This comment is part of an opinion section on human rights and human freedom occasionally published by The Dallas Morning News. You can find the complete series here.
It’s a burning scene. In Spin Boldak, a border town with Kandahar, women languish under the burning September sun, some dressed in blue burqas and others just a tattered sheets over their weathered faces.
Many are sick and dying, and some are pushed in wheelbarrows – the concept of a wheelchair unthinkable for the financially stripped and desperate. And although these sick women, children and entire families are only a few steps away from the Pakistani junction in the Chaman and Quetta, they are denied entry that was once freely accessible to them.
Pakistan’s sudden closure of the border, citing its own national security concerns and the fact that it has taken in far more Afghan refugees than any other country during the decades of conflict has angered the newly appointed Taliban border guards.
“We have an agreement with Pakistan to let Afghans through for humanitarian and medical reasons,” said a Taliban official, 28-year-old Mohammad Sadiq Sabery, angrily.
Perishable goods rot in the sweltering heat, trucks are stuck in traffic for weeks. Belonged merchants, who have survived years of conflict through cross-border imports and exports, now complain wildly that they can no longer afford to bring food to the table.
The border chaos, crammed with people desperate to tell their stories of death and destruction, marks a small section of a nation that is falling into chaos and madness six weeks after the Taliban came to power, followed by the frenetic departure of the US last month .
Immediately after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s flight on August 15, which enabled the Taliban militia in the mountains to seize the reins of a nation of 38 million, Washington’s central bank froze more than $ 9 billion of reserves. It was the US taxpayer who sustained Afghanistan’s ailing economy for nearly two decades. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have suspended loans, and the Financial Action Task Force, a Paris-based group that oversees global terrorism, has mandated member states to cut off Taliban funds.
With every day that goes by, the crisis only worsens.
Many public services, including those in the health sector, have been shut down. Girls’ education has been halted and Taliban officials have told me that they do not have the financial means to ensure full gender segregation according to their strict interpretation of Islamic values.
But given the Taliban’s 20-year track record of waging war against the government killing thousands of American soldiers in the process, and grave human rights concerns, the international recognition the regime so desperately craves will likely not be at any point coming soon.
So while one war is technically over, it feels like another is just beginning. This may lack the bombs and bullets of the past, but Afghanistan remains a bleeding place. And it is always the civilians who suffer.
The cost of food and essentials is increasing day by day, exacerbated by rapid inflation. After that, the value of the Afghani currency sinks and there is a shortage of cash.
Belonged Afghans wait for more than three days in the sweltering heat on the banks without food and water, while Taliban guards wave ominous sticks to keep the population in order. Given the severe shortage of physical money, each family can only withdraw the maximum equivalent of $ 200 per week.
Several who once held government or military posts tell me wearily that they haven’t received their salaries in months, including the last month of the previous government.
The United Nations has warned that 97% of the Afghan population could fall below the poverty line in the coming weeks, a dramatic increase from the 72% reported just before the Taliban victory. Unfortunately, Afghans have become persistent victims of cold statistics. Behind these figures are the faces of fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. Each of them has a history of war, although almost all of them never chose to go to war.
“We Afghans are unlucky,” says a driver with a sigh. “But look at this beautiful place. We would be the happiest people if the wars ever really stopped. “
Muhammad Suleiman Bin Shah, the last Afghan government’s deputy trade and industry minister, assures me over tea one afternoon in Kabul that he and his team were preparing for a possible end of the world as the conflict gained momentum and the Taliban passed through cities and stormed villages. Concerned about food security, he calculated that the country could hold out for two months if major roads or thoroughfares were blown up or blocked, prohibiting access to basic food supplies.
The clock is ticking and that time frame is almost up.
“People have to work outside and don’t have to spend more than half the week waiting in line at the bank,” continues Bin Shah in frustration.
However, it is difficult to find employment in almost all sectors. There aren’t any hard numbers, but almost everyone you meet is either begging to go or to find a job. The millions who were in government a few weeks ago are mostly unemployed. And private individuals, too, from doctors and lawyers to artists, journalists and entrepreneurs, have been pushed into a daunting new world of the unknown.
