Matthieu Aikins and Masuda Sultan on the Plight of Afghans

Masuda Sultan is an Afghan-American women’s rights activist and entrepreneur who has been working for over 20 years in support of women and girls in education, vocational training, and protection from violence.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

“Afghanistan: Nearly 20 million going hungry” (UN News, May 9, 2022)
The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees (Matthieu Aikins, February 22, 2022)

Archival:

What's Taliban's role in Afghanistan's worsening food crisis? | DW News (DW News, May 27, 2022)
Why Is Afghanistan’s Economy Collapsing? (Voice of America, May 17, 2022)
News Wrap: UN sounds alarm over Afghan economy, says country has become a 'frozen hell' (PBS NewsHour, January 26, 2022)
Afghanistan’s Fall Into Extreme Poverty, Explained | WSJ (Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2022)
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani flees the country (TRT World, August 16, 2021)
Biden to Tap Frozen Afghan Funds for 9/11 Victims, Aid (Bloomberg Quicktake: Now, February 11, 2022)
'Frozen funds belong to the people of Afghanistan,' Taliban call on Biden to reverse move | WION (WION, February 15, 2022)
Is the US abandoning its Afghan workers? | The Stream (Al Jazeera English, April 1, 2021)
How the Special Immigrant Visas for Afghan allies work (Washington Post, August 27, 2021)
White House Is Working To Aid Afghan Refugees Resettling Within The US (NBC News, February 1, 2022)

Transcript:

MASUDA SULTAN: For twenty years, we built that economy on aid. We were the biggest donors. To suddenly pull the rug out from under them, it's just not right.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. We talk a lot about war on this show: the root causes, the looming threats, the way war plays out in different parts of the world. Today we get into the ongoing devastation one country is facing in the aftermath of America's longest-ever war.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: To better understand the current state of Afghanistan after America's withdrawal back in August, I spoke to two experts who know the country and its people intimately.

SULTAN: I don't think anyone saw what would happen. Even those of us like myself who were warning about the corruption in the Afghan government eroding confidence in the government and the will to fight, we never thought Ghani would just up and run.

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SULTAN: We always thought at some point he would come to his senses and try to work it out. And for the sake of the millions of Afghans that invested with us in this twenty-year exercise, as well as all those young civil society technocrats who came up believing there was something to be salvaged, no one could have predicted that he would have left in that way. And I think that was the saddest part of all. Something could have been different, and the country may not have been in this situation.

HANNAH: That's Masuda Sultan. She's an Afghan-American women's rights activist and an entrepreneur. She's the co-founder of the Unfreeze Afghanistan campaign.

SULTAN: I think we all hear about it and read about it. But going to Kabul and seeing people up close who were in the capital city where people have always been relatively advantaged when it comes to the international presence and the robustness of the spending, whether that's aid or other spending. It was very deeply saddening to see the people who once had jobs, who once even helped their less fortunate neighbors and friends and relatives, could no longer do that and could no longer feed their own.

HANNAH: Chief among the most pressing issues facing Afghans today is extreme poverty and starvation. And the United States has something to do with that.

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HANNAH: After the United States withdrew its military, and the Taliban took over, the Biden Administration froze nearly $10 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan Central Bank. The International Monetary Fund froze the distribution of more than $400 million destined for COVID relief there. And the World Bank is holding back hundreds of millions of dollars more in Afghan reconstruction money.

SULTAN: Just about everyone I met was in some kind of deep pain and agony over their economic situation. Many young people asked me what would happen to their future. Would they have a future? Should they stay in Afghanistan? Would things change? And I think we're seeing Afghans leaving, and I think we'll see more of them try to leave if the current situation continues.

HANNAH: With Afghanistan's assets still frozen today, Afghans have been fleeing the country by the thousands, choosing the dangers of a refugee journey over a country that can't necessarily assure them a stable future. Leaving might seem like the clear choice in this situation, but you can't fully understand the plight of a refugee unless you live it yourself.

