This year, too, many reports were published on rising poverty and unemployment among the people of Afghanistan. The return of several million migrants from Iran and Pakistan over the past three years, population growth, the closure of trade and transit routes through Pakistan, the crisis in the Persian Gulf and Iran, and droughts have created a situation that is not easy to describe. Only the families who experience their gradual sinking into that swamp every day can say what consequences this situation has truly had and how worried one should be. In this piece, after pointing to several main factors behind the current economic crisis, I want to address these questions: How do people endure this level of unemployment and poverty? Why does this situation not lead to collective protest and political explosion? And what is to be done?
The Taliban, by building and rebuilding some roads and highways, constructing canals and streams, and carrying out a number of agricultural and mining projects, provide material for propaganda to paint a “positive” picture of the economic situation. When they are confronted with hard questions about hunger and livelihoods, they selectively invoke religious precepts to shift the blame off their own shoulders, saying that God is the provider and that a person cannot obtain anything beyond what is written in their destiny.
But we all know how much emptier people’s plates have become over these few years, and how the crisis of hunger and unemployment deepens every day. With the cutoff of foreign aid, the freezing of foreign currency reserves, and the flight of capital and skilled labour after 2021, the wheel of Afghanistan’s dependent and crisis-ridden economy was severely damaged. The labour market has shrunk drastically, competition for daily-wage work or shelter has turned into an exhausting battle for survival, and millions of families are grappling with the risk of absolute poverty and hunger. Barring women from work and education has further paralyzed the economy of urban families.
The Taliban take two contradictory approaches to this situation. One is that supposedly no one in Afghanistan is unemployed, and anyone without work is lazy. The other is that God is the provider and the Taliban have promised bread to no one. This contradiction itself confirms the existence of growing poverty. And although the Taliban collect taxes and religious tithes with ruthlessness and complete precision, and consider themselves, by virtue of having seized the apparatus of government, entitled to a share of even meagre incomes, they shirk the responsibility of governing. As if an emirate that counts people’s morsels and takes tithes from them is not answerable for their employment and livelihood problems. But how do people endure this painful situation?
It must be said that many of our compatriots have died in these years from the direct or indirect consequences of unemployment and poverty. Thousands of young people searching for work have been killed, wounded, or maimed along the migration routes. The caravan of young men, and in some cases children and women, fleeing Afghanistan does not stop at any time of year. According to local observers, sometimes several thousand people set out in a single day, despite knowing the dangers of the smuggling routes, hoping to reach Iran, Pakistan, or lands overseas. Yet there is no broad, sustained movement around livelihoods against this imposed situation.
When poverty is combined with factors such as limited political awareness, the impossibility of collective action, and the inability to recognize shared professional and class interests, it reduces people’s expectations to individual efforts at survival. When all of a person’s energy is spent finding a piece of bread to stay alive, there is no room left for thinking, planning, and collective action. In the absence of labour unions, independent professional associations, rooted political parties, and a middle class strong enough to give voice to wider demands, the masses have been left as scattered, lonely, and defenceless islands.
Despite all these problems, we live in an era in which mass food production has grown so much that even in the poverty-stricken environment of Afghanistan, access to the minimum food needed to escape immediate death has become possible with some social support and foreign aid. A family of five that has lost its home, its work, and all income can live for a month under a tent or in a cramped room on a sack of flour, a can of cooking oil, and some dry tea and salt. That is, for three or four thousand afghanis, about 50 US dollars, five people can survive a full month, without any welfare or civic services, “saved” only from starving to death.
When a Taliban official says that no one in Afghanistan is unemployed, perhaps he is referring to the work through which millions of Afghans across the country, pushing handcarts, street vending, and doing roadside day labour, can “earn” a meagre sum to buy that bare minimum. Unfortunately, a large part of our population has fallen into the jaws of such “work” for “survival.”
Absolute poverty does not necessarily lead to revolution or even to change. Certainly, the suffering of hunger and oppression is the raw material of change, but to turn it into an instrument of change we need conscious, disciplined organizational cores with a clear program.Otherwise, hunger and oppression lead either to passivity or to perilous, often deadly, migration, or else they are simply contained by deceptive slogans.
What Is to Be Done?
“The people” is an ambiguous and sometimes misleading term. On one side, the legitimacy of the people, of the masses consumed by the struggle for bread and their efforts to be fed, their oppression, and their desire for freedom are understandable. On the other side, the people’s inability to identify the right tools and methods for pursuing those goals and aspirations is also undeniable. Because of these very characteristics, the people, especially under the conditions of deprivation in Afghanistan, easily become instruments in the hands of forces and individuals who have the capacity for leadership and mobilization. Local power brokers, mullahs, tribal and ethnic leaders, merchants, and middlemen can easily drag them into trenches, propaganda gatherings, and destructive conflicts.
But the same dynamic can also serve progressive, freedom-seeking forces. If a group with a program and an ideal possesses the necessary discipline and leadership ability, it can easily gather a large population around its goals and direct their energy toward a path that leads to constructive change and prosperity.
Winning broad support from the middle class is not easy in Afghanistan’s current conditions. But the masses can be persuaded more easily and mobilized by presenting a practical plan with tangible results. Therefore, a small but firm core with a program, capable of continuous and effective contact with the people, is vital for leading change: a core that can produce programs and a vision, and inject lasting energy into its popular base.
The historical experience of Afghanistan’s political parties and organizations over the past half century holds lessons in this regard. Leftist parties and movements remained confined to the educated stratum, elite military officers, and the urban middle class, and were unable to carry their modern messages and reform programs to the masses. Jihadi leaders and local power brokers, relying on mosques and tribal structures, were able to mobilize the masses. They drew a vast army of the deprived into war, but because they lacked modern leadership with a clear political program, their efforts descended into chaos, and after “victory” they were unable to create order.
The Taliban, however, were a concrete example of the link between a disciplined core and a rural population weary of insecurity and chaos. By granting local authority and meagre privileges, they were able to gather thousands of men and women around their program and induce them to fight and collaborate.
During the two decades of the Islamic Republic, political movements relied mainly on technocrats, the capital-dwelling urban middle class, and foreign aid. Despite its progressive slogans and laws, the Islamic Republic could not build a reciprocal bond with the deprived masses. The nascent urban middle class, caught in an ambiguity created by the foreign presence and the illusory projects of embassies and NGOs, never found the opportunity for constructive and independent action, and did not become the link between the government and the deprived masses. Setting external factors aside, this isolation of political movements and the urban middle class ultimately paved the way for collapse from within.
The great lesson of the past half century in Afghanistan is that change cannot be created with money, guns, abstract slogans, or sole reliance on a shattered and embattled urban middle class. Organizing and building strong organizational cores with progressive goals, capable of reaching the masses, is the necessary condition of political work for fundamental transformation in Afghanistan.
