Showing posts sorted by relevance for query AFGHANISTAN. Sort by date Show all posts

Saturday, January 15, 2022

Review – Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge

Dec 23 2020 •

Cambridge University Press

Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge
By Nivi Manchanda
Cambridge University Press, 2020

History and the prison-break

In the introduction to After Colonialism, Gyan Prakash was explicit about the need to “pry open the reading of colonialism from th[e] prison-house of historicism”: “For at stake is not simply the issue as to whether or not former colonies have become free from domination, but also the question as to how the history of colonialism and colonialism’s disciplining of history can be shaken loose from the domination of categories and ideas it produced – colonizer and colonized; white, black, and brown; civilized and uncivilized; modern and archaic; cultural identity; tribe and nation” (Prakash 1995, 5). This particular expression of the need to recognise the coloniality of history was articulated in the mid-1990s, a time of a heightened-yet-tense sense of Western supremacy. Not long after, in October 2001, Afghanistan was occupied by a wide international military alliance by the name of “Enduring Freedom”. The ‘operation’ has morphed into an enduring occupation of, and with, Afghanistan. It made the critical re-evaluation of historical knowledge only more urgent than it had already been.

Imprisoned by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, Antonio Gramsci made the compilation of an ‘inventory’ the first step for a critical confrontation of historical processes and their traces in ourselves (Said 2003, 25). Imagining Afghanistan is more than an inventory described in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Since 2001 especially, Afghanistan has been turned into a laboratory for twenty-first century intervention and its application of power. The study of Afghanistan, too, has vastly expanded. Afghanistan has been the subject of policy articulation, and it has populated publishers’ catalogues and university curricula, even colouring books for children. Afghanistan exists in public debate, in the entertainment industry and museums. Afghanistan has been thought about a lot, and an ‘idea’ of Afghanistan has taken shape in the Western mind. Imagining Afghanistan engages with this idea through a rich assembly of materials relating to the work of past and present knowledge practitioners, including academics, political analysts and policy-makers – “the scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier [who] was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part,” in Edward Said’s (2003, 7) terms. The book spans the history of modern Afghanistan from the early nineteenth century, when the country was emerging into the consciousness of British empire builders, to the present. It is a prison-break (in Prakash’s sense) that releases colonialism’s categories and ideas from their (wrongful) captivity in history in order for them to find their intimate place in the community of Western knowledge on Afghanistan.

The imperialism of colonial knowledge cultivation

At its core, Imagining Afghanistan engages with “the hegemonic discourse and its totalising ambitions” about histories of the Afghan state and its peoples (p.5). Woven into the book’s argument are three intersecting threads. To begin with, Afghanistan represents “an intrinsically violent place” in the imagination of the transatlantic Anglosphere (p.3). But, ‘our’ “politics of disavowal” maintain that ‘we’ have nothing to do with it (p.3). A rich “grammar of difference” segregates ‘us’ and the ‘West’ from ‘them’ and ‘Afghanistan’ (p.3). Lastly, this discourse is marked by a “superficial” engagement with Afghanistan’s history and politics, particularly so in times of conflict (p.4). This, to bring the argument full circle, reaffirms Afghanistan’s place in a geopolitical hierarchy whose structure enables and sanctions intervention.

Given the violence inherent in Western knowledge and the widespread, often common-sensical, rationalisation in its application on Afghan bodies, the importance of this critique cannot be underestimated (Savic 2020). The book is an example of “insurgent scholarship”, and an illustration of the need for the continuing decolonisation of imperial/colonial knowledge as a continuous act of resistance in our very own age of imperialism (p.10). Imagining Afghanistan shows the pathways in which the idea and “story” of Afghanistan have come about and taken root. The analysis unsettles with a clear purpose: “‘how is Afghanistan thought about in a way such that it is possible to invade and bomb it?’ and ‘what are the sources of authority that sanction the discourses that make that act of invasion permissible and possible in the first place?’” (p.5).