MATTHIEU AIKINS: Omar was one of the first people I met in Afghanistan after I went there in 2008 at the age of 24 as a freelance journalist, and we worked together on a story. He was a former translator for the US and Canadian military.

HANNAH: That's Matthieu Aikins, a freelance journalist who's been covering Afghanistan since 2008. He chronicles the journey of Omar, an Afghan refugee, in his new book, The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees.

AIKINS: He had actually grown up in exile. Like so many Afghans of his generation, his mother had fled the Soviets when she was pregnant with him, and he grew up in Iran, in Pakistan. And then he and his family returned after 2001, after the US toppled the Taliban and promised a new era of peace and development.

But as the situation deteriorated in the country and the war got worse, he wanted to get out. For a long time, his plan had been to take one of these Special Immigrant Visas and emigrate to the US. But he didn't have the right paperwork, and he was eventually rejected for this visa. This was in 2015 at the moment when the migration crisis was happening in the Mediterranean, where over a space of about a year, around a million people entered Europe via the Med. It was the largest movement of refugees by sea in history. After Syrians, Afghans were the second largest group that crossed.

Interlude featuring archival audio

AIKINS: Omar decided he would join this great migration and take the smugglers road to Europe. And I wanted to report on what was happening, so I decided to go with him. But the only way I could do that, given the risks of being arrested or kidnapped, was to go undercover as an Afghan refugee myself.

HANNAH: For Omar and many people like him, there were hardly any good options, even though they were promised an out if they helped the United States military and other allied countries during the war.

AIKINS: Some of the paperwork requirements were really Kafkaesque, sort of catch-22 situations. For example, Omar had to get a letter from his company proving the company had, essentially, a copy of the contract with the US government. But this company actually no longer existed by the time he thought to apply. Same thing: you have to get a letter of references. Well, he worked for the special forces, and he didn't even know the last name of the captain on the Green Beret team. So, ironically, it was often the people who were working desk jobs at the embassies or in Kabul who were more successful in this process. It was the guys who were on the front line, who were in combat situations, who I think often had harder times getting the paperwork. But at the end of the day, in the summer of 2021, as things start to fall apart, there were tens of thousands of people in the application process. Many of them had been waiting for years. And of course, when the city fell, they feared for their lives from retribution from the Taliban.

HANNAH: Omar's sister and a friend made it to Turkey with smugglers before deciding to apply at the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency for Resettlement, where people are granted asylum from a third country and then often taken to countries in the West.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: But it's actually not that simple. According to Aikins, there's a system of borders and visa laws that are designed to keep asylum-seekers not only right where they are, but also specifically out of the West.

AIKINS: The right of asylum is really transformed into the privilege of being granted your case. And as a result, people like Omar’s sister and her friend, instead of being considered on the grounds of the Geneva Convention, there's all these other factors that come into play when the asylum officer there has to decide who is most worthy of saving and who is most desired to be sent. And countries have their own priorities. They're often giving priority to LGBTQ individuals from certain countries. There's almost a kind of shopping list the UN gets every year in terms of who has priority for resettlement spaces, and that pushes people to tell the story they think is going to save them. And people's stories are influenced by the rules that are set for these interviews. They have to learn to tell the right story about why they're a deserving refugee and not an economic migrant. And if they don't, they're not going to get status.

HANNAH: It's worth noting that while Aikins experienced the dire straits of a refugee’s journey that more than two million people from Afghanistan have lived, Aikins is not Afghan himself. Some might say this is not his story to tell, but due to his ability to speak the local language and because of his own background, he is, in his own words, “Afghan-passing.” And that's an admittedly challenging space for a journalist to occupy.

