Afghanistan: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

we're going to dive straight in with our main story this week which concerns afghanistan a country that's blessed the world with innumerable treasures from embroidery to traditional pashto and persian poetry to the afghan hound undoubtedly the real housewife of show dogs she's a messy and she lives for drama this week march mark the one year anniversary of our withdrawal from afghanistan which you may remember was complete mayhem they were scenes marked by chaos and desperation hundreds of afghan citizens running alongside a departing usc 17. now nearly a year after the u.s withdrawal the indelible images remain a u.s marine lifting a baby over a barbed wire topped wall at kabul's airport and this photo taken by technical sergeant justin triola how many people do you think are on your job [Music] 800 people on your jet holy cow yep i think everyone knew the u.s occupation was going to end badly but it's still shocking just how bad it was in terms of things not going the way that you thought our exit was the foreign policy equivalent of putting a cake in the oven and then 40 minutes later taking out a live rat dressed as hitler it's not just a fuck-up it's a mind-blowing fuck-up that'll take years to fully comprehend everything happened so fast apparently even the taliban was surprised at how quickly the afghan government fell and a pretty decent way of knowing if the us did a good job at something is by asking the question was whatever we did a fun surprise for the taliban within a matter of days the afghan government fell and the taliban took over and many top u.s military officials have struggled since then to put into words just how badly they miscalculated with general mark milley putting it like this all the intel assessments all of us got that wrong there's no question about it uh that was a swing and a miss on the intel assessment of 11 days in august there's nobody that called that yeah that's about right swinging a miss describes roughly 40 percent of the us government's history the breakdown of stuff we've done goes something like this forty percent swing and a miss twenty percent beefed it fifty percent whoops fifty percent whoops parentheses murders and ten percent delivered most but not all of the mail and look there is a lot to criticize about the way we left afghanistan including the fact that while we managed to get roughly 80 000 afghans many of whom had worked with the u.s to america since the withdrawal the number who remain in danger because of their association with the us mission can be counted in the hundreds of thousands so criticism of what happened is completely justified though maybe not from the guy whose administration signed the deal to leave in the first place bagram is this great air base that was built many years ago at a cost of billions and billions and we left in one night everybody was gone they left the lights on think of it the lights were all left on the dogs were left behind by the way for those people that like dogs but we left and they don't like dogs you know that they don't like dogs they don't like them at all what honestly it has been a while since we've heard trump's voice on this show and i somehow forgot just how bizarrely incoherent he is it's truly extraordinary to see his brain function like a crow spotting a crumpled up can because he's flying he's flying he's flying and then wall nearly hold on is that what i think it is shiny garbage nose dive also comments about people not liking dogs are a little odd coming from a man who every time he holds one seems to make the dog want to die but we're we're not actually going to talk about the withdrawal from afghanistan tonight instead we're going to focus on everything that's happened since because while afghanistan has faded as a topic of discussion in this country it really shouldn't because it's in dire crisis right now and i will admit this is a grim topic but it's also an important one because things are going worse in afghanistan than you may know for reasons that have even more to do with our decisions than you might think so tonight let's check in on afghanistan and let's start with the fact that as i mentioned earlier the taliban is now in charge and in the early days of their takeover they tried to convey a slightly softer image to journalists through carefree photo ops like this one where taliban members visited a fairground in kabul or this one where they took a trip to the zoo and really spelled out the message that they wanted the world to hear we want to show everyone that under islamic rule and security everything is enjoyable and everyone can live in their own country the way they want yeah sure yeah because that's what you associate the taliban with freedom for everyone to live their best life also for what it's worth i don't think losing the right to drive bumper cars or go to the zoo was at the top of anyone's list of concerns when the taliban took over it's akin to the pope saying don't worry everyone catholics are still allowed to use pogo sticks okay great but to be honest that's not the main issue people have with the catholic church right now and while the taliban is not actually a monolith different regional leaders rule with different degrees of severity i do still feel comfortable saying everything's very much not enjoyable for everyone in afghanistan right now for starters they've been brutal reprisals against u.s allies and former afghan government employees nearly 500 of whom were killed or forcibly disappeared during the taliban's first six months in power and on a much bigger level the taliban's taken an absolute sledgehammer to women's rights for all the many legitimate criticisms of america's occupation women did make huge gains there in 2001 there were few if any girls in school and by 2020 girls made up roughly 40 percent of all students that same year afghanistan's parliament had a higher percentage of women than the u.s congress did but now they've essentially gone back to zero but much more than that taliban decrees have tried to control nearly every aspect of women's lives ordering that they shouldn't leave their homes unless necessary and that only women who can't be replaced by men will be allowed to keep working in fact one of the only areas women can work is in health care because there are some situations where men aren't allowed to treat women as patients this midwife for example is still working in a hospital but she is furious about what she sees happening to her country the taliban cannot ban me from working in the hospital because they know do not