Their destination is a bakery, one of several in Kabul where crowds of women have begun to gather in the late afternoon, patiently waiting for customers who might give them some bread.
“Sometimes we eat dinner, sometimes we don’t,” says Rahmati. “The situation has been bad for three years, but this last year has been the worst. My husband tried to go to Iran to work, but he was deported.”
The United Nations says nearly half the country faces acute hunger. According to a May report by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), 43% of Afghanistan’s population lives on less than one meal a day, with 90% of Afghans surveyed reporting that food is their main need .
They are dismal statistics that encapsulate the first year back from the Taliban’s rule, with the nation isolated and increasingly impoverished. As the US and its allies left the country, they imposed sanctions, froze $9 billion in central bank funds and halted foreign aid that once made up nearly 80 percent of Afghanistan’s annual budget.
Outside the foreign ministry, a large mural, one of the few written in English, trumpets the Taliban government’s official position: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan wants positive and peaceful relations with the world.”
However, after a year in power, the Taliban have yet to be recognized by a single country in the world, with international funding still largely frozen. One of the main issues for Western countries has been the marginalization of minorities and women by the new government, which includes the de facto ban on secondary education for girls.
Repeated promises by the Taliban to allow girls to return to school have yet to be kept. In late June, Supreme Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada defied international pressure, saying Afghanistan would set its own rules.
“The fact remains that the United States is trying to find moral justifications for collectively punishing the people of Afghanistan by freezing assets and imposing sanctions on Afghanistan as a whole,” State Department spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi told CNN. Saturday: “I don’t believe that conditions should be placed on the release of funds that do not belong to me, that did not belong to the previous administration, that did not belong to the government before it. This is the collective money of the people of Afghanistan.”
Amid fears of a full-blown famine last winter, the US — through the World Bank — released more than $1 billion in aid funding.
“This is an example of an area where we will want to continue to have a realistic dialogue with the Taliban,” a senior State Department official told CNN. “We will talk with them about access to humanitarian aid, about measures that we believe can strengthen the macroeconomic stability of the country.”
But a growing chorus of aid workers and economists say it is not enough and that the continued freeze on Afghanistan’s funds is having disastrous consequences.
“This is a message that no one wants to hear,” Vicky Aken, the International Rescue Committee’s Afghanistan country director, told CNN. “These policies put women at risk here. In the name of feminist policies, we see women starving to death.”
The US is nowhere close to recapitalizing Afghanistan’s central bank, according to a senior State Department official. Although there have been discussions on the matter, the official said they still have deep concerns about assets that may be diverted to terrorism.
“We have no confidence that this institution has the safeguards and oversight to manage assets responsibly and inclusively. Needless to say, the Taliban’s accommodation of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri reinforces the deep concerns that “We have long had concerns about the diversion of funds to terrorist groups,” they said.
The Taliban refuse to acknowledge that al-Zawahiri, who was killed in a US drone strike earlier this month, was even in the capital, further complicating any attempt to normalize relations with the Taliban.
In the markets of Kabul, stalls groan with fresh fruit and produce. The problem, sellers say, is that most people can’t afford them.
“The price of flour has doubled. The price of cooking oil has more than doubled,” says a vendor.
A few meters away, a young boy goes through a rubbish bin, collecting plastic waste to resell.
“Humanitarian aid only buys time. It doesn’t grow, it doesn’t raise incomes, it doesn’t create jobs,” says Anthony Cordesman, chairman emeritus of strategy at the bipartisan research organization the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Cordesman warns that Afghanistan’s overall economic decline did not begin with the Taliban’s return to power, nor did the country’s dependence on foreign aid.
“If we can find ways to negotiate an effective aid process where we know the money is going to the people, where it’s going to be widely distributed, where it’s not just going to support the Taliban government, then those are negotiation initiatives that we need to pursue as But the building a web of lies — the equivalent of an aid process based on a house of cards — taking this money, which could go to many other countries that can effectively use aid, makes no sense.” .
As Kabul’s nights begin to cool and its days grow shorter, the fear among aid workers is that this winter will be even worse than the last.
“It is not in the US interest to see the economy collapse,” the senior State Department official said. “We recognize that the humanitarian crisis remains severe and dire.”
