Starving Millions for 'Leverage' Is Evil
The fact that there is even an argument over what should be done is a disgrace.
Sarah Chayes has written what may be one of the most dastardly op-eds I have ever read. She warns against providing aid to Afghanistan too quickly because that would reduce Western “leverage” over the Taliban:
Western countries should not move too fast. Just because we’ve failed to use our leverage in the past doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start now.
One way of thinking about the fraught matter of placing conditions on humanitarian assistance is to consider any offer to provide it as the equivalent of a treaty with a hostile foreign power. The nuclear deals with the USSR and Iran included not only conditions, but intrusive verification procedures. That’s the model that should be applied here.
Putting conditions on humanitarian assistance is always the wrong thing to do. In the case of Afghanistan, holding back resources that millions of Afghans need to survive the winter is monstrous and indefensible. It is not the fault of tens of millions of innocent Afghans that the Taliban won, and they should not be punished for the fact that the U.S. and its client did not prevail. Afghanistan faces a man-made famine if Afghanistan’s reserves are not unfrozen and aid does not resume, and this op-ed is the sort of twisted argument that lays the groundwork for causing such a famine.
The U.S. has the choice of stubbornly refusing to release the assets that it has frozen or allowing them to be used so that the Afghan people don’t die in huge numbers. The fact that there is even an argument over what should be done is a disgrace. It should be obvious that the Afghan people have already suffered enough and should not be punished harshly because our “nation-building” project collapsed in a matter of days. If the failure of the war in Afghanistan should have taught us anything, it is that we do not know what we are doing in that country. Playing games with the lives of tens of millions of people would repeat that error with truly horrific consequences.
Chayes presents this as a matter of “bailing out” the Taliban, but that is irrelevant under the circumstances. If the U.S. has the ability to help prevent massive loss of life simply by releasing frozen assets and providing humanitarian assistance, it should do so. The U.S. lost the war in Afghanistan, and it would be a terrible and unforgivable mistake to inflict even more suffering and death on that country in a vain effort to wield “leverage.”
One thing that our foreign policy has excelled at over the last two decades has been on inflicting untold misery on millions of innocent people. Our sanctions regimes alone, on Afghanistan, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, Iran, Yemen, and probably a dozen other countries has achieved next to nothing in terms of benefit to the US. Yet our policy elite seems addicted to continuing these malicious actions. What makes it even worse, is that many of these sanctions were levied after we had destroyed the physical and social infrastructure of some of these countries. Pure evil.
There’s a strange moral reasoning at play. The model of applying a sanctions regime is a kind of virtue signaling that we, the US, is making a statement of disapproval of a certain government, even if—as is usually the case-- those sanctions are not effective in general or effective in advancing US interests in particular or actually have terrible humanitarian consequences as implemented. It's the signal that matters, not the all-too-predictable consequences. The sanctions on Iraq in the 90’s is a classic example.
Similarly, there’s that disdain for diplomacy and “negotiating with terrorists”, in which those approaches are moral abominations because they signal an implied US imprimatur of legitimacy on those governments even if they advance US interests and avoid conflict (or nuclear proliferation).
The reasoning seems to be that all moral culpability for the negative humanitarian impacts of that sanctions rest on the “bad actor” governments, whose actions US policymakers assert precipitated the need for those sanctions. There’s no apparent constraint for proportionality or justifiability in their use in light of the economic hardships they can cause on the usually innocent population or any barrier to prevent them from being used as a naked act of aggression to destabilize governments. We can do all that and still maintain the delusion of believing ourselves to being the “good guys.” It’s a kind of moral narcissism.
Maybe all that would be fine, if idealistic and impractical, but then they’ll go full Henry Kissinger and throw their arms around the governments of illiberal autocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and shower them with subsidies and arms deals, for which of course we bear no moral culpability when those arms and subsidies are used to terrorize innocents and brutalize their own people.