The book stands on the shoulders of studies that have crossed (and continue to eradicate) the (artificial) disciplinary boundaries between history and international relations in an attempt to make visible the colonial legacies in their combined knowledge systems (e.g. Bayly 2016; Hopkins 2008). Imagining Afghanistan focuses on the intellectual cornerstones of historical knowledge production, and how these were, and continue to be, recycled and cultivated for application in instances of imperialism, racism and war in the present. The analysis draws out the (at best) “lazy” and (at worst) “mercenary” scholarship that has contributed to the reification of Afghanistan as a violent place and failed state allegedly riddled with tribal customs – in short, the scholarship that assists in turning ‘inferior’ Afghanistan into a legitimate object of ‘superior’ Western intervention (p.25). As such, Imagining Afghanistan is a “decolonising intervention” as well as an exercise in auto-decolonisation prompting knowledge practitioners in the humanities and social sciences to “unlearn the colonising impulses of knowledge production in the Western academy” (p.7).

Chapter 1 lays the foundations for the discussion, unearthing and analysing the key constituents of how Afghanistan has been ‘understood’ and ‘made legible’ in a geopolitical sense. Chapter 2 charts the history of ‘Afghanistan’ as a “spatial formation”, exploring also its multiple configurations as a ‘frontier’, ‘buffer’, ‘failed’ and even ‘non-state’ or ‘AfPak’ (p.66). Over time, the palimpsestic space of Afghanistan was reinscribed with arbitrary notions of marginality in the age of colonialism. These Eurocentric lenses of geopolitical organisation make Afghanistan appear ‘different’ and continue to exert their power on ‘our’ imagination, in which Afghanistan features as “an arbitrary blip on the world map, its re-inscription as a space of exception on the fringes of humanity that demands ‘special treatment’” (p.102). Chapter 3 forefronts the ‘tribalisation’ of Afghanistan. It weaves its way from Mountstuart Elphinstone’s inspiration by Scottish clans through increasingly racialised registers to Olaf Caroe’s The Pathans. Whilst the Soviet intervention in the 1980s created independence-loving freedom fighters, Afghanistan has more recently been reduced to tribal assemblages of chauvinistic men with penchants for terrorism and the subjection of women. According to many Western readings, Afghanistan’s tribes have always been ‘inward-looking’ producers of warriors, patriots or terrorists. Chapter 4 is a nuanced critique of Western feminist writing, which has contributed to a reduction of ‘Muslim culture’ by “superimpos[ing] the neat image of a medieval land of barbaric men and tyrannised women over the messy history of the region” (p.175). The urge to ‘save’ Afghan women is closely linked to the same global structures that legitimise patriarchy at the local level. Chapter 5 complements this discussion with a representational survey of Afghan masculinities, singling out representations of Hamid Karzai and the Taliban. The need to classify, label, categorise and, ultimately, deal with Afghan men is a historical trace deeply rooted in colonial enterprise and has “remained true to the wider Orientalist discourse” (p.218).

Imagining Afghanistan is a conceptually brilliant, deeply researched, richly annotated, finely articulated and thought-provoking ‘inventory’: it is decolonisation-as-critique. In its challenge to the cultivation of colonial knowledge as a supporting function to imperialism the book has scholarly as well as political relevance. Its insurgent path is plotted toward a re-imagination of ‘Afghanistan’. But there is work to be done, and Nivi Manchanda reminds us of the necessity to rethink ‘liminal’ or ‘frontier’ spaces as well as their constructions as imperial ‘peripheries’ (p.103; see e.g. Hopkins 2020). This process of re-centring requires the production of fitting intellectual tools that are not rooted in colonialism’s own centres, such as India. There is also the need to bring the Anglospheric Afghanistan of this book into a comparative framework with other imperial imaginaries, such as Russia’s.

Auto-decolonisation / decolonising ourselves

In addition, the book has an important message to all knowledge-practitioners: we cannot escape the past, but we are obliged to change the way we think about its knowledge systems. True to its thought framework, Imagining Afghanistan is explicit about its engagement with ‘story-telling’ and ‘sense-making’. It firmly incorporates the dialogic making of modern empire and ‘frontiers’, centre and ‘periphery’ into its larger make-up (p.10). At a critical historical moment, Imagining Afghanistan is also about the stories ‘we’ tell about ourselves and about academia’s role in an age of heightened ‘culture wars’ and ‘post-truth’. In this sense, the book is as much about what makes war, ‘(un)lawful killing’ and murder in ‘our’ name possible on a global scale as it is part of a discussion on racism closer to home. However strong the desire to incarcerate history – or the urge to throw away the keys – may be in the present, we need to engage more with colonial history. Orientalism signifies the power of the self to create constitutive knowledge of the other. What is too often and conveniently forgotten is that power begets responsibility and accountability. This book makes for essential reading for every knowledge-practitioner, and particularly those studying or ‘working on’ Afghanistan. Because we have the power to construct ideas and narrate stories that are acted upon, we also have a responsibility to recognise the coloniality of our knowledge as the basis for its sustained deconstruction in the first place. We can level the power of imperial knowledge by critiquing one colonially woven idea at a time. That process demands acts of auto-decolonisation from all of us if we want to avoid forms of complicity, conscious or otherwise, in physical or epistemological acts of imperial violence.

