Hunger in Afghanistan: We have to help people through the winter

In view of the humanitarian catastrophe in the Hindu Kush, humanitarian aid urgently needs to be expanded.

The children in Afghanistan cannot wait until solutions are found to the diplomatic dilemma of dealing with the de facto rulers.

Contrary to the current public perception in Germany, help is possible.

It is a dangerous ice age for children in Afghanistan, both literally and figuratively.

The temperatures at night reach close to those of a deep freeze.

It's minus 14 or 15 degrees in Kabul and in the provinces of Logar and Paktia south of the capital, which I just visited with UNICEF.

Afghan families have endured decades of conflict, the transfer of power last summer, one of the worst droughts in decades, the economic downturn and the incredible price hikes of food and everything they need to survive.

In this cruel winter, the only choice now for many is to buy from the last Afghanis a few logs of firewood for the stove to weather the cold, or some bread to ease a growling stomach.

How would we choose?

Many mothers choose the bread for their children and increasingly only drink unsweetened tea instead of eating.

Hardly any of the women we spoke to this week had a full meal last.

Many children do not survive the winter without help

Almost everyone in Afghanistan will soon be living in poverty, the country is rapidly approaching a state of emergency.

This humanitarian catastrophe, which, despite all the restraint in the choice of words, has to be called that every day, is now affecting 13 million children.

That's about as many children as live in Germany.

Let's imagine that over the next few months we would have to provide all the children in our own country with food, medicine, drinking water and school materials, and also support them with psychological help because they cannot cope with the experiences of violence and extreme daily hardship.

This task would put our prosperous country in a state of emergency.

In the Afghanistan of 2022, this crisis means

While the children's situation worsens every winter night, most of the international funds that financed about 70 percent of the Afghan state before the takeover remain frozen.

As diplomats struggle to win human rights concessions in exchange for frozen millions, children like five-year-old Basmeena struggle to survive in cold hospitals.

If the healthcare system collapses completely, how will the little patients fare in the wards, with their broken incubators and the tattered chairs on which their mothers anxiously hope day and night that they will regain their strength?

There are ways to help specifically

At the Gardez hospital, we are overwhelmed by the large number of women, men and children queuing for medication - and appalled by the condition of the malnourished boys and girls, who are rapidly being brought to the brink of death by pneumonia and other infections.

Because so many pregnant and breastfeeding mothers are malnourished themselves, even the youngest are born very weak.

At a ward in Kabul that I visited, 30 newborns lost the fight to survive in November.

Basmeena, who is too small and light for a five-year-old, is repeatedly hospitalized because there is neither enough food nor clean water at home and her condition is deteriorating again.

Just like the brave workers in the health facilities, UNICEF, the sister organizations of the United Nations and other humanitarian workers are fighting the growing need.

But even if we reach hundreds of thousands of children in these weeks with life-saving supplementary food, and even if our packages of winter clothing help a little through the freezing nights, the chance of a childhood will be stolen from children in Afghanistan if the international community does not make an effort to ensure that it is the greatest world humanitarian crisis.

Contrary to the perception in Germany, we have the opportunity to massively expand the help with our partners, and we are doing so.

We have the ways to provide targeted support to health workers, teachers and other professionals so that after this cruel winter, children have a spring where survival is assured beyond the day.

And a summer when the girls I met in a catch-up class were rewarded with a spot at school for their eagerness to learn.

The world must not turn its back on the people in this emergency.

Humanity must come first, beyond these harsh winter weeks.