An estimated 2.4 million Afghan girls remain excluded from secondary education five years after the Taliban took over the country, a U.N. agency said Tuesday, renewing a call for an immediate restorat...
And then we yanked all the aid and kicked off a famine the day the last soldier took the last plane out of Kabul.
I think you may have gotten the timeline confused here, USAID to Afghanistan continued until Trump took office in Jan 2025 - and per the Doha accord, the US withdrew it’s military (and diplomatic) presence from Afghanistan in august 2021. The Taliban declared the agreement void in 2025 as a response, though fortunately little has come of that from either side. To be clear, USAID payments were not cut off until ~3.5 years after the US withdrew it’s forces, and the current famine is the result of that cessation (medical shortages too, though that’s been greatly exacerbated by the Afghan/Pakistan war) (no argument that even with the barest abstraction it was similarly caused by the vast machine of imperialism)
Also unless I’m misunderstanding what you said here, the soviets were the ones that mined Herat during the soviet-afghan war. It wasn’t destroyed by the US invasion, it had been salted a decade before - british forces spent a great deal of their time trying to actually do the hearts-and-minds thing by demining much of the arable land (the US did do some demining, but almost all of the work was done by the Brits, Afghan army and Taliban-affiliated groups post-doha. Though as I understand it, UXOs are the greater threat left over from the era of the US war).
It’s always been a critical region for food supply - and it has (likely) returned to that role after the taliban’s 2022 ban of poppy cultivation. We know that poppy cultivation in the region seems to have stopped at least, though crop yields aren’t regularly published by the IEA as far as I am aware so it’s solidly in the realm of ‘informed speculation’ (most likely its been turned to Saffron production - a fairly lucrative trade but I will spare the world yet another lecture on the agrieconomics of rural Afghanistan…)
(unless you’re referring to something else as the breadbasket)
Finally getting a second to respond:
I think you may have gotten the timeline confused here, USAID to Afghanistan continued until Trump took office in Jan 2025 - and per the Doha accord, the US withdrew it’s military (and diplomatic) presence from Afghanistan in august 2021. The Taliban declared the agreement void in 2025 as a response, though fortunately little has come of that from either side. To be clear, USAID payments were not cut off until ~3.5 years after the US withdrew it’s forces, and the current famine is the result of that cessation (medical shortages too, though that’s been greatly exacerbated by the Afghan/Pakistan war) (no argument that even with the barest abstraction it was similarly caused by the vast machine of imperialism)
Also unless I’m misunderstanding what you said here, the soviets were the ones that mined Herat during the soviet-afghan war. It wasn’t destroyed by the US invasion, it had been salted a decade before - british forces spent a great deal of their time trying to actually do the hearts-and-minds thing by demining much of the arable land (the US did do some demining, but almost all of the work was done by the Brits, Afghan army and Taliban-affiliated groups post-doha. Though as I understand it, UXOs are the greater threat left over from the era of the US war).
It’s always been a critical region for food supply - and it has (likely) returned to that role after the taliban’s 2022 ban of poppy cultivation. We know that poppy cultivation in the region seems to have stopped at least, though crop yields aren’t regularly published by the IEA as far as I am aware so it’s solidly in the realm of ‘informed speculation’ (most likely its been turned to Saffron production - a fairly lucrative trade but I will spare the world yet another lecture on the agrieconomics of rural Afghanistan…)
(unless you’re referring to something else as the breadbasket)
(edited for clarity)