Since his return from Kabul two days ago, Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary General Jan Egeland has been campaigning to get Western nations to put some money back into Afghanistan, immediately, before winter sets in and brings “suffering beyond belief” to its 40 million citizens, “the countless girls and women, boys and men [who] will perish” without a functioning economy.
In a dramatic interview with National Public Radio in the U.S. yesterday, Egeland described the “free fall” of Afghanistan’s economy, which was already small before the Taliban took over from the NATO occupation. The families he spoke with, many now internally displaced, were “people who [before] could scrape together a minimum and were able then to sustain themselves. Now the economy is gone. There is zero work. There is zero income. Many of them are living in the open….
“When all of these NATO nations left with all of their personnel, they took with them also the development money. One example, 70% of public employees — these are teachers, nurses, doctors, water engineers, garbage collectors and whatnot — were basically on a World Bank payroll. All of those had their last salary in May. They didn’t even have it at the end of the previous regime. And there is no money now for them during this new Taliban government….
