Link to Article: https://iwpr.net/global-voices/inside-deadly-collapse-maternity-care-afghanistan
As the Middle East continues to crumble due to many noteworthy external conflicts, Afghanistan faces a different sort of internal threat. The country is being crippled by an understocked healthcare system: limited hospitals, staffing shortages, and medicine scarcities. In December 2022, the Taliban banned women from attending universities. This has caused massive staffing deficits in hospitals and clinics across the country, that only continue to worsen. This ban has specifically endangered the practices of midwifery and birthing care in hospitals, which are primarily staffed by women. Hospitals throughout Afghanistan lack supplies, beds, medicine, and staff members, causing over 1 in 150 mothers to die in childbirth. Last year, President Trump withdrew aid from Afghanistan, worsening the already prominent issues tremendously.
As the article continually notes, there is no end in sight for the issues of maternal care, or healthcare in general, throughout Afghanistan. The Taliban will continue to tighten restrictions on not only healthcare, but other personal freedoms that we take for granted in the United States as well. Assuming these restrictions stay their course, eventually Afghanistan will reach a breaking point. The Taliban will tighten restrictions further and inflict so much damage on their people that the West will have no choice but to step in once again (mainly referring to the United States). The impacts of the United States withdrawing aid are clearly stated in the article, which makes me think that it is only a matter of time before a Western country, be it the US or a European power, reinstates some form of aid in Afghanistan.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the United States is aware of the drastic consequences their aid withdrawal has imposed. The question is, then, whether or not our administration will choose to overlook these issues in favor of internal obligations, or reinstate aid within Afghanistan, renewing its precedent as the cleanup crew of the Middle East. As indicated in the past few years, the Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan will not be changing their policies on women attending universities, or their harsh employment restrictions any time in the near future. Afghanistan will not be able to heal itself by performing the same actions while hoping for a different outcome. Whether or not the United States will reattach itself to Afghanistan for another 30 years remains undetermined.
While Afghanistan is recognized internationally as a state, meaning it does have a “functioning” system of government, this government is not considered legitimate by its citizens or the UN. This system of government is predominantly assumed by the Taliban, meaning a rebel terrorist organization is the de facto governing body of the state of Afghanistan. Under this regime, the people of Afghanistan face more hardships than can be explained, including daily violence, human rights violations, and extreme poverty, with no apparent end in sight. The violence and poverty leave no room for “commodities” such as hospitals and clinics, leading to the wave of deaths we read about in the article.