AIKINS: The history of passing is a complicated one. It's fraught. As I reference in the book, there are imperialist explorers like Richard Francis Burton, who adopted the guise of—actually when Burton famously went to Mecca, which was forbidden to non-Muslims, he adopted the guise of an Afghan. So, there is an imperialist and even racist tradition to these kind of passing journeys. And at the same time, passing is not just about white explorers passing as “natives,” quote unquote. It's also about people like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani passing as an Afghan when he was actually a Shia from Iran or Afghans who passed as different sects and ethnicities. In this book, it's about refugees who try to pass as Europeans. Omar passes as a Lithuanian to get into Europe. So, there are all sorts of different acts of translation, essentially, that happen within the context of borders and history, but are done ultimately by individuals and could be acts of agency. So, that's the, I think, interesting context for this journey. And it's, again, something I just tried to be honest about.

HANNAH: Passing gave him access to this journey, and it also meant he had a platform the Western world might pay attention to.

AIKINS: Well, this winter the UN warned that about half the country was facing starvation. That's pretty bad, though we have to remember acute malnutrition and all sorts of other really terrible indicators of poverty were common in Afghanistan during our time there. And they were getting worse, mostly because of the lack of access to areas affected by the conflict for humanitarians, but also because of the incredible corruption and waste in development there. And so, we created, in essence, one of the most aid-dependent countries in the world. The government was almost entirely dependent on foreign funding. So, the sudden withdrawal of that funding has had predictable consequences. They’re not able to pay salaries for teachers and doctors. The economy has also been crippled by sanctions against the Taliban. So, the situation is teetering on the brink of a catastrophe.

HANNAH: Afghan citizens face an impossible choice: stay and face a present and future where food and money are scarce, or leave with no certainty of finding a new country to settle in. So, who's at fault for all of this? And for the citizens who haven't left, how does the country move forward? We turn back to Masuda Sultan for her take.

SULTAN: I think regarding the economic catastrophe, to some extent, the blame can be jointly shared by various parties. First, I would say, again, I bring it back to Ghani fleeing. If he hadn't fled, the whole idea was that those technocrats and some of those folks would be able to stay. Some kind of joint government could have been formed, even until the last minute.

Now, the donors also bear some fault in this because they literally took their money and ran, perhaps a result of panic, perhaps the Taliban coming to power. Yeah, they do share some blame, but especially with their latest policies with regards to girls’ education, they're not encouraging confidence either in that regard. So, I think it's a jointly shared blame. But ultimately this economy was built on aid. Seventy-five percent of the of the government's budget was driven by external aid. And so, donors really built this economy in a particular way. And that's why I think the larger share of fault does lie with the donors, because we upped and left.

HANNAH: What do you mean by donors? You're talking about donor countries, especially the United States.

SULTAN: Yeah, I think the United States does have a certain responsibility here as the largest donors to the country. The institutions we built, including the Central Bank.

HANNAH: And why did Joe Biden freeze these assets in the first place? Can you explain what his rationale is before we get into why he should unfreeze?

SULTAN: Well, I think President Biden made the right decision to initially freeze the assets. We didn't know what was happening. We didn't know what the Taliban were going to do. We hadn't anticipated the government would flee. And it was an uncertain situation. He did the right thing. He did the responsible thing. He also did the right thing to leave Afghanistan. I will say that. Subsequent to that, the decision to then continue to withhold the assets and then to split the $7 billion in the Federal Reserve—I think those are big mistakes being made right now.

HANNAH: What exactly is the Federal Reserve doing, before we get into why it's a mistake?

SULTAN: Well, the New York Fed is where countries put their money to be safe. And since the 1800s it has been keeping gold and other assets in the US at the Fed for safekeeping. So, there's an understanding that those assets should have been protected in the US.

Secondly, when President Biden made the decision to split off three-and-a-half billion of those funds for a court case for 9/11 victims—and don't get me wrong. I'm a New Yorker. I was here on 9/11. I believe 9/11 victims should be compensated. And I feel for them. But to say that the state assets of an impoverished country like Afghanistan, where we've been at war for twenty years, suddenly should be provided for a court case for 9/11 victims seems like a real miscarriage of justice. And the reason I say that is there were no Afghans involved as hijackers on 9/11. Those assets belong to the Afghan people. They don't belong to the Taliban. They're not Taliban assets. And the Afghan people need their economy to function because for twenty years we built that economy on aid, and we were the biggest donors. To suddenly pull the rug out from under them. It's just not right.