References

Bayly, Martin J. 2016. Taming the Imperial Imagination: Colonial Knowledge, International Relations, and the Anglo-Afghan Encounter, 1808-1878. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hopkins, Benjamin D. 2020. Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Hopkins, Benjamin D. 2008. The Making of Modern Afghanistan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Prakash, Gyan. 1995. ‘Introduction: After Colonialism’. In After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, 3–17. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Said, Edward W. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin.

Savic, Bojan. 2020. Afghanistan Under Siege: The Afghan Body and the Postcolonial Border. London: I.B. Tauris.

Sunday, July 18, 2021

China to play a constructive role in post-war Afghanistan with SCO
Wang Peng

Opinion 17:31, 18-Jul-2021

CFP

Editor's note: Wang Peng is a distinguished research fellow at the Center for American Studies, Zhejiang International Studies University. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

International media call this week "China's Central Asia Time", since Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi has visited Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan from July 12 to 16, marking his first trip to Central Asia this year.

Wang Yi's remarkable visit has shown the great significance of China's relations with central Asian nations. Central Asian countries are China's close neighbors. There is an old Chinese phrase that "a distant relative cannot be so helpful as a near neighbor".

China's relations with Afghanistan

When it comes to Afghanistan, as good neighbors, China and Afghanistan has no conflict or war and maintained traditional friendship, which have made a strong foundation for their bilateral ties building. So now are the honor and responsibility of China and its neighbor to inherit and carry forward this glorious legacy.

China's diplomatic principles, such as non-intervention, equality and mutual benefit, provide political guarantee and mutual trust. China never regards itself as a superior power to force its neighbors to obey and follow instructions. Rather, as an equal and trustable partner, China only provides practical advice and necessary material assistance in a humble and prudent way. Wang Yi pointed out that China supports and expects all parties in Afghanistan to follow the "Afghan-owned and Afghan-led" principle and proceed from the fundamental and long-term interests of Afghanistan to build a political structure that suits Afghanistan's national conditions and has the support of the Afghan people through intra-Afghan dialogue and consultation. This approach has established deep political trust and international reputation for China.

In addition, China and Afghanistan are highly complementary in strategy and economy. China needs security cooperation from Kabul while Afghanistan needs capital, foreign aid, and technology for its post-war reconstruction, especially infrastructure building. China can make great help. As Wang Yi said that the Chinese has attached great importance to the China-Afghanistan strategic cooperative partnership, and is willing to work with the country to prepare for high-level contacts between the two countries and send a positive and peaceful signal to the outside world.

Security and post-war reconstruction in Afghanistan

After America's two-decades-long war that failed to bring peace, now the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan offers this country a new chance to take its destiny into its own hands.

However, the security situation of Afghanistan is still uncertain. The domestic peace process between Kabul government and the resurgent Taliban will determine the future of this suffering country and its people.

As Wang Yi emphasized that the urgent task now is to avoid a civil war, restart the intra-Afghan negotiations, and seek a political reconciliation plan, especially to prevent various terrorist forces from gaining ground in Afghanistan.

A doctor fills a syringe with the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center in Kabul, Afghanistan, June 16, 2021. /CFP

Therefore, what should be noticed, no matter who comes to power finally, it is critically necessary that the administration of Afghanistan must cut all ties with terrorist groups; since it is the only way for the Afghanistan government to win the trust and acceptance from international society, especially from its neighbors. The legal government of Afghanistan with international recognition should resolutely draw a line with all terrorist forces, and return to the political mainstream of Afghanistan with a responsible attitude toward the country and people. After all, China which shares a narrow border with Afghanistan has ample reasons to concern about extremism spilling over into their border provinces; and so are Afghanistan's other neighbors.

