Sanctions of mass destruction

In a recent interview Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi sought the West’s “mercy and compassion” to help millions of Afghans. David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, summed up Afghanistan’s dire situation after his recent visit to Kabul as: “the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth with 95 percent people without enough food and 23 million marching towards starvation”. He termed the next six months as catastrophic, warning “it to be hell on Earth”.

What could be a tragedy of agonising proportions is that 3.5 million Afghan children face severe malnutrition with reports that one million of these innocent lives might not live to see the advent of the coming spring. This impending doomsday scenario has been brought about by the US and its allies having imposed inhuman sanctions and freezing almost 10 billion dollars of a war-ravaged Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover.

Like its military forays, Washington’s economic sanctions have borne genocidal results. Historian Roxanne Dunbar writes, “From its founding, genocide was the inherent policy of the United States”. Ever present, these genocidal policies, more so in the post-cold-war era, morphed into military interventions and economic sanctions. Used with impunity to horrendous effect, they have become an arbitrary must of Washington’s foreign policy. Economic sanctions by the US started with the 1917 ‘Trading with the Enemy Act’. Historian Benjamin Coates writes that this punitive law has “transformed over the decades into a broad writ of executive authority to wage economic warfare against loosely defined enemies virtually anywhere and at any time”.

Steve Hanke, economist at John Hopkins University, notes that “the US has 8,842 sanctions in place”. He terms it “a failed policy” asserting that “sanctions are for losers”. The US has imposed sanctions on 17 countries and many organisations the world over. The ineffectiveness of these sanctions can be well gauged from the fact that Cuba, under rigorous sanctions since 1962, has refused to be cowed down by any Washington diktat. Venezuela too refuses to grovel, and these sanctions coupled with extreme insecurity were the reason a belligerent North Korea attained and is flaunting its nuclear prowess.

Afghanistan, ravaged by decades of wars and corrupt vassals, is the latest target. Seemingly cocooned in a time warp, the US still lives in the Truman years. Even its most ardent fan base has shrivelled, while that of its detractors has swelled. Its incorrigible policies have pushed erstwhile allies into the outstretched arms of China and Russia. On a visit to Beijing, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that the two countries were working on a currency system and a technological alliance that could end the dollar’s hegemony and reduce the brunt of Washington led sanctions.

Empirical evidence proves that Washington’s genocidal economic sanctions and military interventions have had disastrous consequences. In ‘Sanctions of Mass Destruction’, John and Karl Mueller encapsulate the horrifying fallout saying: “Sanctions may have contributed to more deaths during the post cold war era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history”. Sanctions wreak horrors on the most vulnerable that are the newborns, pregnant women, elderly and the sick.

In Iran, Trump reneged on its nuclear deal and reimposed 800 sanctions with 800 new ones. These sanctions have inflicted a damage of one trillion dollars on the Iranian economy. Iran along with other sanctioned countries has suffered greatly compounded by the Covid pandemic taking its lethal toll for want of vaccines and medicines. A 1993 UN report says that sanctions in Haiti are killing 1,000 children a month. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research found that in 2017-18 alone, sanctions on Venezuela led to more than 40,000 deaths. The same tragedy prevails in Syria and other sanctioned countries as eliminated diseases like measles, typhoid and rubella have re-emerged.

Humanitarian law gleaned from principles enshrined in various treaties and conventions advocates response to humanitarian disasters to be based on humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence. These four principles are advocated even amidst hostilities. Over the past decade, sanctions have resulted in major humanitarian disasters. In Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Congo, sanctions have failed to prevent massive violence and misery. Touting regime change as justification, these sanctions yield the opposite persistently. In severely sanctioned Iran, the last electoral results saw what are called hardliners sweeping away the reformists.

By exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the US risks ensuring that Afghanistan becomes a haven for the very groups that it sought to eradicate at the cost of many lives and trillions of dollars. The spillover shall be a nightmare revisited for Pakistan. The UN Security Council warned in July that Daesh had expanded its hold across Afghanistan. The group is now offering Afghans $270-450 a month to join them. This is a fortune for the cashless Afghans struggling for their survival. This is also the group whose creation is attributed to the US with Hamid Karzai, a US ally, accusing the latter of collaborating with Daesh in a 2017 Al Jazeera interview.

Responding to Foreign Minister Muttaqi’s plea for compassion and release of its funds, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied that “the US does not want the funds to benefit the Taliban”. It is a cruel paradox that the Washington-led West has cited its concern for women’s emancipation and human rights in Afghanistan to create conditions which shall be disastrous for the whole Afghanistan population.

In 1996, then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright was interviewed by veteran reporter Lesley Stahl who asked if it was worth imposing sanctions that led to the deaths of over half a million Iraqi children. He pointed out that the deaths were higher than the number of children that perished when the US dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Albright’s response was “Yes, it was worth it”.

Expecting compassion from the likes, and what Dick Cheney pompously declared as an American “non-negotiable way of life”, may be an unattainable mirage. Muslim countries have converged in Islamabad for an OIC moot to find ways to avert the disaster in Afghanistan. Despite their apathy to the beleaguered Kashmiris, it is imperative that they come up with ways to alleviate the suffering in Afghanistan.

The writer is a freelance contributor. Email: miradnanaziz@gmail.com