HANNAH: Right. What do you think are some of the negative consequences of doing that? Do you think foreign countries won't put their money in the Fed anymore? Obviously, it prevents the Afghan people from accessing this money. What does that mean? Or what is the extent of that? Or what does that look like?

SULTAN: Well, certainly, I think for the Afghans it's been quite devastating. It's not just the $7 billion assets are also somehow related to the two-and-a-half billion that are sitting in Europe in various banks. And those won't get released until the US signals or at least releases some of this money. And that's a lot of private money. That's money from Afghan businesses, NGOs, and others. So, there's a whole tangled web of money that is tied up, and it won't move until the US makes a decision.

Now, how does that affect ordinary Afghans? Well, we saw there were long lines outside of banks as they wait to collect what was at one point a $200 and $400 per week limit of what they could collect. The banks themselves—this banking sector we built up where this is a modern country now or a democracy. Bring your money to the bank. Take it out of the mattress. Let's modernize this country. And for the Afghans, it did that. They're now stuck holding the bag because they're facing an extreme collapse. And it's pretty clear that if nothing is done very soon, a lot of them will have to close, and those people who had their money in the banks may never see their money again.

HANNAH: Are there other countries that are stepping in to assist in this? Or is it just that the entire international community, as such, has up and abandoned Afghanistan?

SULTAN: Well, we understand that Europeans, particularly Germany, may be trying to help and set up some kind of third-party foundation for the functions of a central bank. But really the keys to this problem lie with the United States. And what we're hearing is that there just isn't enough political will at the very top because nobody wants to be seen as giving money to the Taliban. And of course, the reality of it is you're not giving money to the Taliban. You're giving it to a central bank which we built up, which has kept the same laws, which, yes, has Taliban appointees in it. But that's what happens when you win a war. You appoint your most trusted people to positions of authority and power.

HANNAH: What has Joe Biden said are the conditions he has for unfreezing this money? Because, like sanctions, presumably, freezing money is a means to an end. What is the end goal here?

SULTAN: The administration hasn't actually cited specific conditions for the release of the money in the sense that they've had some meetings with the new government. They've met with the Central Bank. Mind you, a lot of us are saying, “We need more meetings. We need more engagement. We need officials to go to Afghanistan.” We need some kind of diplomatic presence there, because engagement is really the key to this—to solving this puzzle.

Now, we obviously have big cultural differences with the Taliban. There are some technocrats still in the bank. We may need more. There needs to be an assessment of what the technical capability is of the bank. And that's something that special representative has talked about. But everything is so slow. It's so slow. And meanwhile, this population—things are worsening and worsening in terms of hunger. And the real question is: what is our end goal? If our end goal is to try to help the Afghan livelihoods that we know are required for stability of that country, try to mitigate the risk of terrorism and migration, then we should be engaging and thinking proactively about how to release this money. It feels like the administration is really struggling with how to do that, and some of that is because of political will at the top.

HANNAH: Is that is it essentially like a hostage-taker without giving any kind of demands? I know this is a poor analogy because it doesn't relate to the political sensitivities involved. But presumably from Afghans perspective, the United States is hijacking or taking hostage their money, right?

SULTAN: From the Afghan perspective, they feel like it's intentional, and they feel like it's done to punish the population for the Taliban coming to power. That's how they feel.

HANNAH: So, the ordinary Afghans that you spoke to in Kabul—were you getting the sense that the Taliban was winning a propaganda victory with this by saying, “It's not we that are to blame for your problems, it's the Americans.” And that ordinary Afghans feel like they're being punished by the United States?

