Help Me Help the Starving People of Afghanistan
Please read through till the end to find out how you can help
The plight of the Afghan and Iraqi people has grabbed me and it won’t let go. The endless trauma, distress, the agony piled upon agony that the civilians of both nations have suffered as a result of the War on Terror has been like a slow, but incessant burn on my consciousness.
I recall, just as anyone who watched the horrific scenes of 9/11 will recall, exactly where I was as the second plane hit the South tower of the World Trade Center. In those appalling few minutes as the world watched aghast, shocked, unsure and scared, few of us would have known the extent to which our world was about to change.
Nothing has been the same since. For any of us.
A Diminished World amid Diminishing Freedoms
Those born since that time have known nothing else, but for those of us who are older there is a sharp division; there is the world before 9/11, and the world after 9/11.
The former is gone forever, whilst the latter continues to evolve, continues to shape our world in so many deep, profound ways that to list them all would be almost impossible; even to fully connect the events of post-9/11 to that day becomes harder with each day.
But so many world events have been influenced and altered by the repercussions of 9/11 and that list just continues to grow. The rise of populist demagogues, ethnic nationalism and political polarisation (1., 2.); the increase in governmental surveillance and so-called security measures spun to feed the popular narrative of a rising need for public security; the normalisation of political, cultural and ethnic hatred and violence all across the globe; countless civil and international conflicts; democratic decline and the weakening of democratic institutions (3), and the increase in authoritarian and dictatorial leaders are all, I would argue, connected in one way or another to 9/11 and its consequences.
Ambivalence Takes a Backseat
For myself, 9/11 was an awakening of sorts. In the world before I had taken little notice of international affairs, of the way the world worked, of the complex machinations that made the world the way it was.
It had been not unimportant to me, but it was in some unfathomable way, somehow irrelevant to my life at that time. Everything would carry on in the background, just as it always had, without my needing to know about or understand the minutiae of the mechanisms that made the world tick.
9/11 changed all that. But even then, the awareness of the vastness of the changes took time to seed itself in my consciousness. The hunt for bin Laden, the Afghan invasion, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq, the removal and sordid end of Saddam Hussein stirred and heightened my senses in ways that surprised and shook me; layers of encrusted ambivalence and naivety falling away like a skin I had outgrown.
I started to think differently about how I saw the world. Novel opinions, coloured far too easily in the beginning, followed the course of whatever I had last read or seen, but then with time they began to harden, coalescing into something more critical, more inquisitive, more questioning than anything I had known before.
Now more than two decades later I’m still learning. I still can’t say I understand all, or even close to all, that has befallen us since that day, but at least now I’m aware enough to know and to recognise where some of the gaps in my understanding lay, and that in itself is a step forward.
There are however, some things of which I’m pretty sure of where my head, and in the case to point in this post, my heart as well, lies.
The Shoddy Withdrawal
The withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 finally shook that last bit of political fairy dust from my eyes. I always been a sucker for a hero/heroine and that fictional line has always pervaded my reality probably lending an unconscious bias to many of my opinions and ideas.
With some political characters their colours are nailed on and unmistakable. Trump for me, was always a bad guy even before he took to the political field. Blatant, self-serving liars are just plain disqualified from the good side of the field in my book. Whilst others stand astride the halfway line, their bent sometimes hard to uncover, like Emmanuel Macron or even Boris Johnson to some extent, for instance.
And then there are the supposed good guys. The guys who you can just feel are working for the best even if you might not always agree with how they go about it. I used to put Barack Obama firmly in there, though of late that opinion has changed — more of that in another post soon. So too Joe Biden; a man so sincere and empathetic it’s hard to find a way not to warm to him, and again as VP and then in that first 100 days I did just that.
But that warmth I now see as a political Spring, or perhaps in this case an Autumnal analogy would be more apt, because that warmth has chilled and abated, and turned into something infinitely more pragmatic, more honest and much colder and more Wintry.
