President Biden is calling on the Taliban Afghan government to release Navy vet and civil engineer Mark Frerichs after 2 years of captivity in Afghanistan. Once America was ousted from Afghanistan last August 30, the victorious Taliban should have released Frerichs forthwith. Their failure to do so is a cruel act causing much needless pain to Frerichs, his family, friends, neighbors; indeed all Americans.
But while Biden is demanding Frerichs release, he’s strangling the Afghan economy with cruel, inhuman sanctions that degreed life for Afghanistan’s 40 million people. His cruelest sanction is withholding of $9.4 billion of Afghan assets in the Federal Reserve. Upwards of 23 million Afghans face starvation this year. Food insufficiency affects 98% of Afghans. Many Afghans die every day from America’s sore loser punishment for the Taliban defeating the world’s most powerful country.
The grief and misery pouring out of Afghanistan never reaches the American people. Our government and mainstream media have essentially erased America’s grotesque humanitarian crisis there from our consciousness. But 36 (out of 535) decent congresspersons recently sent Biden a letter stating “The U.S. confiscation of $9.4 billion in Afghanistan’s currency reserves is plunging Afghanistan deeper into economic and humanitarian crisis.”
President Biden is not doing everything in his power to return Mark Frerichs to his loved ones. He needs to drop America’s ghoulish and deadly revenge on the Taliban for their humiliating repudiation of our destruction of their country. That policy may wind up taking another American life, Mark Frerichs, to go with the thousands of just as innocent Afghan civilians being destroyed long after American’s exit from a 20 year war that should never have been fought.
Walt Zlotow became involved in antiwar activities upon entering University of Chicago in 1963. He is current president of the West Suburban Peace Coalition based in the Chicago western suburbs. He blogs daily on antiwar and other issues at www.heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com.