Those Afghan Sanctions—What Are They and Will They Work?

By Colin MacKinnon

Here we go again—more U.S-inspired economic sanctions. Last October the United States managed to get the U.N. Security Council by unanimous vote to approve sanctions ostensibly aimed at the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The U.S. hopes the sanctions will persuade the Taliban, the faction currently controlling Kabul and much of the rest of the country, to hand over exiled Saudi national Osama bin Laden to American authorities. Bin Laden is under indictment in the United States for murder in connection with the bombings of two American embassies in Africa and the Americans really want him.

Until bin Laden is turned over, the Security Council resolution forbids Ariana Airlines, controlled by the Taliban, to fly internationally and freezes Taliban assets.

The resolution gave the Taliban until last November to turn over bin Laden. They didn’t, and now the sanctions are supposedly in force. (The White House has also issued an executive order forbidding Americans to trade with Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan or to invest there.)

But what do the sanctions really do? And will they work?

Nancy Soderberg, who was representing the U.S. on the U.N. Security Council at the time of the vote, said: “The sanctions are limited and targeted very specifically to limit the resources of the Taliban authorities and will in no way harm the people of Afghanistan.”

Soderberg’s was the voice of optimism and sweet reason. But there are other views. “To say the sanctions are directed against the Taliban is rhetoric,” says Barnett Rubin, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and a long-time scholar of Afghan affairs. “They are imposing hardships on the people of Afghanistan.”

Rubin cites in particular the restrictions on Ariana flights that have cut off international mail (and hence remittances) to Afghanistan and have cut travel to and from the Persian Gulf, where many Afghans are migrant workers and generate income for families back home.

“What’s important about the sanctions is not the substance,” says Rubin. “The substance is derisory compared to the real problems of Afghanistan. And it doesn’t make sense to put sanctions against the little bits of legal economic activity that remain.”

Therefore what’s important about the sanctions is the political point they make, according to Rubin: “The unanimous vote in the Security Council demonstrates to the Taliban and the Pakistanis [who support them] how isolated they are,” he explains.

What’s important about the sanctions is the political point they make.

Afghans opposed to the Taliban generally support the sanctions. Ravan Farhadi, the Afghan delegate to the United Nations, spoke in favor of the sanctions on the day of the vote. Farhadi represents the Northern Alliance, a loose grouping of anti-Taliban factions that continue to hold territory in the north of the country and who are recognized by the U.N. as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

Some of these anti-Taliban Afghans expect the sanctions to strengthen the opposition within Taliban-held territory.

“The sanctions absolutely will have an effect,” says Qayum Karzai, head of Afghans for Civil Society, a Maryland-based group that favors secular democracy for Afghanistan. “There has been a lot of propaganda that the United States actually supports the Taliban. There is tremendous political realism among the Afghan people. They feel that if the United States does support the Taliban, you can’t oppose them. But the sanctions deliver the message that that propaganda is wrong.”

U.S. prestige, Karzai believes, and the American action against the Taliban will give heart to anti-Taliban forces in the country.

Can Sanctions be Enforced?

Keeping Ariana from flying internationally is more or less doable. But policing the assets freeze will be, let us say, challenging. Afghanistan’s economy these days is mostly illegal, consisting of smuggling and opium production. The sanctions won’t touch these. Taliban officials and businessmen are undoubtedly continuing to conduct trade through the black market and in other under-the-table ways. Stopping such trade, particularly if Pakistan does not cooperate—and it won’t—will be impossible.

Afghanistan’s Economy Has Been Wrecked

Afghanistan’s legitimate economy is prostrate. Even before the Soviet invasion 20 years back, Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries in the world. “The past 20 years [of conflict],” says Rubin, “have been destroying even the little that had been there. Which is why I tend to think that sanctions are not the best way to influence people there.”

A rural country, Afghanistan has seen much of its agricultural infrastructure ruined in warfare. Roads, bridges and irrigation networks have been destroyed. Thanks partly to war, partly to simple poverty, farmers are also lacking seed, fertilizer, and tools. Of 33 Afghan provinces, 22 are what the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization calls “food deficit areas.”

“In rural areas where there is subsistence agriculture people do seem at least to get fed,” says Julie Sirrs, of Response International, a Virginia-based NGO specializing in health, education and information technology. Sirrs has spent time in Taliban territory and, recently, in territory controlled by the Northern Alliance.

“But in the cities the story is different,” Sirrs continues. “Especially with the prohibitions on women’s employment,” and the Taliban’s inability to create a functioning administration that would employ men, “a lot of people are in very dire circumstances. I’ve seen an increase in begging.”

According to some estimates, 60 percent of Kabul’s population depends on foreign aid.

Farmers are under intense pressure to shift into lucrative cash crops—the opium poppy being the most attractive. Last year Afghanistan produced some 4,000 tons of the crop. Afghan production of opium is larger than that of the rest of the world combined—some estimates put it at 70 percent of the total.

Then there’s the smuggling. According to a World Bank study of the Pakistani economy, the transit trade though Afghanistan in 1997 amounted to $2.5 billion. Goods typically come from Dubai, pass through Iran or Turkmenistan, transit Afghanistan and are then sold in smugglers’ markets in Pakistan.

Such is the Afghan economy.

Will the Sanctions Work?

But will the Taliban, even under U.N. pressure, agree to turn over bin Laden?

“The presence of bin Laden in Afghanistan may be a net plus economically for the Taliban,” says Sirrs. “Because of the money he gives and because of the money [other funding from Persian Gulf states] that goes to the Taliban because he is such a symbol [of Islamic militancy].”

Bin Laden also organizes and funds a contingent of largely Arab fighters who operate alongside the Taliban and who have proven valuable militarily. These, says Sirrs, are another factor the Taliban will take into consideration.

According to Rubin, the only way bin Laden will leave Afghanistan is “if he somehow agrees to leave in a way that appears voluntary. According to their culture, they cannot expel him.”

In short, don’t expect these sanctions to accomplish much. Except, of course, a slight increase in the general misery.

Colin MacKinnon is contributing editor to the Washington-based Middle East Executive Reports.