David Miliband: The West has left Kabul in need of cash as well as food

Every tragedy needs testimony. Christina Lamb’s jarring, shocking, anguished chronicle of the catastrophe facing the people of Afghanistan in The Sunday Times last week met that standard. Her article was sensational but not sensationalist. Because it was true.

Across the country, girls as young as Fatima, aged 8, who featured in the article, are being sold into marriage so that families can feed themselves. Alex Crawford’s brave reporting on Sky has shown that body parts are being sold for the same reason. In effect, the whole population of 40 million people face extreme poverty, half face malnutrition, and already a million children are on the brink of famine.

It would be convenient for western policymakers if this humanitarian carnage could be laid at the door of the Taliban authorities. But it can’t. They won the war. They are in charge. But though they have much to answer for, it is not Taliban economic policy that has turned a very poor country into a starving one.

There are 2,000 staff of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) working in Afghanistan. Nearly half are women. We support education (for girls as well as boys), child protection, livelihoods and now healthcare. We operated throughout the war. We did not choose the new government, but it is not our biggest problem today.

Afghanistan has been uniquely dependent on western policymakers for 20 years. And it still is. Governments in Washington, London and Berlin choose whether Afghans sink or have a chance to swim.

This is not just about the amount of humanitarian aid. More is needed — more than $4 billion urgently, according to the United Nations. The British public have been very generous, for example during the December appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee, and donations to organisations such as the IRC are invaluable. But the fundamental problem is the economic collapse. It is a fast-moving downward escalator that threatens to overwhelm the aid effort.

Less than six months ago, more than 40 per cent of the formal economy (that is, not the drug economy) and 75 per cent of public spending in Afghanistan came from international donors. It is the end of that support, overnight, plus the freeze on the international assets of the Afghan Central Bank, plus the sanctions — which are meant to be on individual Taliban leaders but which have, in fact, chilled all economic relations inside and beyond the country — that are the proximate cause of the current starvation crisis.

This is the policy mix that betrays precisely the people whom the West spent 20 years promising to help — and who as recently as August were told that military withdrawal would not be followed by economic and political withdrawal. That is how you end up in a situation where the World Food Programme needs to feed more than 20 million people.

The excuse is that policymakers do not want to support the Taliban. There is widespread international resistance, including from Russia and China, to formal diplomatic recognition.

But salary payments to nurses, teachers and water engineers are there to support people, not governments: $1.2 billion of aid is sitting in the World Bank trust fund and could be used for this purpose. It would provide support for families in desperate straits, and Britain should be leading the charge to get it paid.

But for salaries to be cashable, and for businesses to be able to function, there needs to be capital to underpin the banking system. The freeze on Afghan international financial assets, including the assets of Afghan citizens and companies, imposed last summer, has left this import-dependent economy unable to function.

Most of these assets — about $7 billion — are in the US, and are tied up in lawsuits arising from the 9/11 attacks. But some of these assets, estimated at about $2 billion, are in the UK, other European countries and Switzerland. They need to be released.

Then there are sanctions. They have been imposed on individual Taliban leaders (more than 100 of them) by individual states and the UN security council since 9/11. There are now welcome exemptions for humanitarian purposes, but much of the private sector is paralysed.

Traders fear that imports of fuel or machine parts or agricultural produce will be caught. And even the printing of Afghani bank notes (in Poland) is apparently not exempt, so cash to the tune of $8 billion is stuck outside the country. The result is that the cash economy (80 per cent of people do not have bank accounts) is stifled.

It is one thing to say that Afghanistan needs economic adjustment at the end of a war. It certainly does. It is a different matter to punish innocent civilians for the failure of the western war strategy. Yet that is the consequence of the current policy posture.

The shock therapy is misdirected. Where a planned and phased shift in international support could be defended, and could make demands of the government, there has instead been a guillotine, cutting off the supply lines for those in need. It is indefensible.

In its place, the World Bank and IMF should be directed to offer urgent technical support to the financial authorities in the country, and to co-operate with the regional powers with an interest in stability in Afghanistan to sustain economic functioning. It will not be pretty, and may not be palatable, but the current approach is far, far worse.

If the policy was intended to collapse the Afghan state, it could hardly be better designed. But such a collapse should be a terrifying prospect not just for Afghans but for the rest of us.

It is in no one’s interest (except, conceivably, extremist groups such as Isis). And the idea that mass migration out of the country would stop at the borders of Iran or Pakistan is a delusion. Of course people would want to come to Europe, including the UK.

An IRC staff member in Afghanistan wrote to me: “What doesn’t make any sense to me or any Afghan woman inside of Afghanistan, is that in the name of ‘protecting women’s rights’ we are ensuring that they starve to death. As well as the fact that with the men having no jobs, gender-based violence increases everywhere.”

Current policy is not serving Fatima, or millions like her. It has created a catastrophe of choice. There needs to be a change of approach that is comprehensive and fast.