Perhaps that initial warmth grew in part by way of comparison with the polar wastes of the self-aggrandising, callousness of Trump — which would make total sense to me.
Whatever the reason, the August withdrawal from Afghanistan sharply pulled that veil aside to show me what lay behind the wizards magic, and for me what lay behind was not pretty. Not pretty at all.
I’ve come to see that in politics there are no true good guys. There are just pragmatic political winners and political losers. As to whether they seem good or bad…well, it all depends on the side of the fence you stand in relation to the prevailing wind.
But this post isn’t about laying into Joe Biden and his foreign policy failures. It’s not even about the very same failures that had dogged the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations that presided over the widely mishandled, misjudged and miscalculated conflicts that constituted the disastrous failure that was the War on Terror (4).
No, this is about my own realisation; a realisation that I believe every one of us in the West bears some degree of responsibility for, and that is the catastrophic outcomes that have unfolded as a result of this misbegotten, mistaken and mismanaged War on Terror.
The hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian lives lost as a justification for the fears that we in the West felt in the wake of 9/11.
The millions of people all across the world displaced, left homeless and hopeless and hungry and cold in order to assuage the West’s perceived lack of security and safety. And then when those we have physically turfed out of their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs have the temerity to turn up at our borders and ask for help, or ask for a safe place for their children to sleep for the night, or utter those two dirtiest of words that have politicians everywhere scrambling to slam the door shut lest they should lose their seat next time round.
‘Political asylum! Political asylum!’
‘How dare they?’
And therein lies the crux of my moral conundrum!
I feel guilty but don’t know what I can do to help!!
The political fallout and turmoil that stymies, stalls and strangles the future of countless nations and those who now live under constant threat of violence, physical hardship, starvation or worse. Think Syria. Think Yemen. Think Iraq. Think Afghanistan. Think Mali. Think the Sahel. Think Libya. Think Myanmar. And more. So many more.
And that’s without the decline in global democracy largely brought about by the rise of demagogic, political populists who followed the political lead set by the United States of America whose grandiose ideals and standards failed us all just when we needed them the most.
The debasement and disrespect of basic human rights shown by the US since 9/11 has opened the door for would-be dictators and political hard-men everywhere to use racial and ethnic devices to undermine and crack open the social order and cohesion of democracies everywhere.
After all, what’s good for the US has gotta be good for us, right?
Think Poland. Think Hungary. Think Brazil. Think the Philippines. Think India. Think Egypt. And more.
All these nations and many more besides, have in some way or other been affected negatively by the consequences of the War on Terror.
Racism, in whatever form it takes, is an enduring problem that as a race we have always faced; perhaps always will. But the War on Terror has given legitimacy and currency to such tainted ideas. To hate and despise someone who is not like oneself is almost the norm now, and there’s no doubt that social media has played its part in this social, political and racial degradation that is now all but ubiquitous. But social media has only exploited the cultural trends that our political and social leaders told us existed.
And let’s be honest here — to hate and to despise are such strong verbs to use with respect to anyone, regardless of what they are, or what they might have voted, or what they believe in, or what God they worship, and yet these abhorrent verbs are almost commonplace now. Their vileness and vigour watered down by overuse and iterative repetition.
Don’t get me wrong though! I’m not trying to blame all the world’s ills on the 9/11 and the War on Terror. The world was far from perfect before that, and many of the problems that now exist have roots that go way back before 9/11, and many of those would no doubt have persisted and possibly festered without the encouragement gained in 2001.
It’s just that 9/11 and all that followed has concentrated and magnified many old, pre-existing qualms and issues, giving them a new legitimacy that they arguably wouldn’t have gained without that terrible day.
And it would be easy to blame it all on Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and be done with it. But in so doing we would be glossing over all over the reasons for the rise of Al-Qaeda and their ilk in the first place. The inherent complicity that the West should own for its many failures and shortcomings. For the centuries of exploitative colonial policies and woeful treatment of peoples across the globe who were viewed and used and abused as little more than agricultural produce to be shunted about at the behest of hypocritical Western governments that endlessly preached one thing and did another.