meddle in women's rights to education and employment otherwise they are amputating one arm from the body of society our societies are made of two pillars a pillar of men and another pillar of women how can you run your life one-sided yeah of course you can't run a society on a pillar of just men i mean we've tried for thousands of years we have tried but look where it's got us we have a global pandemic the planet is on fire the babysitter's club is cancelled despite unparalleled critical success and the world's richest man is a ventriloquist dummy from hell let's maybe lean on that one pillar a little bit less and things are getting worse because in march the taliban went back on a promise that they made after they took over and announced the girls would be prevented from receiving a secondary school education in most of the country now that decision drew widespread condemnation in afghanistan including from many taliban members but the leadership pushed back claiming that it's just temporary and arguing among other things that they simply needed more time to decide on a school uniform for teenage girls which is clearly total besides for an organization so concerned with virtue and purity taking months to brainstorm a schoolgirl uniform you like is objectively the single pervious thing you can do so women in particular have lost a great deal in the last year but on top of that the whole country is facing a cascading series of humanitarian crises the un has estimated that as much as 97 of the population is at risk of sinking below the poverty line and part of that is due to a series of natural disasters from an ongoing severe drought that's hit around 80 of the country devastating food production to a massive earthquake in june and flooding just this month but that's been exacerbated by the fact that this is all falling on a brand new taliban government that is in no way equipped to take it on the taliban now need to shift from being a jihadist insurgency to a ruling group for 20 years you've built an organization that was designed to fight and you motivated people to engage in suicide bombings they don't turn into people who are government officials overnight yeah of course not a militant insurgency group is pretty low on the list of people that you want leading a government right around the hells angels the manson family and ron desantis and to be a million percent clear i am not suggesting that the u.s occupation was a perfect magic wonderland it was awful in its own ways not least having to live under the specter of hellfire being rained down from flying unmanned death machines every day our continued presence there was untenable but the exact circumstances of our departure have to a significant degree made things substantially worse because we've made a series of decisions some of them understandable that have had huge ramifications for the afghan people and let's start with the taliban government itself when it took over many of its members were already sanctioned by the us because we list the taliban as a specially designated terrorist group so suddenly those pre-existing sanctions apply to at least part of the taliban government take siradhin haqqani the state department currently has a 10 million reward out for information leading to his arrest but you should know he's the current acting interior minister there so guess what state department i found him can you mail me by 10 million dollars now please don't worry i spend my money very wisely so individuals in the taliban government are sanctioned which effectively means the whole government is making it nearly impossible for banks businesses and charities to operate there which is a massive problem especially because 75 of the former afghan government's budget came from foreign aid and grants 75 that was the money that among other things paid the salaries for vital government services like teachers and public sector employees and all that aid disappeared almost immediately as one expert has said no country in the world could withstand a sharp cut off of that aid and it's affected everything in health care for instance the world bank and other organizations immediately froze 600 million dollars in aid which left doctors in a very difficult position this state hospital in the heart of kabul has not received funding since the taliban takeover we don't have any medicine here we had antibiotics painkillers and vitamins here but it's empty now what's your budget now in in total for the department for the total departments we didn't have just only for our salary we have budget for uh other item we didn't have any budget so you mean your budget is zero budget is zero yeah yeah zero it is hard to imagine how a hospital can even function with a budget of zero unless every exam room is just a paper bag and a sign that says yell what hurts into this bag then leave and it gets even worse because the us also froze afghanistan's central bank assets held in america amounted to around seven billion dollars now that is money typically used to do things like keep the currency stable finance imports and provide money to the banking system the us froze those assets to prevent the taliban from accessing them but that also kneecaps the country's entire banking system especially as afghanistan doesn't have the ability to print its own currency all of this led to a literal cash shortage where even afghans who do have money in the bank can't access it so they've been massive lines and weights just to get money out at some banks withdrawing cash has reportedly taken three days or more and that has brought the country to an unusual state of affairs this is a unique humanitarian crisis this is a situation where food is technically available but there isn't enough liquidity in the economy and enough availability of paper currency to purchase food food which is available right and that is awful food but no money to buy it with it's like a lyric from alanis morrissette's ironic in that it's fundamentally not ironic at all and i'm sure dave coulier is still somehow to blame things are very grim in afghanistan its population is young nearly half are under the age of 15 and unicef has warned that over a million severely malnourished children will be at risk of death without emergency treatment this year and because many afghans have nowhere to turn for food or for money families have been forced to make some harrowing choices forty-year-old gulam hazrat sold his kidney for around two thousand three hundred dollars [Music] it's true he sold his kidney to feed his kids a desperate decision that you can make precisely once that's actually