As part of those prevention efforts, China has been sharing up ties with its central Asian neighbors to deal with possible security threats in the post-U.S. era. In this regard, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has great potential to offer solution.

The role of the SCO in Afghan security and economic cooperation

Wang Yi has attended meetings of the SCO where foreign ministers of the member countries have discussed solutions to the Afghanistan conflict. Meanwhile the international society wondered what solutions the SCO may contribute at a time when the U.S. and its NATO allies are pulling troops from the country.

Last month, Wang Yi has proposed five points in promoting peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan. This time, Wang Yi said on July 14 that the Chinese will continue to provide anti-epidemic support including vaccines to Afghanistan until the country beats the outbreak.

As mentioned above, since the security situation of Afghanistan is still uncertain, the most urgent affair for Afghanistan is the domestic peace resolution and civil war prevention. It is reported that the Taliban and the Afghanistan government are currently meeting in Qatar to attempt a peace agreement. However, the international society widely suspects that it is unlikely any power-sharing will be agreed longer term as the Taliban regard the incumbent Afghan government as a "Washington puppet". If so, a bitter civil war seems to be unavoidable; and no doubt, it will be the nightmare for tens of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians.

In this case, the international humanitarian relief and assistance will be of particular value and great necessity. The SCO members who have had twenty years to build coordinating intelligence, security, and military capabilities, with an eye on when the extraterritorial power pulls out of Afghanistan may take its international responsibility for regional security and Afghan people's life. With that day arriving, Central Asia now has a regional body capable of understanding, organizing against, and repelling threats. SCO may serve the role as a practical multilateral platform for Afghan domestic security dialogue and regional security cooperation.

The second priority is how to deal with the pandemic. As COVID-19 pandemic dampens the international flow, in order to recovery and strengthen the connection, China, Afghanistan and their Central Asian neighbors can establish joint prevention and control mechanism, especially the immune and vaccine cooperation through the SCO platform. International media widely believe China is ready to play a bigger role in the post-war era of Afghanistan.

Tuesday, February 15, 2022

The Terrible Fate Facing the Afghan People

BY VIJAY PRASHADFacebook

Photograph Source: DVIDSHUB – CC BY 2.0

On February 8, 2022, UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) Afghanistan sent out a bleak set of tweets. One of the tweets, which included a photograph of a child lying in a hospital bed with her mother seated beside her, said: “Having recently recovered from acute watery diarrhea, two years old Soria is back in the hospital, this time suffering from edema and wasting. Her mother has been by her bedside for the past two weeks anxiously waiting for Soria to recover.” The series of tweets by UNICEF Afghanistan show that Soria is not alone in her suffering. “One in three adolescent girls suffers from anemia” in Afghanistan, with the country struggling with “one of the world’s highest rates of stunting in children under five: 41 percent,” according to UNICEF.

The story of Soria is one among millions; in Uruzgan Province, in southern Afghanistan, measles cases are rising due to lack of vaccines. The thread to the tweet about Soria from UNICEF Afghanistan was a further bleak reminder about the severity of the situation in the country and its impact on the lives of the children: “without urgent action, 1 million children could die from severe acute malnutrition.” UNICEF is now distributing “high energy peanut paste” to stave off catastrophe.

The United Nations has, meanwhile, warned that approximately 23 million Afghans—about half the total population of the country—are “facing a record level of acute hunger.” In early September, not even a month after the Taliban came to power in Kabul, the UN Development Program noted that “A 10-13 percent reduction in GDP could, in the worst-case scenario, bring Afghanistan to the precipice of near universal poverty—a 97 percent poverty rate by mid-2022.”

The World Bank has not provided a firm calculation of how much of Afghanistan’s GDP has declined, but other indicators show that the threshold of the “worst-case scenario” has likely already passed.

When the West fled the country at the end of August 2021, a large part of the foreign funding, which Afghanistan’s GDP is dependent on, also vanished with the troops: 43 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP and 75 percent of its public funding, which came from aid agencies, dried up overnight.

Ahmad Raza Khan, the chief collector (customs) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, says that exports from his country to Afghanistan have dropped by 25 percent; the State Bank of Pakistan, he says, “introduced a new policy of exports to Afghanistan on December 13” that requires Afghan traders to show that they have U.S. dollars on them to buy goods from Pakistan before entering the country, which is near impossible to show for many of the traders since the Taliban has banned the “use of foreign currency” in the country. It is likely that Afghanistan is not very far away from near universal poverty with the way things stand there presently.

