The US economic war on Afghanistan amounts to a humanitarian crime | Larry Elliott
The war in Afghanistan did not end when US and UK troops left Kabul airport last year: it merely took a different, but still lethal, form.
The response of President Joe Biden to the military humiliation inflicted on America by the Taliban has been a scorched earth policy designed to cause the maximum amount of economic damage to what was already one of the world’s poorest countries.
Prosecuting this war by other means involved freezing Afghan state assets held in New York. It meant the threat of sanctions against banks and other foreign companies doing business in Afghanistan. It has involved halting payments from the World Bank’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF). It meant no emergency Covid-19 financial help from the International Monetary Fund.
At the time, it was obvious this withdrawal of overseas financial aid – which accounted for almost half of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product in 2020 – would have a…
