Why The UK Must Not Forget The People of Afghanistan

Author: Libby Smith, Director of Advocacy

This time last year we all witnessed the horrific images of Afghans desperately trying to flee their homes, frantically gathering at the airport, as Kabul fell to the Taliban and Western troops withdrew. One year on, Taliban fighters have been parading in the streets as they mark the anniversary and a national holiday has been declared.

In the UK our foreign affairs bandwidth has been almost entirely absorbed by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine which has rightly received a huge outpouring of generosity from the British public. Yet Afghanistan has dropped off the headlines. 

Afghanistan is suffering one of the world’s worst economic and humanitarian crises leaving the population in an ever desperate situation. This desperation is no more felt than by Afghan women and girls. Since the Taliban seized control women cannot work to support their families and cannot leave their homes unaccompanied, they must wear full burqas and girl’s secondary education has been banned. Men, now the sole income-earners for their families, are struggling to find work and twenty million people are facing starvation - with an additional 95% of Afghans going hungry - leading to reports of men selling their kidneys in order to feed their families.

As always with humanitarian crises, children have become primary victims with NGOs reporting children being taken out of school to work and some families having to sell their children in order to provide a means to support the rest of the family. This includes children being sold for cheap labour and girls sold into forced marriages. 

Local NGOs have argued that this catastrophic situation has been further exacerbated by the US decision to freeze the Afghan Central Bank’s assets and the international sanctions that have crippled an already fragile economy. Humanitarian aid, whilst absolutely vital, cannot replace a functioning economy. As such Afghan NGOs have called on the international community to establish a roadmap out of Afghanistan’s economic crisis through supporting the Afghan Central Bank, disbursing Afghan banknotes impounded in Poland and eventually beginning the phased release of some frozen Afghan assets. 

The new incoming UK Prime Minister and their government should also create a legal asylum and resettlement route for Afghan women at risk. They should also prioritise safe passage for the thousands of Afghans and their families who worked with the UK military and are now trapped in Afghanistan with their lives at risk.

Without the international community coming together in this way the situation is only going to worsen. As former US Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who served in Afghanistan, has warned, the full negative consequences are still yet to come, adding that in two years Afghanistan will "look worse than it does now” and that the country is in "a pre 9/11 scenario". The Taliban have set out their roadmap and the human rights situation is only set to worsen. Girls are currently banned from secondary schools yet in another year it is likely we won’t see many Afghan girls in primary school or women at university.

We cannot be passive onlookers to these horrors. This is not a crisis unconnected to the UK. Britain has a long and complex history with Afghanistan that goes as far back as the 1870s when Britain seized territory from Afghanistan and annexed it to British India. Between 2001-2014 we were heavily involved in the conflict in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaeda and currently over 6,000 Afghans and their families who worked with the UK military are still stranded in Afghanistan with their lives at risk.

We face a unique opportunity with the media’s attention turned momentarily back to Afghanistan. We must not abandon the Afghan people, instead the incoming Prime Minister and their Government must seek to work with partners to address the root causes of Afghanistan's economic and humanitarian crises, stand up for human rights and provide refuge for those Afghans who have risked everything to promote the values of freedom and democracy. Afghanistan cannot wait any longer for us to act.