According to an analysis by the United Nations World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organisation, 8.7 million people are nearing famine — putting Afghanistan on the brink of a mass starvation. And children are among the most vulnerable…the country is facing numerous humanitarian crises, including a critical food shortage that some aid groups say could kill a million Afghan children this winter.
Heartbreaking images from Afghanistan food crisis: How to help
Dylan Stableford and Yahoo News Photo Staff
December 11, 2021
The New York Times reported this week that an estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the country’s population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening food insecurity.
U.S. sanctions against the militant group have isolated the country and made it harder for international relief organisations to deliver aid.
And it’s not just the lack of food that kills children its also the lack of medicine, which there is no money left to buy replenishment for. Yesterday, BBC America TV gave a heartrending 5 minute segment on the infants at death’s door, their mother’s pleading uselessly for care for their babies. The BBC did not tell its audience that the US had frozen Afghanistan’s money and that is why many babies would not survive.
By AFP – Agence France Presse
August 30, 2021
Russia Calls On US To Release Afghan Reserves
Russia on Monday called on the United States to release Afghan central bank reserves that Washington blocked after the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul earlier this month, said the Kremlin’s envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov. The United States must urgently unfreeze these assets, US freezes nearly $9.5 billion in Afghanistan central bank assets
Bangor Daily News
Aug 17, 2021 — U.S. sanctions on the Taliban mean that they cannot access any funds.
‘Just give us our money’: Taliban push to unlock Afghan billions abroad
Reuters October 29, 2021
“Freezing this money is unethical and is against all international laws and values.
Opinion: The United States cannot let Afghan children starve
Washington Post Dec 3, 2021 — Afghan children are covered with a blanket as their families camp … the United States freezing $9.5 billion in Afghan Central Bank funds …
With foreign funds frozen, Afghan aid groups stuck in limbo
Associated Press Sep 15, 2021 — The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union suspended financing for projects in Afghanistan.
Taliban Demands Nations Handover Frozen Afghan Cash …
Newsweek Human Rights Watch
Oct 29, 2021 — The Taliban government has called on foreign governments to unfreeze billions of dollars of central bank cash reserves stuck in overseas …
Starving the Taliban — or the Afghan people? –
ResponsibleSateCraft.org Oct 18, 2021 — When the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan at the end of August, it froze $9.5 billion of the Afghan Central Bank’s assets.
US Freezes Nearly $9.5 Billion Afghanistan Central Bank Assets
Bloomberg.com Aug 17, 2021 — The U.S. has frozen nearly $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank
In freezing Afghanistan’s money the government of the United States of America is committing genocide in Afghanistan and trying to have its CIA controlled Western media portray those dying as the fault of the Taliban government, which the US 2001 invasion overthrew, but which easily and quickly reinstated itself when the American military withdrew 20 years later in August of 2021.
Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. The Afghan central bank had $9.4 billion in reserve assets as of April, according to the International Monetary Fund, which is equivalent to about a third of the country’s yearly economic output.
The war in Afghanistan has cost $2.3 trillion according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
The US military and soldiers of other nations of the coalition managed to kill over fifty thousand Taliban,[1] but the Taliban managed to continue to govern nearly half of the countryside of Afghanistan throughout the 20 year occupation war.[2]
Over the course of the 20-year conflict, more than 46,000 civilians were killed, the Brown report says.
In withholding the funds that could be buying food and medicine Western propaganda often cites the Taliban restrictions on coeducation at schools and universities, but this is hardly reason enough to cause thousands of people, children in particular, to starve to death or die for lack of money to buy critical medicines.
Towards the End of September, the Washington Post reported Taliban Minister of Education saying women can attend university, but not alongside men. Recently, the new Minister of Higher Education stated flatly, “We will not allow coeducation.” Some private universities have already switched to divided classrooms.
Coeducation at colleges and universities in America didn’t become common and widespread until the late 1960s, that’s around only 60 years ago. Young women who attended them were called ‘coeds’ rather than ‘students as the males were.)
In 1979, long before the Taliban existed, it was the Western backed mujahedin that were even executing teachers. This author remembers a newspaper front page photo of three bodies of teachers with the hands wired behind their backs with the caption ‘Executed for for teaching girls,’ during the US backed civil war, and it was these fanatics that the Taliban years later would be born to combat only to have these brutes of the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance again ally with USA during its murderously deadly invasion in 2001.
Chronology of US Bringing Terrorism into Afghanistan.
1978, Afghani King overthrown. Popular women liberating Socialist gov. installed in Kabul.
July,1979, Prez Carter has CIA secretly fund, arm, train fundamentalist war lords to overthrow it.
December,1979, Soviet military comes to Kabul’s aid.