an increasingly common decision in afghanistan and it's not just that families are also selling some of their children so that they can feed the others which is just unimaginably heartbreaking so clearly the people of afghanistan are in dire need of help and the current president has at times been alarmingly blithe about the situation there do i feel badly what's happening to we as a consequence of the incompetence of the taliban yes i do but i feel badly also about the fistulas that are taking place in eastern congo i feel badly about a whole range of things around the world that we can't solve every problem okay first i hate to be a marion the librarian but you don't feel badly you feel bad feel is a linking verb and you're modifying it incorrectly marion out but for a second it's pretty disheartening to see our official foreign policy boil down to sorry champ can't win them all especially when the us is so directly responsible for so many problems in afghanistan and in eastern congo by the way but that is a different story now the obama administration will point out that it's begun issuing sanctions exemptions to allow the free flow of some humanitarian aid and it sent hundreds of millions in relief to afghanistan more than any other country which is absolutely true and it's also true that they've done that in the face of stiff opposition from some on the right who argue in pretty strong terms against any kind of assistance and for one particular reason obviously humanitarian suffering all over this planet right uh i i don't i'm not in favor of giving money that i'm pretty confident we end up in the hands of the taliban we should not give them one red ascent until such time as we can demonstrate that they have actually done what they said they would do which is to separate themselves from terror look mike pompeo and deep fake blake shelton here are clearly although i will say for even non-assholes it is natural to be concerned about the prospect of usaid money going to the taliban but a couple of things you should know for years now charities have been able to find ways to work with through or around the taliban to help ordinary afghan citizens they had to do that because even when the us was there the taliban effectively still controlled large parts of the country and for people at some of those groups like the afghanistan director at the international rescue committee the fact that they are financially constrained from helping people now is pretty frustrating i think a lot of people will say well i don't we don't want to see aid go to afghanistan because we don't want to give money to the taliban that's an extremist group so you want to make 38 million people suffer because of a few thousand i that that math doesn't work for me right that math doesn't work for me either and that is saying something because look at me i look like math in human form i look like a pokemon whose final evolution is a graphing calculator i look like an algebra textbook left me on the doorstep of an orphanage as a baby i look like what matt damon's character in goodwill hunting should have looked like so when i say that math doesn't work you better believe me so there is a strong case to be made for finding ways to get humanitarian aid to afghanistan but that is not all it needs in the long term no amount of emergency relief can stand in for health care and education system or a functioning economy as one report said humanitarian efforts are bandages not cures you can't just keep applying them forever and right now there are some worrying signs of donor fatigue with contributions from the international community drying up even as nearly 20 million people that's almost half afghanistan's population are experiencing high and critical levels of food insecurity so a more sustainable way to help them is through development aid building long-term solutions like investing in health care and education salaries or helping build infrastructure through investments in irrigation and water management in areas affected by the drought but the tricky thing with that is that really does require some form of engagement with the taliban now there are mechanisms to try and ensure that they don't end up benefiting financially but admittedly none of them are perfect and the idea of the taliban getting one red cent is obviously hard to swallow especially because despite the taliban's new outward-facing live laugh love vibe they've continued to remind us how terrible they are not only with their heinous treatment of women but also with the recent confirmation that they were harboring the leader of al-qaeda in a safe house but withholding all forms of aid until the taliban either give in or collapse just is not a viable strategy because for one thing who knows how long that will take if ever and for another while you're waiting potentially millions will starve just listen to that midwife from earlier who is no fan of the taliban explain what she thinks of that logic your sanctions on the taliban will kill us faster than the violation of our rights by the taliban a girl dies from hunger and a mother either sells her daughter because of hunger or from pressure to marry her by force the issue of their education and literacy is meaningless when you're dying from hunger yeah she's right there's no two ways around it this is a crisis at the most fundamental level and thankfully there have been some small steps in the right direction recently the u.s is working on a proposal to release some of the billions of dollars of frozen money into a trust fund that the taliban themselves can't access which could still help inject some cash and stability into the country's financial system if it happens also the un and the world bank both have initiatives in the works to try and bridge the gap between emergency humanitarian assistance and longer-term development aid as long as they're able to get adequate funding and for the final time i do get the broad worries about how sending money to afghanistan might inadvertently help the taliban but i'd argue the key question here isn't just what happens if we send afghanistan money and aid it's what happens if we don't and we know the answer to that millions of innocent afghans will suffer and die under a government they did not choose the reality is there is no one simple solution here that is without risks but 38 million people's lives are at stake and doing nothing would be yet another colossal if i may borrow a military intelligence term here swing and amiss you

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Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022