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Announcer: This is The Takeaway with Melissa Harris-Perry from WNYC and PRX, in collaboration with WGBH Radio in Boston.

United Nations Secretary-General: "These situations, without a more concerted effort from the international community, will make that virtually every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan could face acute poverty."

Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to an urgent plea from the United Nations Secretary-General about the serious and swiftly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. In August, the last US soldier to leave Afghanistan bordered a cargo plane in Kabul and abandoned a country as our nation departed from a place we occupied for two decades, leaving behind the Taliban to rule. Five months later, the United Nations estimates approximately 22 million people in Afghanistan are experiencing starvation as they desperately wait for humanitarian aid. That's more than half the Afghan population.

The choices they face are not familiar to us as Americans. These are not choices between keeping the lights on or buying food. These are far more horrifying.

United Nations Secretary-General: "Babies being sold to feed their siblings. Freezing health facilities overflowing with malnourished children. People burning their possessions to keep warm."

Melissa Harris-Perry: A core reason for this suffering is the US policy of sanctions against the Taliban, which abruptly eliminated the primary support of the Afghan economy.

United Nations Secretary-General: "We are in a race against time to help the Afghan people."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Ali Latifi is a freelance reporter who's joining us from Istanbul. Ali, thank you for joining us.

Ali Latifi: You're welcome.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are conditions like right now in Afghanistan?

Ali Latifi: The condition right now is that because the economy is essentially at a standstill at this point, even people who previously had some sort of a steady income, some sort of a job, now are wondering how they're going to continue to pay rent, how they're going to continue to feed their families, and are resorting to desperate measures. In that story, there was a young guy in his 20s. He was a teacher at a private school, he was a writer, he was an amateur photographer. He was everything the occupation wanted young people to be.

Then once basically it ended and once the Taliban took over and the sanctions started and the aid cutbacks came with them, things like private schools shut down so this guy was unemployed. He was unemployed and he couldn't feed his family. He had to resort to selling energy drinks on the streets and polishing people's shoes, saying that he would sell his books, trying to find ways to sell his kidneys. Anything to just feed his family, and he's only 20-something years old.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Which means that basically for his entire life the US had been occupying the country, and yet this is only five months after US withdrawal. How did this all happen so swiftly?

Ali Latifi: If you look at the way that the economy was handled during that 20 years of occupation, there really was no sustained effort to create a sustainable self-sufficient economy. Afghanistan is a highly agricultural country, but if you look at the last 20 years there were so many agriculture ministers. Yet none of them actually came up with a real long term sustainable program of how to best use Afghanistan's agricultural diversity to really be able to produce at a level where if we couldn't export out the goods, we could at the very least use it to feed as much of our population as possible.

At the same time, essentially every segment of Afghan society was reliant on foreign aid or some kind of foreign business. I was in the Emirate until the middle of September, and every time I would call a hospital, I would call a hospital in Jalalabad and Herat and Kandahar and Kunduz and some of the biggest cities in the country, and even a month in they would tell me, "We're running out of needles. We're running out of anesthesia. We're running out of materials to dress people's wounds."

These are all very basic supplies for a hospital but it all came from abroad. It was either donations or it was imports, and you can't buy the imports if you don't have the money. A lot of the money and the funding for those hospitals came from foreign donors and from foreign countries, and from foreign aid organizations. When all of that dried up, what happened was the hospital was affected, the school was affected. Every segment of society was affected.

These hospitals employed people, these schools employed people, and these people aren't getting paid. Either their places of work have shut down, or even if they're going back to work they're, at the very best, getting paid a fraction of what they were paid, and much more likely not getting paid. Still going to work but not getting paid for it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay. Here we have the UN asking, actually, for the single largest foreign aid contribution for a single nation in history. Yet the description you just offered me, and that failure over two decades to invest in local community creation of both agricultural resilience and the economy, I guess yes there's a humanitarian crisis. Clearly, that must be addressed first, but I'm also wondering how you're thinking about a long-term, more sustainable investment in the economy of Afghanistan so that it is not subjected to the whims of international aid in this way.

Ali Latifi: Right, and that's the issue, is that there really didn't seem to be any sort of an effort. For 20 years the whole world was in Afghanistan, and they were pouring literally billions of dollars a year into the country. Yet within essentially a day, everything came crumbling down. I could give you examples of my own neighborhood. Around me were little bodegas and there were travel agencies. They were all reliant on the offices in the area. Offices would buy their monthly groceries from the little bodega, or they would buy plane tickets for their staff from the travel agency.

A lot of those, again, either they had foreign grants or they were part of foreign programs, or they were serving NGO staff things, all of which was put to an end by August 16th. Then again, what happens to those businesses? Eventually they shut down, and the families that they support are also now wondering how to make money. At the same time, the average consumer because, again, they're probably not working and earning any money, are much less likely to be able to afford to keep buying food, to go out and buy new clothes, or to go hang out somewhere. These are people who had, as I said, fairly steady incomes; fairly reliable incomes.

Now, the poorest of the poor have always been poor in Afghanistan, including during the last 20 years, but now even the people who had managed to rise up, essentially now they're wondering what are they going to do when their money runs out? For a lot of them, it either already has run out or it's very close to running out at this point.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Ali Latifi is a freelance reporter who's written for Business Insider on precisely this topic. Please take the time to go to thetakeaway.org and read his piece. Thanks so much for joining us, Ali.

Ali Latifi: Thank you.

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