Tuesday, February 22, 2022
The costs of war
War in Ukraine looms. Meanwhile, we have pretty much forgotten about the site of our longest war, Afghanistan. What's going on there is pretty bad.
Before the Taliban took over the Afghan government, as Ezra Klein points out in the New York Times, foreign aid made up 45% of the Afghan GDP, and 75% of government spending. That's a remarkably high reliance on outside sources... and nearly all of it was cut off as sanction against the horrifying Taliban. Not surprisingly, the economy there has crashed, and people are deeply affected. More than half of the population is suffering what the World Food Program calls "extreme levels of hunger," and 98% lack enough food to eat. It sounds like a pretty desperate situation.
We bear some of the responsibility, for allowing the country to become so reliant on our aid in the first place. And having done so, we have snatched it away in hopes that it will punish the Taliban. Somehow, though, I suspect that the Taliban leaders are eating well.
War destroys.