CIA invites bin Ladin et al.into Afghanistan
1988 bin Ladin organizes al Qai’da
1988-89 Soviets withdraw.
1992 Kabul gov. falls. US backed war lords fight a horribly destructive civil war.
1996 Taliban defeats US backed war lords – establishes government
2001 US invades kills thousands of Taliban instals drug lord government. Taliban continues to rule half of the countryside
For a more detailed 32 year history of US terrorism in Afghanistan in reverse time order read on:
2021 ending 20 years of occupation war in Afghanistan
The Deep State CIA and the mainstream western monopolized media keep referring to the Taliban as an insurgency, but the Taliban Was the government of Afghanistan for four Years when the USA Invaded, claiming the right to conquer or try to conquer all Afghanistan in order to find and capture or kill Osama bin Laden; accused of having planned the 9/11 suicide squads of Saudi Arabians crashing US airliners into the World Trade Towers, and Pentagon.
For all the whatever crimes the Taliban has been cited for notwithstanding, the Taliban had all but eliminated the opium poppy cultivation, which was made to flourish again under the CIA-led 20 year long occupation war against the Taliban by the Coalition Military forces, which has included participation of every nation of Caucasian population, even tiny Lichtenstein, Andorra and Monaco.
1996 – 2001 Taliban governs Afghanistan
The Taliban (‘Taliban’=’students’ in Dali language) came into power in 1996, by defeating the two US backed war lords armies during their horrifically destructive civil war following the defeat of the Socialist/Communist women liberating Kabul government three years after the withdrawal of the Soviet Armed Forces,
In December of 1979, Soviet military had come to the aid of a popular women liberating Socialist Kabul government under attack since July of 1979, from fundamentalist war lords armed, trained and funded by CIA, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on the secret orders of President Carter upon the urging of his Presidential Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski (David Rockefeller’s right hand man)
Who are the Taliban? How and why did the Taliban come into existence?
“In 1992, Kabul under Hekmatyar came to be a bullet riddled city, a center of lawlessness, crime and atrocities fueled by complex tribal rivalries. Mullah Omar, who once fought against the Soviets, started the Taliban movement with fewer than 50 armed madrassah students in his hometown of Kandahar. The most credible and often-repeated story of how Mullah Omar first mobilized his followers is that in the spring of 1994, neighbors in Singesar told him that the local governor had abducted two teenage girls, shaved their heads, and taken them to a camp where they were raped repeatedly. 30 Taliban (with only 16 rifles) freed the girls, and hanged the governor from the barrel of a tank.” (Wikipedia)
July 1979, CIA armed funded trained fundamentalist war lord counter-revolution
In an interview for a French magazine in 1998, [3] Brzezinski admitted that Washington had lied about the American role. According to the official version of history, he said, “CIA aid the mujaheddin began during 1980, that after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan … But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise.” Unknown to the American public and Congress , President Carter authorized a $500 million covert action program in support of the tribal groups known mujahedin. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government.
Contrary to cold war mythology, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,did not happen until six months later.[4]
Thus, Washington began a Faustian affair with some of the most brutal fanatics on earth. Men like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar received tens of millions of CIA dollars. Hekmatyar’s speciality was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London in 1986, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a “freedom fighter”. Between 1979 and 1992, the life of the PDPA government, Washington poured some $4 billion into the mujaheddin factions. Brzezinski’ plan, as he wrote in his autobiography, was to promote an international movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and ‘destabilize’ the Soviet Union.
The 1978 popular revolution
In the sixties, a liberation movement arose in Afghanistan, centered on the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which opposed the autocratic rule of King Zahir Shar and eventually overthrew the regime of the king’s cousin, Mohammad Daud, in 1978. It was, by all accounts, an immensely popular revolution. Most foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times , found that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said they were delighted with the coup.’ The Wall Street Journal reported that “150,000 … marched to honour the new flag … the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.’ The Washington Post said that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned.’
The new government outlined a reform program that included the abolition of feudal power in the countryside, freedom of religion, equal rights for women and the granting of hitherto denied rights to the various ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.
Under tribalism and feudalism, life expectancy was thirty-five and almost one in three children died in infancy. Ninety percent of the population was illiterate. The New government introduced free medical care in the poorest areas. Peonage was abolished: a mass literacy campaign was begun. For women, the gains were unheard of; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 percent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.
Indeed, so radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who escaped the Taliban in September 2001, said, “Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked … We used to go to cafes and cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday and listen to the latest Hindi music … It all started to go wrong when the mujheddin started winning … They used to kill teachers and burn schools … We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were people the West had supported.”[5]
Brzezinski called for Jihad! Previously the Internet featured a photo of Brzezinski holding high a Kalashnikov calling for Jihad against the Russians and Communist Kabul government.
