DUBAI (Reuters): Afghanistan is inching closer towards economic collapse six months after the Taliban seized power, the Red Cross said, with a paralysed banking system stymieing international efforts to get financial aid into the war-ravaged country.
Organisations such as the Red Cross have been forced to rely on informal money exchanges to move cash in to pay the salaries of some workers, although most of Afghanistan’s estimated 500,000 state employees have now worked without pay for months. “The banking system is totally paralysed. The central bank is not operating,” International Committee for the Red Cross Director General Robert Mardini told Reuters, adding that it is paying some 10,000 doctors and nurses using the informal ‘hawala’ money transfer network.
Mardini said on a call from the capital Kabul that the international community and the Taliban needed to find a pragmatic solution to get the banking system up and running as Afghanistan was hanging by a thread. “You cannot just run the country on hawala system. There needs to be a political negotiation for this. But the clock is ticking,” Mardini added.
Afghanistan’s new rulers have appealed to the international community to help the country and have pressed for billions of dollars of frozen assets overseas to be released. The Afghan economy depended on aid before the western-backed government was overthrown last year by the hardline Islamist Taliban, who are under unilateral sanctions that have made foreign banks reluctant to facilitate aid money transfers.
The United States has sought to allay fears of those providing humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan of falling foul of sanctions and said it would free up $3.5 billion in frozen Afghan central bank assets on U.S. soil to help Afghans. Mardini said the Red Cross would soon request an additional $50 million from donors for aid to Afghanistan this year, on top of an already budgeted 150 million Swiss francs ($161 million). “Humanitarian aid is needed more than ever,” he said.
The international community must step up urgently to stop Afghanistan’s rapid slide towards total collapse and all-out humanitarian disaster, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has warned.
Six months after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) took control, resulting in international sanctions and the freezing of aid, the continuing reluctance of many international donors to engage with the current leadership is worsening the desperate plight of millions of Afghans already worn down by more than four decades of conflict, repeated droughts and the COVID-19 pandemic, ICRC said in a statement released.
“In my 25 years as a humanitarian worker, I have never seen anything quite like this. The magnitude of the crisis facing the people of Afghanistan – and the speed with which it has worsened – is really alarming,” said Robert Mardini, director-general of the ICRC, during a visit to the country. “Afghan lives must not be hostage to political manoeuvres. It is vital that donors distinguish between the type of development aid that might be used as political incentive and aid that will help ordinary Afghans to survive – by ensuring that government institutions can deliver basic services and prevent economic collapse. There is no time to lose.”
ICRC said that health services are among those in most urgent need of support. It cited an ICRC-supported hospital in Kandahar as an example of how it was overcrowded. “Access to healthcare is clearly one the most pressing humanitarian concerns in the country,” said Anders Ladekarl, secretary-general of the Danish Red Cross society. “Supporting teaching hospitals and nursing schools is one of the most effective and sustainable ways to save an already-debilitated health system from collapse and help secure its future. The urgency of putting the right support in place cannot be overestimated.”
Kristiina Kumpula, secretary-general of the Finnish Red Cross society, said the levels of suffering in Afghanistan is “very distressing.” “Afghanistan was already one of the most difficult places in the world to be a mother or an infant. Now it is harder than ever.” Mardini said that humanitarian response cannot replace a functioning public sector and ensure service delivery for 40 million people.
“The most urgent next steps are salary payments for some 500,000 public sector civil servants, ensuring that critical services are able to function, and resuming technical support to the Central Bank to relieve the banking and liquidity crisis,” he said. ICRC will launch an appeal of around $54 million in March, mostly to provide assistance to the country’s hospitals and medical staff.
“What is needed now is decisive action by donors to put the lives and livelihoods of Afghan people above politics,” Mardini, said. “The cost of inaction will be very much greater, and the ensuing disaster difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.” Earlier this week, ICRC said that the Afghan people’s need for humanitarian assistance has increased by 30 percent.
The committee said 24.4 million people across Afghanistan were in need of humanitarian assistance. Meanwhile, UNICEF said around 3.2 million Afghan children under five are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition this year.
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