On January 26, 2022, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that “Afghanistan is hanging by a thread,” while pointing to the 30 percent “contraction” of its GDP.

Sanctions and Dollars

On February 7, 2022, Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen told Sky News that this perilous situation, which is leading to starvation and illness among children in Afghanistan, “is not the result of our [Taliban] activities. It is the result of the sanctions imposed on Afghanistan.”

On this point, Shaheen is correct. In August 2021, the U.S. government froze the $9.5 billion that Afghanistan’s central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank) held in the New York Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, family members of the victims who died in the 9/11 attacks had sued “a list of targets,” including the Taliban, for their losses and a U.S. court later ruled that the plaintiffs be paid “damages” that now amount to $7 billion. Now that the Taliban is in power in Afghanistan, the Biden administration seems to be moving forward “to clear a legal path” to stake a claim on $3.5 billion out of the money deposited in the Federal Reserve for the families of the September 11 victims.

The European Union followed suit, cutting off $1.4 billion in government assistance and development aid to Afghanistan, which was supposed to have been paid between 2021 and 2025. Because of the loss of this funding from Europe, Afghanistan had to shut down “at least 2,000 health facilities serving around 30 million Afghans.” It should be noted here that the total population of Afghanistan is approximately 40 million, which means that most Afghans have lost access to health care due to that decision.

During the entire 20-year period of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the Ministry of Public Health had come to rely on a combination of donor funds and assistance from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It was as a result of these funds that Afghanistan saw a decline in infant mortality and maternal mortality rates during the Afghanistan Mortality Survey 2010. Nonetheless, the entire public health care system, particularly outside Kabul, struggled during the U.S. occupation. “Many primary healthcare facilities were non-functional due to insecurity, lack of infrastructure, shortages of staff, severe weather, migrations and poor patient flow,” wrote health care professionals from Afghanistan and Pakistan, based on their analysis of how the conflict in Afghanistan affected the “maternal and child health service delivery.”

Walk Along Shaheed Mazari Road

On February 8, 2022, an Afghan friend who works along Shaheed Mazari Road in Kabul took me for a virtual walk—using the video option on his phone—to this busy part of the city. He wanted to show me that in the capital at least the shops had goods in them, but that the people simply did not have money to make purchases. We had been discussing how the International Labor Organization now estimates that nearly a million people will be pushed out of their jobs by the middle of the year, many of them women who are suffering from the Taliban’s restrictions on women working. Afghanistan, he tells me, is being destroyed by a combination of the lack of employment and the lack of cash in the country due to the sanctions imposed by the West.

We discuss the Taliban personnel in charge of finances, people such as Finance Minister Mullah Hidayatullah Badri and the governor of the Afghanistan central bank Shakir Jalali. Badri (or Gul Agha) is the money man for the Taliban, while Jalali is an expert in Islamic banking. There is no doubt that Badri is a resourceful person, who developed the Taliban’s financial infrastructure and learned about international finance in the illicit markets. “Even the smartest and most knowledgeable person would not be able to do anything if the sanctions remain,” my friend said. He would know. He used to work in Da Afghanistan Bank.

“Why can’t the World Bank’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) be used to rush money to the banks?” he asked. This fund, a partnership between the World Bank and other donors, which was created in 2002, has $1.5 billion in funds. If you visit the ARTF website, you will receive a bleak update: “The World Bank has paused disbursements in our operations in Afghanistan.” I tell my friend that I don’t think the World Bank will unfreeze these assets soon. “Well, then we will starve,” he says, as he walks past children sitting on the side of the street.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad’s most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August 2022).

Friday, February 18, 2022

US Is Effectively Stealing Billions From a Nation Ravaged by a US-Initiated War

People protest against recent remarks by President Joe Biden to freeze Afghanistan's assets, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on February 15, 2022.

SAHEL ARMAN / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY Ashleigh Subramanian-Montgomery,

Truthout

February 18, 2022

President Joe Biden recently declared a national emergency in the name of addressing the dual threats of the massive humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan, as well as “the potential for a deepening economic collapse in Afghanistan.” He was right to do so.

In sharp contrast, his decision to unilaterally assert the U.S.’s authority to redistribute $7.1 billion of Afghanistan’s frozen funds as it sees fit was dead wrong. In declaring the national emergency, the president laid out his administration’s vision for Afghanistan’s funds should U.S. courts voice their approval: that half be made available, pending litigation, to the families of 9/11 victims who have claims against the Taliban for its role in harboring al-Qaeda. The remaining $3.5 billion would go towards humanitarian efforts.

Setting aside the moral and political problems inherent in the U.S. effectively stealing billions of dollars from a nation ravaged by a U.S.-initiated war and the resulting humanitarian and economic devastation, the president’s failure to make any of these funds immediately available to the people of Afghanistan in their hour of need is unforgivable. In abdicating responsibility to the courts, which may take months to decide how these frozen funds can be redistributed, the Biden administration is threatening the well-being of millions of Afghans, while also undermining the ability of civil society organizations to respond to the crisis. This is in direct opposition to the “beacon of human rights” the U.S. claims to be.

To say that Afghanistan is in urgent need is to understate the severity of the situation. Over 24 million Afghans, nearly 60 percent of the population, need humanitarian aid. Some 23 million face acute food insecurity, meaning their lives are in immediate danger, and over 1 million children are at risk of death due to severe acute malnutrition. While Afghanistan has faced humanitarian challenges for years as a result of conflict, U.S. occupation and natural disasters, the current situation is markedly worse, in no small part due to U.S. policies towards Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban takeover.

When the Taliban took control of the country last August, the Biden administration froze $7.1 billion in Afghanistan’s foreign reserves held in the U.S. — money that belongs to the Afghan people — and that prior to the takeover, the Central Bank of Afghanistan (Da Afghanistan Bank) had been using to maintain economic stability.

The resulting liquidity crisis has led to massive inflation, alongside depreciation of the Afghani, whose value the Central Bank can no longer stabilize by selling off its foreign reserves. Many banks in Afghanistan have dramatically limited the amount of money account holders can withdraw, while others have closed entirely. Businesses, no longer able to pay their employees, have shuttered, leading to rampant unemployment. The price of food has risen, while the value of the Afghani has plummeted, leading to mass starvation.

As a further result of freezing these funds and of U.S. sanctions that have led risk-averse banks to severely limit access to financial services in Afghanistan, local and international aid groups and other civil society organizations in Afghanistan are struggling to pay their staff and provide services to the millions of Afghans in need.

Kate Phillips-Barrasso, director of humanitarian policy at InterAction, a network of humanitarian aid organizations, recently explained that financial service providers “just don’t want to get involved. There’s a lot of risk aversion. Financial institutions say that even with explicit permission, it still reeks of effort and risk, and it’s better to just not provide the service.” As a result, aid organizations are turning to informal cash transfer networks, which entail greater risk and higher fees. Some have also turned to cryptocurrency as another means of getting funds into the country, despite challenges arising from limited use of cryptocurrency among much of the population. While these workarounds have offered some relief, limited access to cash and financial services is still plaguing the humanitarian aid sector as a direct result of U.S. policy.

The Biden administration must urgently reconsider and correct its policies towards Afghanistan, and towards Afghanistan’s foreign reserves in particular. Shah Mehrabi, a member of the Supreme Council of Afghanistan’s Central Bank and a professor of economics at Montgomery College, has called on the administration to “allow the Central Bank of Afghanistan limited, monitored, and conditional access to $150m per month from Afghanistan’s foreign reserves,” citing the Central Bank’s “independen[ce] from the Afghan government,” and the U.S.’s ability to monitor how the funds are dispersed. Some form of a phased release of the frozen funds has widespread support, including from members of the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and prominent international aid groups, human rights groups, and women’s human rights and peace groups.

Beyond releasing the frozen funds, the Biden administration must also lift sanctions on Afghanistan, which have done almost nothing to incentivize the Taliban to change its policies. Instead, sanctions have unleashed a chilling effect on national and international banking in Afghanistan by shutting down access to financial services, causing dire repercussions to Afghan lives and preventing civil society groups from addressing the crisis. While the U.S. Treasury Department has issued piecemeal general licenses aimed at enabling civil society organizations to continue their work in Afghanistan, these necessary but insufficient steps have failed to address the financial access issues caused by sanctions, let alone the liquidity crisis caused by freezing Afghanistan’s foreign reserves.

