The human cost of US aid suspension: Ethical and practical concerns  

President Trump’s halt of all existing foreign assistance – with very limited exceptions – will have disastrous consequences for millions of Afghans, among many others around the world. Its approach of a 90-day freeze and stop-work may offer an opportunity for the reform of the international aid system and its bureaucracy, but its potential costs in lives and suffering will raise serious ethical questions.

While the new U.S. administration has legitimate concerns about foreign assistance, it could have taken a more compassionate and responsible approach to address them. First, two of the administration’s concerns – aid efficiency and accountability, as well as diversion by the Taliban and others – are widely shared by the Afghan people, as they undermine the generosity of U.S. taxpayers and other donor nations and divert life-saving resources away from those truly in need.

A serious assessment to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability within the aid bureaucracy, reduce its hefty overheads, and prevent diversion and misuse was long overdue.

However, linking aid to the interests of the donor – with consistency of foreign aid with U.S. policies cited as the third reason for the suspension – marks a significant departure from long-held international humanitarian principles.

These principles dictate that humanitarian aid should be provided based solely on human needs, forming a key part of the rules-based global order that the U.S. has historically championed and defended. While the international community has applied different rules to development financing as part of their foreign policy, humanitarian aid has remained distinct and often shielded from non-humanitarian considerations.

Second, the suspension of aid poses serious life-threatening risks to hundreds of millions of aid recipients whose lives and livelihoods depend on such assistance. The impact will be extensive given the scale of U.S. foreign assistance, which is the largest among global aid donors. This will be particularly painful and costly for Afghans, of whom, according to a recent UN report, about 11.6 million—roughly 25% of the population—have recently experienced acute food insecurity at “crisis” or higher levels.

Although it is reassuring that emergency food aid is one of the three exceptions—the other two being military aid to Israel and Egypt—the policy details and guidelines remain unclear. In the case of Afghanistan, even if food aid is not part of the suspension, the impact will still be enormously harmful. Millions of Afghan people, including women and children, depend not only on existing U.S. assistance for food aid but also on water, shelter, critical healthcare services, mine clearance, as well as education and agricultural recovery. Even before the uncertain outcome of the U.S. assessment, the speculative impact of the announcement has already caused a 13% depreciation in the value of the Afghan currency against the U.S. dollar, reducing the purchasing power of one of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations. It would have been more appropriate for the new administration, both technically and ethically, to conduct the assessment—and possibly implement reform measures—while ensuring the continuation of all life-saving and sustaining assistance. The U.S. is certainly in a better position to manage three more months of inefficiencies within the aid system than the hundreds of millions of hungry and desperate people who now face the risks of this suspension.

The article is written by the former Afghan Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar.