Healthcare in Crisis: Factors Afflicting Afghanistan's Healthcare

Abstract

Prior to Soviet intervention, Afghanistan was a promising market in the booming South Asian economy. The nation was also popular with western travelers, who savored its rich cultural heritage along the well-traversed Hippie Trail. In 1977, Afghanistan had zero refugees; today, Afghanistan has the second largest population of refugees. Afghanistan in the late twentieth century was evolving into a modernized nation and a leading economic power in South Asia. Despite its relative poverty, Afghanistan's foreign policy, agricultural production, and health care system were self-sufficient. Less than forty years later, Afghanistan's foreign policy loses its autonomy to Pakistan, its agricultural industry is nearly nonexistent, healthcare is parlous, and ethnic divides limit the nation's growth. Afghanistan has become addicted to foreign aid, and although no country in history has improved its economy longterm with foreign aid, Kabul insists for more support and money. Whereas Cold War escapades targeted Moscow and Washington D.C., they struck Kabul.

In a 2002 interview with the New York Times, former US Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson was awestruck at the obstacles of rebuilding Afghanistan: ''It's hard to appreciate, unless you've seen for yourself, the extent to which war and the Taliban have devastated this land and its medical infrastructure … The Afghans have nothing; they need virtually everything.'' Earlier that year, while talking with the United States' Secretary of Health, Afghanistan's ex-President Hamid Karzai pleaded, ''We need to rebuild our health system entirely after 20 years of neglect … [but] most of all, we need you to stay concerned about Afghanistan.'' Fourteen years later, as chaos and strife continuously plagued Afghanistan, health-care systems have further denigrated. Western powers have left the region in conflict and distress, yet Afghanistan's humanitarian crisis has been forsaken. According to a 2015 report by the World Bank, Afghanistan has the worst average life expectancy in all of Asia: approximately sixty years. During his visit to the nation in 2002, Thompson observed that "the Afghans [still] have nothing; they need virtually everything."

Exactly how has Afghanistan's health care system become the worst in Asia?