There is room for honest debate about precisely how, not if, these frozen funds should be returned to the people of Afghanistan, and which, if any, sanctions should remain in place — however, there is no room, or time, to cling to a status quo that is starving Afghanistan’s people and its economy.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Liberal Leadership Rivals On Afghanistan

Thanks to my comment combatant Lord Kitcheners Own for suggesting this.

Let's look at where the Liberal Leadership hopefuls stand on Afghanistan, in their own words .To begin lets look at last summers Leadership debates where Afghanistan became an issue. Because for many of the Liberal Leadership contenders it was not a major issue and still isn't except for commenting on the positions of the NDP and Conservatives.

For an ongoing overview of the candidates positions check out Libnews.ca » Afghanistan

Liberal leadership candidates debate in Winnipeg

Updated Sat. Jun. 10 2006 11:50 PM ET

However, unlike Ignatieff, who supported an extension of Canada's mission in Afghanistan to 2009, Rae called for a less aggressive military role.

"(We need) a party that is committed to peacekeeping, a party that is committed to mediating and being a force for good in the world versus a party that very clearly wants to turn us into a branch plant of the Republican Party of the United States."

While Ignatieff said, "We should stay there until we get the job done with honour," Rae said, "... I disagree quite profoundly with Michael on this issue."

Hedy Fry: a veteran Liberal MP from British Columbia, said troops should be placed in Sudan's Darfur region to help stop the escalating humanitarian crisis there.

And thats all she has said on the issue of Afghanistan

I can't find any comments on her website since the House Debate on the issue.

HEDZ SEZ: Harper Plays Politics With Troops

Submitted by Hedy Fry on Wed, 2006-05-17 11:08.

Tonight the Harper government is forcing a vote on whether we should extend the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, when our mandate expires at the end of this year.

This is the worst sort of political manipulation on the part of this government.

This vote is premature.

There is no information on whether we are achieving our objectives in Afghanistan. No information on whether there will be a mandate change. No information on whether our troops will be put in greater danger. The vote tonight is a clear yes or no.

The government will allow no amendments to their motion. It's the sort of "Take it or leave it," "Like it or lump it" way of doing things that we have come to expect of Stephen Harper.

When Canada first sent troops to Afghanistan, we did so with clear parameters. We went there with a mandate: for capacity building, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping and the duty to protect. These are all worthy Canadian values.

Let us be absolutely clear. We support our troops who are in Afghanistan right now. We are part of a multinational force. We are currently there with the Netherlands and the UK.

But there are many questions to be answered before we can take this vote.

Would our mandate change? Is this a worthwhile project still? Are we achieving our objectives? Could other members of the multilateral forces take their turn to allow Canada to focus in other areas such as Darfur?

Until these questions are answered, this forced blind vote tonight does an injustice to our troops, our aid workers and diplomats currently in Afghanistan.

I'd like to hear what you think.

Globe and Mail coverage of the June 10 debate.

FED - Liberal leadership race

June 12, 2006 - JANE TABER: Eleven Liberal leadership hopefuls raced against the clock yesterday at their first all candidates meeting in Winnipeg, and there were some differences, some marked differences over policy. In a minute, our guest journalists will have their say, but first, the clash of views over the mission to Afghanistan.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF (Liberal - Ontario): You simply have to have a combat capable military. You can't deliver humanitarian aid and reconstruction. You can't protect people, as Hedy wants us to do, unless you have the capacity to have a military that can stand up and, if necessary, respond with fire. Canada is a serious country. If you ask us to do something hard and difficult, we will do it. We should stay there until we get the job done and return with honour.

BOB RAE (Former Ontario Premier): The risks that we run by turning ourselves into a combat force that's engaged in counter-insurgency and counter-guerrilla forces is that we will, in fact, lose our way as peacekeepers and as people who believe in the maintenance of peace. And that, it seems to me, is a very basic question for Canadians, and very important for Liberals as we head into the next election.

SCOTT BRISON (Liberal - Nova Scotia): The headlines in the New York Times the day after that vote, had we defeated it, would not have been Canadian parliament votes down cynical government motion. The headline in the New York Times the next day would have been Canadian parliament withdraws support for the Afghan mission.