SULTAN: Ordinary people do believe the US is punishing them. When you go to the bank and stand in line, and the bank doesn't give you your money. And you do this over and over. And when you can't send money and even—think about the Afghans that are fleeing, even the ones in hiding that were our allies in the fight. If they want to leave Afghanistan, they have to get their money out of the bank, especially if they're trying to get to Pakistan or to Iran on these visas to go further on P-2s or other methods. Even if you're an SIV applicant, and you're leaving the country, you probably want to get some money out of the bank. They can't get their money out of the bank. So, if that's what our allies are going through, think about what ordinary Afghans that have nothing to do with the US war or the US presence are feeling about when they go to the bank to do a basic transaction, but they can't. Of course they're going to blame us, and that's not good for us. We spent twenty years investing in this country. And to take what goodwill we had and built as a result of our investments in health and education and modernizing that country—to suddenly bring it all to a screeching halt, where ordinary Afghans can't even afford to buy food. Ninety-two percent of households have debt, and almost as much of them cited food purchase as the main reason for borrowing. They're suddenly seeing their world completely collapse. And sure, they can blame the Taliban. We've heard them say these things, too. The Taliban are not helping. But when you go to the bank, it's pretty clear you're not getting your money because the US is holding it.

HANNAH: And I want to bring this back to the human element. There’s a new UN report out showing roughly half the population is facing acute hunger right now. And whether some people who actually have money and who are banking with the banks in Kabul or are able to get their money might not, like you said, remedy that problem.

SULTAN: Well, this economy was driven by aid and military spending. A whole crop of Afghans came up—middle class came up as a result of our spending there. And it's not like it was great before the collapse of the government. In fact, the best we got was getting poverty down to 40%, and then those numbers started to worsen over the last year of the Ghani administration. And the reasons were because, first of all, we reduced our spending in Afghanistan. Especially as troops withdrew, our spending decreased. Second of all, there was rampant corruption. And so, government revenues were not what they should have been. And mismanagement. So, the poverty rate was already going up, especially in the last year or two of the Ghani administration. Now, there was also COVID, remember?

HANNAH: So, what you're what you're saying is it's not all the Taliban's fault, essentially.

SULTAN: No, it's not all the Taliban's fault. Poverty was increasing. By the time the Taliban came to power, depending on what numbers you listen to, poverty was already close to 70%. It's just that when they came to power and donors completely pulled the plug, it went to close to 90%. So, a famine was largely averted this winter thanks to the generous donors, the United States and others, thanks to the World Food Program who fed 18 million people. And we heard stories of people lining up to sell their organs, even selling children. And again, Afghanistan is a poor country. We know that. But the scale and scope of poverty right now is so bad, and there's not a lot of hope for things improving unless either of two things happen and hopefully both in concert. One is that we have to keep sending humanitarian aid there. It's just part of the formula to keep that country stable. And two, we have to let the private sector do its thing. We have to stop holding that economy hostage, effectively, at this point, because without that, we're never going to fix the problem.

The United States—the largest uplift was over 100,000 Afghans being brought out directly by the US when the government fell. But there's, I think, a million people who have left Afghanistan. And I would argue that a million more will leave as soon as they can. If things don't change. From a refugee perspective, if we don't keep that country stable, if we don't let them have an economy, if they can't find a way to feed themselves, then we will be facing one of the greatest refugee crises of our time. This is why we at Unfreeze Afghanistan are so adamant about longer-term sustainability of our approach to Afghanistan, allowing the economy to function and get back on its feet. And for the time being, giving humanitarian aid. In order to slowly reduce that, over time, we have to let the economy function. We have to unfreeze their assets.

HANNAH: With no signs of the humanitarian crisis slowing down in Afghanistan. It's worth asking whether the United States is responding to the situation correctly and what could be done to help mitigate a potential catastrophe for millions.

Thank you so much to our guests, Masuda Sultan and Matthieu Aikins, for joining us.

I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. As always, thanks to our producer Caroline Gray, our associate producer and editor Sarah Leeson, and for our research and archival support provided by Lucas Robinson and Sam Gardner-Bird. If you enjoyed what you've heard, subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and catch you next time

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