The West may not have engineered 9/11, but was without doubt the unseen hand behind the reasons why it happened.
Let bygone’s be bygone’s
And yet, as we move into a new year it should be a time for reflection, a time to work on our previous failings and to try and better ourselves, better our communities, better our nations, better our world and not to rake over the past and apportion blame.
With this in mind, and with a tragedy unfurling in front of our eyes in Afghanistan right now. These are the facts:
- Prior to August 2021 11m Afghans were food insecure* after decades of conflict, drought and more recently, Covid-19.
- Now some 23m, or greater than 50% of the population, are food insecure.
- Since the US froze all Afghanistan’s financial aid and resources at the end of August 2021 the economy collapsed by 43% almost overnight.
- The World Food Programme (WFP) says that in all its decades of experience in dealing with famine across the globe that it has never seen a famine triggered more quickly than that now seen in Afghanistan as a result of this economic collapse.
- In Syria, it took 5 years of civil and international war to see an equivalent degree of economic collapse.
- Before August 2021 severe drought and the adverse effects of Covid-19 saw more than 3m Afghans internally displaced.
- Since the August withdrawal a further 700,000 have been internally displaced.
- Some 50,000 of those made for Kabul (at an altitude of 1800m) and now live mostly in temporary or makeshift shelters or cold, squalid rooms. Most have no access to heating of any sort. Snow has now arrived and temperatures will fall far below zero.
- Most have no home to return to, and many of those that do are too scared to do so.
- Many now beg on the streets or sell their children to feed the rest of the family.
- More than 4m children are out of school and child marriage is now seeing a dramatic rise.
- UNICEF report that 3.2m children are acutely malnourished,
- and a further 11m children at risk of dying from severe, acute malnutrition. Many mothers are too malnourished themselves to breast feed their babies.
The World Food Programme are now rushing to get as much as they can into the country before the Winter snows make the roads impassable and conditions deteriorate even further.
UN Special Representative Deborah Lyon says that Afghanistan is facing ‘an humanitarian catastrophe.’
What Can We Do to Help?
I’m not a billionaire or anything close to being a millionaire…were I the answer might be much easier. I give what I can each month but it’s a pittance. So I asked myself what can I do to raise more money?
My answer…I’m going to cycle 8,000 kms this year to raise much needed funds for the children and families of Afghanistan, and for those in need or fleeing conflict everywhere.
My chosen charities are:
And I would like your help in doing so.
My aim is to raise 8000 euros…that’s 1 euro for every kilometre I cycle, with the monies to be spilt evenly among the chosen charities.
Even then it’s not much, but at least it’s something. I’ll be posting regular updates on my progress on social media and there is a website on the way. I’ll furnish further details of how exactly you might help me reach this target and make your pledges within the next few weeks.
It’s not been the best start to the year for me…I put my back out just before New Years Eve and am struggling to sit upright at the mo — not the most auspicious of starts I grant you — let alone jump on my bike…but I will endure and I will achieve the distance I’ve set myself, if for no other reason than I must.
And this, as much as anything is the reason why I’m not totally organised right now. It was all a last minute decision which was then almost immediately put in jeopardy by my unforeseen back injury! Doh!
So, please help me raise that money by pledging a small amount or whatever you can afford to my cause.
Thanking you in advance. Please share this, tell people, tell everyone and help me to help the starving children and families of Afghanistan.
- Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 era destabilized America and produced Trump. Spencer Ackerman, 2021.
- Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump. Karen J. Greenberg, 2021.
- Twilight of Democracy: The failure of politics and the parting of friends. Anne Applebaum, 2020.
- The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war. Craig Whitlock, 2021.
* Food insecurity is defined as the disruption of food intake or eating patterns because of lack of money and other resources.