Brzezinki’s grand plan had coincided with the ambitions of Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, CIA director William Casey gave the CIA ‘s backing to a plan put forward by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI , to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1982 and 1992. (Taliban means “student’.) Operatives, who would eventually join the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone.[6] In Pakistan, mujaheddin training camps were run by the CIA and Britain’s M16, with the British SAS training future al-Qa’ida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts.
This continued long after the Soviet army had withdrawn in 1989. When the PDPA government finally fell in 1992, the West’s favorite warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, rained American-supplied missiles on Kabul, killing 2,000 people, until the other faction agreed to make him Prime Minister.
The last PDPA president, Mohammad Najibullah, who had gone before the UN General Assembly to appeal desperately for help, took refuge in the UN compound in Kabul, where he remained until the Taliban took power in 1996. They hanged him from a street light”)[7]
There was a lot more blood on American hands every day made possible by steady media propaganda that killing Taliban, who still governed half of Afghanistan and the parts of Pakistan where the war had driven them, is protecting America from the Saudis of 9/11.
(Americans are also told that it is fine to be bombing five countries, but not Saudi Arabia, the 9/11 nation of origin. Wikileaks has revealed US officials confessing to knowledge of continued major funding for al-Qaida coming from Saudi Arabia, and not from Yemen, Somalia, Iraq or Pakistan where US Predator and Reaper drones stroke daily targeting America’s growing enemy and thereby taking the lives of men, women and children of those countries in willful collateral murder.)
A few years, after the Taliban had secured control of most of Afghanistan, and had its government accepted, if not officially recognized, by a number of countries, including the US seeking to have peace and permission for an oil pipeline, this writer got into a taxi in New York City. The handsome soft speaking bearded driver was listening to a recording of the Qur’an being read before a large outdoor audience, which, at intervals, was roaring approval as I listened over the taxi’s tiny radio speaker.
I asked the driver what was the topic of the passages being read. “Childbirth,” he answered. I notice color photos of his three young children on his dashboard.
“If you don’t mind my asking, I would be interested to know what you, as a family man, think of the Taliban?”
His firmly spoken answer was, “The Taliban are righteous, they have brought peace and safety and protection to our people suffering rape, homicide and violent thievery. Taliban do not fight for money but for decency and respect inspired by our religion Islam.” Making women wear the burka has ended the rapes and now the streets, neighborhoods and families are safe.”
The reader may see below two of the many previous published articles appealing to Americans to stop their war of occupation in Afghanistan.
Over the last thirteen years, the New York Times, though supporting the US occupation of Afghanistan, has headlined, nearly every year, usually with pathetic heartbreaking photos of tiny children in rags freezing without enough food to survive, reporting that hundreds have been dying every winter. Every year, other publications report that children have been freezing and starving to death in the camps just outside Kabul, ever since the American invasion and overthrow of the Taliban government.
Cold Weather Kills Children in Afghan … – The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/world/asia/cold…
Feb. 3, 2012. KABUL, Afghanistan — The following children froze to death in Kabul over the past three weeks after their families had fled war zones in Afghanistan for refugee camps here:
$2,000 for a dead Afghan Child, $100,000 for Any American Who Died Killing it. OpEdNews
6/30/09 Shocking? Shame provoking? Embarrassment for the discrepancy between the value of an American soldier’s life and the value of lives of people in US forcibly occupied countries? In imperialist America, there is no interest in such ‘war casualties,’ considered ‘inevitable.’
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End Notes
1.
https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-43d8f53b35e80ec18c130cd683e1a38f
AP News Costs of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars
August 17, 2021
2.
https://ctc.usma.edu/lessons-from-the-collapse-of-afghanistans-security-forces/
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
Lessons from the Collapse of Afghanistan’s Security Forces
OCTOBER 2021, VOLUME 14, ISSUE 8
3.
the 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview that Brzezinski boasted that he had provoked the invasion, by getting Carter to authorize a presidential funding to intentionally suck the Soviets in, six months before Moscow considered invading. Yet, despite Brzezinski’s admission, Washington’s entire political spectrum continued to embrace his original false narrative, that the Soviets were embarked on world conquest.
https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interviewconquest.
4. Intervention and Exploitation: US and UK Government International Actions Since 1945
http://www.us-uk-interventions.org/Afghanistan.html
5. Revolution and counter-revolution in Afghanistan | Green Left
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/revolution..
6. Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covert program to arm and finance the Jihadi warriors, mujahideen.Wikipedia · Text under CC-BY-SA license
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxgZZ8Br6cE
John Pilger – The New Rulers of the World – YouTube
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which Dissident Voice supports with link at the end of each issue of its newsletter.