Pakistan shut down another Afghan border refugee camp—this one used to house over 50,000 people. And still, there are tens of thousands now living as IDPs in Eastern Afghanistan, an area that has seen an alarming, though still less severe, spike in violence this year. Coorelated with this kind of demographic pressure—UNHCR has reported that returnees have sparked much of the tribal and village-level conflict—is growing despair about the food crisis.
Afghanistan is experiencing a food crisis largely because its one-time suppliers have banned exports or taxed them. Neighboring Pakistan and nearby Kazakhstan, which together once supplied much of Afghanistan’s wheat, have banned most exports to feed their own people. Iran has taxed wheat exports.
Flour prices in Afghanistan have tripled since 2007. The cost of 220 pounds of flour —enough to feed Daud’s family for a month—has risen to about $88. That’s almost four times what it would cost in Pakistan. Most Afghan government employees earn about $100 a month…
Because of the stiff controls in Pakistan, smugglers have been using donkeys and children to carry flour to Afghanistan. The situation is so dire that some Afghan farmers who grew poppies for opium and heroin have switched to wheat, to take advantage of the price increases, said Obaidullah Ramin, the minister of agriculture, adding that he considers the food crisis to be more serious than the poppy crisis.
So how does this impact the frontier as the frontline in the GWoT? Hungry, disenfranchised people are angry people. The latest tactic in RC-East has been to pay construction workers just above the average Taliban price for temp fighters—about $5.50 a day. It is a solution borne of necessity and not, sadly, a strategic, long term push to remove foreigner dependency and improve local economies to where they won’t crash from price fluctuations. And without one of those in place, then every time someone can’t afford to buy bread for his family, he’ll have one more reason to join one of the AAFs and blow up some Humvees.
This is part of a series examining the fundamentals of conflict around the Durand Line.
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