Reports out of Afghanistan are that famine is coming, if it is not already there:
“[T]he near complete unraveling of the economy has been sudden and dramatic as the US and its allies enforced sanctions after the Taliban swept through the country and seized control. …
Nato members face re-engaging with Afghanistan or watching civilians starve in a famine that the International Crisis Group warns could kill more people than the two decades of fighting that has raged since a US-led coalition first ousted the militants in 2001. …
[T]he UN World Food Programme {WFP} … estimates that 98 per cent of the country’s 40m people do not have enough to eat. [Mary-Ellen McGroarty, Afghanistan director at the WFP, said,] ‘What’s scary is how quickly it has deteriorated.’”1
Except, of course, the West is not the only side involved here. The Taliban has a choice, too. We have no confidence that, if we give money or food to the Taliban, they will use it for everybody as opposed to just feeding their supporters and supporting terrorism.
But there is a precedent for what we should do. One hundred years, newly Communist Russia was hit by a terrible famine. According to a review of The Russian Job in The Economist:
“[The famine] was partly self-induced: terrorised by the Red Army and threatened with requisitions and executions, Russian peasants drastically reduced the land under cultivation, sowing the minimum required for their own survival.
Acutely aware that food meant power, Vladimir Lenin abandoned War Communism in favour of a new economic policy that replaced requisition with taxes and made some concession to capitalism. But it was too late. By the end of 1921, the vast territory along the Volga succumbed to starvation and cannibalism.”
Having no choice, Russian leaders appealed for help. Herbert Hoover, head of the American Relief Administration, responded. He got the $20 million Russian Famine Relief Act passed and signed into law on December 22, 1921. When Hoover was asked if he was helping Bolshevism by providing relief, he replied: "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed."
But the key was how it was done. We didn’t just give money or food to the Russians. Instead, the ARA insisted on complete autonomy, but pledging that it would provide help without regard to “race, creed, or social status.”2 In The Russian Job, Douglas Smith says that an estimate of ten million lives saved “does not seem exaggerated.”
If we are to help feed Afghanistan, what Herbert Hoover did in Russia shows the way. I understand we were fighting the Taliban earlier this year, but American troops were in Russia fighting against Bolsheviks in 1918. What we should do is to offer the Taliban this: We will help feed Afghanistan, but we have to handle the distribution ourselves. We will do it without regard to race, creed, or social status, but we have to do it. It is the only way we can make sure it is done fairly.
If the Taliban refuses, that is their choice, not ours. I do not know if we have some obligation to help feed Afghanistan. I do know we are have no obligation to give money to the Taliban to use however they want.
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1 Benjamin Parkin and Fazelminallah Qazizai, “Economic ruin leaves millions of Afghans on brink of famine,” Financial Times, December 18, 2021.
2 The reference to “social status” was critical since the Soviets had deliberately liquidated entire classes of people.
UPDATE (12/24/21 2:30 pm): I understand many will say the Taliban would never let the U.S. do this, but they may not realize just how much the Bolsheviks and the West feared and distrusted each other in 1921. Still, the fact it was Herbert Hoover who would be doing it may have been the difference back then. I don’t know if there is anybody today, in any country, who would have either the credibility or the capability, let alone both, that Herbert Hoover had in 1921.
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