It is no surprise Afghanistan is desperately poor. But what often gets glossed over in the reporting on poverty—whether concerning drugs or wheat—is the enormous problem of debt.
Much like elsewhere in South Asia, this debt is usually very small—Mohammed Yunnus, for example, found in Bangladesh that family debt was commonly under $30, yet still crippling. Numbers in Afghanistan are similar, though obviously larger: by western standards, they are vanishingly small (I probably have more credit card debt than many of these desperate families), yet still they create appalling conditions.
In Afghanistan, this is playing itself out in the form of wide scale child labor:
That is in Nangarhar, one of the provinces often touted as a success story in RC-East, alongside Khost and Kunar—despite the increase in attacks this year. As can be expected, debt-labor prevents school, and education is the biggest and most effective weapon against extremism. While $6/day is a lot by local standards, the braggadocio about keeping debt-slaves is simply offensive.
At least the Taliban aren’t nearby, or then those families would be in real trouble. Actually, maybe they are: this wasn’t filmed too far from that nasty suicide bomb in Khogiani a few weeks ago. Which was carried out by locals working for the Taliban. Because they pay well.
This is part of a series examining the fundamentals of conflict around the Durand Line.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.
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There has been a fair amount of work done on the role of debt and credit mechanisms as part of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit’s livelihoods department: see in particular Klijn and Pain’s 2007 paper “Finding the money” on informal credit systems (https://www30.a2hosting.com/~areuorg/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=35).
Mines in Balochistan employ a lot of Hazara children from Afghanistan. The family is paid a relatively large sum which it uses to pay off debt in exchange for sending their sons to work in the mines until their lungs give out (Here’s the article I read about it a while ago).
For godssake, son, get yourself out of that grad school or whatever it is you’re doing in the midwest and get yourself over to Afghanistan and help out.
Your puerile carping and hairsplitting will seem much less clever to you after you’ve actually put your shoulder to the cart for a bit.