Afghans who are left to pick up the fragments of their unpredictable lives face high levels of fear.
In the weeks after their sudden assault on the throne, the Taliban reinstated the Department of Virtue Propaganda and Vice Prevention, which had been disbanded after the US invasion. This aroused fear in the hearts of Afghans, who still remember the draconian and violent practice of Islamic law with twitching memories.
“We will punish according to Islamic rules,” says Mohammad Yousuf, who believes he is around 32 years old and is responsible for the “central zone” of Afghanistan, after reluctantly agreeing to an interview with a woman. “Whatever Islam guides us, we will punish accordingly.”
Most important, he continues, will be the penalties for those found guilty of the “great sins of Islam”.
Planned murder is punished by public execution; a thief’s hand or foot, or both, is severed, and an adulterer is stoned to death. Typically, a close relative is assigned the fatal act to rid the family of the “shame” inflicted on them.
Yousuf swears that both male and female transgressors would face such death, although girls and women are disproportionately stoned. The ministry is also expected to reinstate “moral police” on the Afghan streets, although Yousuf insists that there will be fewer of these types of police. And he says they won’t be as tough as they were 20 years ago when it comes to punishing minor assaults, like a woman exposing an ankle or a man failing to trim his beard.
But trusting the Taliban to obey their own word is still hard to sell to many locals who have spent years in a state of terror as the former insurgents used suicide bombers and blown buildings – and civilians inside – to pieces.
But those foot fighters, once exiled to remote villages and damp basements while waiting to be attacked, are now a familiar sight on every inch of the blood-soaked terrain of Afghanistan.
They move through the markets and speed down crumpled highways. They crowd at checkpoints and guard most mosques and certainly every ministry, their white and black flag flapping high on every government building and armored vehicle.
Some wear camouflages collected by the defeated Afghan army and others wear traditional tribal clothing. Even so, they are always easy to spot in the thick of those who are just trying to get through; they almost always have a high-powered, US-made rifle strapped to their back or in their arms.
On the other hand, some Afghans point out that there is also a strange sense of security stemming from their heavy footprint lurking in almost every crack in the country.
“In terms of security, it was perfect. There were no robberies, no kidnappings, nothing. We couldn’t walk around before. Criminals with guns would take our cell phones and money and everything, ”says Fazal Mohammed, 55, who has owned his hairdresser for 35 years. “Well, there is none of that.”
Homayon, 49, who has worked in his family’s famous carpet store on Chicken Street in Kabul since childhood, agrees that “security under the dreaded regime is 100% better” than under the previous administration.
His greatest suffering now is caring for the people in the world he loves most.
“Now there are 75% fewer sales,” Homayon continues gently, staring at me with wet eyes. “Nobody visits the store anymore.”
Afghans – namely, those who lived through decades of incessant conflict from the Soviet invasion of the 1980s to the expanding civil war of the 1990s to the US occupation of the 2000s and the rise of terrorist groups like ISIS after 2010 – know this only too well Financial instability has the power to devastate and destroy.
The Taliban leadership is already rumbling about internal power games and splintering. The movement itself was founded in 1994 when Mullah Mohammad Omar, who fought valiantly against the Russians in the US-backed mujahideen, split from his fellow militants and made his base bear the weapons of a small, shabby mosque in the sleepy village of Kandahar from Sangsar.
Similarly, headed is ISIS-K, the Afghan subsidiary of the international terrorist group that indiscriminately slaughtered hundreds, including 13 U.S. soldiers, in a suicide attack on the edge of Hamid Karzai International Airport over the years in the final days of the U.S. evacuation of disaffected al-Qaida and Taliban activists.
It is undeniable that Afghanistan is constantly wavering, always waiting for one war to end and another to break out.
And even though America’s “Eternal War” is considered done and dusted, the conflict still kills from my place.
Hollie McKay is an international freelance writer. She wrote this column for the Dallas Morning News.
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