Against Sanctions
In the wake of the Taliban taking Afghanistan, commentators have been quick to call for sanctions – but the record of Western sanctions across the world make clear that they predominantly harm civilians.
Credit: MoD Crown Copyright / Getty Images
As one of the more urbane Tories of the Brexit years, the bar for praise of Rory Stewart has often been set low. On the subject of Afghanistan, however, a country in which he once went hiking, and clearly cares for, the former MP recently made a blunt and valuable statement against the injustice of sanctions that the US now hovers over the Central Asian state.
‘Sanctions – unless very carefully designed’, he tweeted, ‘will inflict pain on innocent Afghans communities and have almost no impact on the Taliban. If we impose general sanctions and cut aid inside Afghanistan now, we will deepen a humanitarian catastrophe.’
There are few examples of the careful design he speaks of, but Stewart is correct, even if the statement barely tugs the first thread in a web of US sanctions reaching in an arc from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean. These punitive measures have served to isolate and immiserate hundreds of millions of innocent people, incentivising corruption in states that learn to skirt them, and creating countless refugees from the economies they wreck, with most victims then moving towards Europe. The people best-placed to change their governments are left waiting in queues for basic goods, and for relatives abroad to return with suitcases full of the essentials they can no longer buy.
Already, as the Kabul government headed for the UAE, the Afghan state has seen billions of dollars of its few assets frozen by the New York Federal Reserve, assets that will become more crucial as aid—including from the UK—is cut. Even this, however, obscures the more pressing fact that up to two million Afghans were already living under US sanctions as refugees inside Iran, an economy broken by the 2018 decision to reinstate general sanctions on the country, despite Iran being in compliance with an agreement not to seek to join Israel as the only West Asian state to possess nuclear weapons.
It is no surprise that its refugee population is among Iran’s most economically vulnerable communities, so that Afghans were already among the most numerous leaving. People who began their journey in Iran now make up the largest proportion of migrants crossing the Channel to the UK. It is hard to imagine a more immediate means of helping more Afghans, closer to their home, than reinstating Iran’s right to trade with the outside world, import medicines during a pandemic, or even have its residents—in Iran but sometimes even its diaspora—have access to global basics ranging from money transfers to a Dropbox account.
Clearly the West has infinitely more capacity to allow the regional economy and society to function naturally than it does to airlift Afghans, so that the question becomes whether we genuinely at last want the betterment of Afghan lives, or to be the ones who save a smaller number of the people we have so desperately harmed, in a region we repeatedly unsettle.
For all that the sudden outpouring of concern for Afghans might seem hypocritical to those who consistently opposed the war and its abuses, it does create a political reality in which the cruelty of sanctions and their consistent failure cannot help be noticed. It is hard to purport to care about Afghans while readying to choke off their economy. It is also hard for the US to impose sanctions after one of its wars because to do so is to admit that war was a failure, and that you want nothing in the country you allegedly ‘built’ to be left in business.
A similar story is playing out in Syria, where Western interest in—and popular concern for—Syrian wellbeing square poorly with a country so sanctioned it cannot even procure pipes to lay new water infrastructure. In a classic case of divide-and-rule, chosen US partners in the Kurdish-majority northeast of Syria meanwhile received waivers to extract and sell oil, initially with an energy contractor from Delaware, thus driving a wedge, and resource dispute, between Kurdish and non-Kurdish Syrians. Sanctions and the US financial system take over where militarism inevitably fails, brutalising civilians in the hope of making regimes that are seldom loved further unpopular.
Mixed Messages
This rising awareness of the effects of sanctions are at least generating some discussion of if sanctions can even work – in the Syrian case to remove the Bashar al-Assad government as punishment for its human rights abuses. But the concern for human rights, aside from being noxious in its selectiveness, by the same token destroys the very idea of human rights at all. Saudi Arabia murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in their Istanbul consulate, while bombing Yemen at the same time.
Not only have the Saudis never suffered meaningful sanctions, the UK government even pressed to change laws on stock market listings in order to try and woo the state oil company, Aramco, to an IPO on the London Stock Exchange. A similar story can be told of Israel and its apartheid and bombing in Palestine. While the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) campaign against Israel is repudiated as apparently being a less effective method than constructive engagement to secure Palestinian rights, the same people posit that sanctions and isolation are in fact the most effective means of achieving change against strategic rivals.
Economically, too, sanctions run contrary to one of the founding myths of neoliberalism. The fabled idea that wealth in an economy ‘trickles down’ from the top clashes with the sanctions logic that you can successfully target the top without harming those at the bottom. The evidence suggests otherwise. A long-term isolated, sanctioned population and middle class was, according to the stinging assessment of an Iraqi working with the New York Times in Baghdad, key to the failure to create an integrated, functioning culture after the famously premature ‘Mission Accomplished‘ announcement of George W Bush (he did, at least, simultaneously lift longstanding sanctions against Iraq). It is, of course, only foreign policy orthodoxies, and basic racism, that still apparently impede Westerners caring about sanctions on Iranians in the way they are learning to in the Afghan and Syrian versions.
Some two thousand miles from Afghanistan—the other side of an interconnected region the US works hard to segregate into separate ‘files’—Lebanon now provides perhaps the most convoluted illustration of sanctions failing to deliver anything but dysfunction. In response to the growing financial crisis and power cuts devastating the country, including forcing shutdown of hospital generators, Hezbollah finally announced it would break sanctions and organise a consignment of fuel to be shipped from Iran. The desperation of the situation saw the US authorise issuance of a World Bank loan to cover Lebanon’s power supplies – an act always within its gift. Washington’s plan—at least one of them—is to pipe Egyptian gas to burn in Jordanian power stations and relay the electricity to Lebanon. In order to do this, however, the US must first grant a waiver for the power to be transmitted through Syria and its US sanctions regime, Caesar.
For those with genuine concern for these countries and their populations, it is impossible not to see that sanctions are at best failing, and at worst cruel, perverse, ridiculous. They create poverty, deep resentment, refugees, and the sort of crony client states we have just seen fall in Kabul; entities so narrow in their appeal and legitimacy they make Keir Starmer’s support base appear broad. As the US reckons with its failure in Afghanistan, and finally does the right thing for itself and that country, it is imperative to go where Stewart has sensibly led, but where the political class must follow, and ask what we think sanctions in West Asia can achieve, and if they bring our stated goals closer, or leave them further from reach.