In Kabul, silence has fallen. Where once the desperate cries of malnourished children echoed off the walls of a therapeutic feeding center, all that remains now is the squeak of empty metal beds. The center is closing this week - not because of war, not because of disease, but because somewhere in Washington, a contract was torn up. Because the money vanished. Because the Trump administration decided that humanitarian aid no longer serves American interests. What remains is emptiness. No patients. No contracts. No food. “If we don’t treat children with acute malnutrition, there is a very high risk they will die,” says Cobi Rietveld, country director for Action Against Hunger. “No child should die from malnutrition. And yet they will.” A sentence as clear as a guillotine. And just as merciless. In a country disfigured by decades of war — civil war, two decades of U.S. military intervention against the Taliban, and a cycle of withdrawals, reversals, and reassurances by Western powers — it is now the children who are paying the price. Not symbolically. Not metaphorically. But with wasted bodies, with organs that no longer grow, with bones that push through skin.
The numbers are brutal: 3.5 million children in Afghanistan will suffer from acute malnutrition this year — a 20% increase from 2024. A child who can no longer crawl because they lack the strength. Another who can no longer eat because their body has already given up. These are not images from the past. This is now. And this is man-made. In March, Action Against Hunger halted all U.S.-funded operations, after the funding disappeared overnight. The organization tried to maintain the most critical services in Badakhshan and Kabul from its own reserves. But even that is now over. The stations are empty. Refrigerators unplugged. Staff contracts terminated. Once upon a time, there was a promise: That no child would ever die of hunger. That humanitarian aid was not up for negotiation. That the United States, as the largest donor nation, bore a moral responsibility. Last year, the U.S. provided 43% of all international humanitarian assistance for Afghanistan. This year: nothing. Not a cent. Not a plan. And while Washington announces new deals — for weapons, for border walls, for billions in the name of “security” — children in Kabul are starving. Not by accident. But because aid has become politically inconvenient.
“If they don’t get medical care, they die,” Rietveld says. And now they are dying. Quietly. Far from the headlines. Dr. Abdul Hamid Salehi, a pediatrician in Kabul, describes mothers arriving with their dying children — still hoping for a miracle that never came. “They’re still waiting for someone to fund us so we can restart our work and begin helping patients again.” Waiting. Hoping. Dying. Whoever leaves Kabul today is not leaving a warzone. They are leaving a symbol. A symbol of what happens when politics severs itself from ethics. When life is calculated with spreadsheets. When humanity is sacrificed on the altar of budget priorities. Hunger is not a natural disaster. It is a decision. And as Orwell once wrote about poverty in Wigan: “People do not starve because there is not enough food. They starve because someone has decided they shall.” Perhaps someday, someone will remember that an empty room in Kabul said more about this era than any speech made in Washington. It is not death that is the catastrophe. It is the indifference with which we watch it unfold. And someday, a child somewhere else in the world will ask why no one did anything. And the answer will not be: “We couldn’t.” It will be: “We didn’t want to.” And while in Germany, AfD politicians like Alice Weidel and Maximilian Krah express performative outrage over rising refugee numbers, they remain silent about the fact that their political idol, Donald Trump, is the one who cut the humanitarian aid that millions of people in Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Sudan depended on to survive. What do these self-proclaimed defenders of Western civilization have to say about children starving to death because Washington has decided they may? And what does it mean when the very voters who see Trump as a “hero” appear willing to follow this path — a path that doesn’t defend Western values, but betrays the very essence of humanity? If this is the AfD’s vision - a world where children are left to die rather than helped, then perhaps those voters shouldn’t be denied immigration. They should be encouraged to emigrate - urgently. Not for political reasons. But for moral ones.
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