“You Break it, you Own it!” Our Moral Obligation in Afghanistan

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The more I recall his elegance, decency and ability to serve wisdom in small, digestible bites, the more I miss Colin Powell. In March 2003, less than eighteen months after 9/11, the triumvirate of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld decided to invade Iraq. Powell resisted, advising them: “You break it; you own it.”

The triumvirate ignored him. They also ignored the lack of credible evidence that Iraq’s then ruler, Saddam Hussein, had conspired in 9/11 or had nuclear weapons under development. They forced Powell to attest to their unfounded suspicions—the greatest embarrassment of his professional life. Still his wisdom cries out from his grave.

Iraq isn’t broken yet. But it has oil, lots of it, and a long history of trade relations with its neighbors. Afghanistan has little to sell but opium made from its poppies and the bare rights to rare-earth elements that only may be in its mountains in quantities and locations worth mining. Afghanistan was and remains one of the poorest countries on Earth.

So Afghanistan was a lot easier to break. And we have broken it badly.

While still there, we didn’t so much beat the Taliban on the battlefield as overwhelm all Afghans with our power, technology and riches. For nearly two decades, the whole country depended on us and our allies. Even today, three-quarters of Afghanistan’s economy depends on outside funding.

In pulling out so abruptly, we pulled the rug out from under it. As the courageous independent reporter Jane Ferguson reminds us, over one-third of Afghans are now starving. It doesn’t help that a four-year drought has decimated their agriculture, and that now the harsh mountain winter is setting in.

Do we bear responsibility for this humanitarian catastrophe? Of course we do. We corrupted Afghans and their government with unaccustomed torrents of cash. The people at the top—apparently including even erstwhile President Hamid Karzai—all took their cut. Some stashed it abroad, and many sent it out of the country before the Taliban’s boom came down.

While we were still there, at least some of our largesse trickled down to Afghans at the bottom. Even peasants could survive and fight the Taliban. But after we left, over half the Afghan economy stopped cold, as if by flicking a switch. The top and many of the middle people had departed, and there was nothing left to trickle down.

So if you want to see the end-game of “trickle down,” look at Afghanistan today. The people at the top and most of the middle took theirs and got out. The people at the bottom are starving. Young babies are dying of malnutrition, two to four to a hospital bed, in surprisingly modern but overwhelmed facilities that our money once paid for.

These innocents are dying because their parents no longer have jobs or sources of income, which dried up when we cut off our torrent of cash. The Afghan government, now badly run by uneducated Taliban, has no resources. Afghans’ remaining national wealth is stashed in Western banks that won’t release it because their governments see the Taliban as terrorists.

There are two solutions to this dilemma. First, sit down with the Taliban and trade them money to feed their people in return for their restarting education for girls and women. Second, provide food aid directly to starving Afghans, through NGOs now operating in the country, some of which claim to have permission to work independently of the Taliban. (David Beasley, Executive Director for the UN World Food Programme, claims that his group has that permission.)

Why not try “trickle up” for a change? It isn’t rocket science. It’s simple humanity and decency.

I can think of only one reason why we don’t, right away: we’re too proud to help (or even recognize) our erstwhile enemies, who defeated us, primarily by default. Maybe the Europeans, who shared our misadventure, can talk some sense into us.

The Taliban are mostly uneducated religious fanatics. To the extent they can read and write at all, many are familiar only with the Q’uran and Islamic religious tracts. They missed out on modern economics, medicine, chemistry, engineering, biology, physics, agriculture and logistics, all of which post-dated the Prophet Muhammad by at least a millennium. They don’t have a clue how to run a modern nation, let alone one in such distress. The people who do all have left.

But the Taliban have promised to fight the real terrorists in their midst, including ISIS-K and what remains of Al Qaeda in their country. They have every reason to do so. Already they have suffered suicide-bombing attacks on their watch. So why not take them at their word, when their own interests align with ours, at least until we have hard evidence to the contrary?

Are we going to condemn innocent people to death by starvation for their conquerors’ ignorance and primitive religion, after we failed for nearly two decades to provide them with a better option for the long term? Or are we going to do the right thing for a change?

After the fall of Saigon to the Viet Cong, we generously took in many Vietnamese refugees. Decades later, once the Vietnamese had helped account for our missing in action, we established diplomatic relations with them. Vietnam is now an important trading partner and something of an ally, as it seeks our help in pushing back on its aggressive neighbor and millennial frenemy China.

But we don’t have that kind of time to reconcile our hurt feelings about Afghanistan. If we don’t act now, up to a third of its entire population could starve.

We broke Afghanistan. Though the Taliban now claim to own it, we have an obligation not to let its innocents die. To do so would be a crime of omission against humanity.

We Americans often claim the moral high ground. Now is the time to stand there for real. We could stave off starvation for millions for a small fraction of what we spent so rashly on war.

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