MARTHA HALL FINDLAY (Lawyer): We do not establish our foreign policy in this country because, with all due respect, because we're afraid of what the headline in the New York Times will be.

JOE VOLPE (Liberal - Ontario): I disagree with my colleagues, Michael and Scott, about this being important for the United States. We're running to be a leader in Canada.

Another day and another debate and candidates take shots at each otehr over Afghanistan.

11 Grit candidates hold debate in Moncton June 17, 2006

On Afghanistan, Volpe used his opening remarks to take a shot at Ignatieff, who along with Brison supported a government motion last month to extend the Canadian military mission there to 2009. All other leadership hopefuls opposed the motion.

Holding up a newspaper with a front-page story on Ignatieff's pitch for a more aggressive role for Canada's military in Afghanistan and other global trouble spots, Volpe said, "I read it and I agreed with everything in it because my name is Stephen Harper."

Ignatieff did not respond in kind. Indeed, he went out of his way to praise Volpe for initiating reforms to Employment Insurance.

However, Ignatieff didn't back down on the need for Canadian troops to help "provide human security for populations in danger."

"That may mean you have to deploy your military in a place like Darfur, where it's tough, in places like Afghanistan, where it's tough," he said.

"The single greatest problem with the United Nations is talking about protecting but not doing it. We have to be a country that actually lives by what we say and do."

At one point, Rae spoke movingly of watching young girls in war-torn Sri Lanka ride their bikes to school. That prompted a sharp retort from Brison.

"I would urge you to consider those young women in Afghanistan who did not have the right to go to school under the Taliban," Brison said

PRO WAR

Michael Ignatieff: But on the matter of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, Ignatieff is as strong a supporter of the mission as any of the Liberal leadership contenders. Rae has distinguished himself by taking a deeply skeptical position on the entire project, which is far closer to the stance of most Canadians, whose enthusiasm has been waning ever since Stephen Harper’s Conservatives took office.

Why are Canadians becoming so disillusioned?

For one thing, Ignatieff said, Canadian soldiers are dying there. But there is a “deeper obstacle”, and it’s the idea that Canadian soldiers have become “auxiliaries of the American empire, fighting a counterterrorism war that has nothing to do with us”.

On this question, Ignatieff has no second thoughts.

Canada is in Afghanistan at the invitation of the country’s democratically elected government, with the approval of the United Nations, as part of a NATO engagement, Ignatieff said. If we pull out now, Afghanistan could fall prey to a terrorist militia, leading to a civil war, and “the last war cost a million lives,” as he points out.

And this is where we have to leave our innocence behind.

“The things that Canadians have understood is they’ve understood globalization. They’ve understood that the future of the British Columbia economy is somehow tied up to China and India. And Vancouver is the great epitome of Canada waking up to globalization and profiting and benefiting from it,” he said.

“But the other side of globalization is that security threats, very long and very far away, are our business, in a way that I think we didn’t, we don’t, understand. And that’s the innocence here. And that innocence has to end because our security really is involved in these things.”

Ignatieff says Canada belongs in Afghanistan because of 'moral promise'

Angela Pacienza, Canadian Press

Published: Friday, September 08, 2006

Canadians have an obligation to keep their "moral promise" to Afghans despite a mounting death toll, Liberal leadership contender Michael Ignatieff said Wednesday as the bodies of five more soldiers returned home from the battlefield.

"This is an agonizing mission for Canadians but it's a mission that amounts to a moral promise," Ignatieff said following a rally in downtown Toronto where he unveiled a new campaign platform. "It's a promise in which Canada said 'We're going to help Afghans get their country back on its feet.' And the Canada I love and the Canada I respect always keeps its promises."

The latest casualties in Afghanistan, which brings the total to 32 since 2002, have prompted a growing number of politicians to push for an end to the mission.

Earlier this week New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton said Canada should pull forces out and focus its efforts on reconstruction and negotiating a peaceful settlement.

Ignatieff dismissed Layton's proposal, saying it wasn't credible.

"I'm not clear who you negotiate with. I'm not clear what you negotiate about," he said.

"There isn't a responsible politician who doesn't prefer negotiating to combat. That's not the issue."

Ignatieff said he would continue to back soldiers so long as the mission offered the war-torn country a balance of security, reconstruction and humanitarian needs.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Saturday, January 15, 2022

Review – Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge

Further Reading on E-International Relations