The Foreign Service Journal, April 2022

20 APRIL 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL to ravage the country. The Afghan-Japan Communicable Disease Hospital, Kabul’s only dedicated COVID-19 facility, reported a lack of oxygen supplies critical to patient care and shortages in generator fuel, food and basic supplies like examination gloves. Supplies of some 36 essential medications had already run out by mid-December 2021. Last quarter, the State Department and USAID told SIGAR that they had suspended all contact with the Afghan government and terminated or suspended all on-budget assistance, or funds provided directly to and controlled by Afghan authorities. This quarter, USAID said it has resumed some off-budget, or U.S.-man- aged, activities in Afghanistan. Other findings shared in the report relate to governance and social policies. The Taliban announced a ban on forced marriages in the country on Dec. 3, 2021, stating: “A women is not property, but a noble and free human being; no one can give her to anyone in exchange for peace … or to end animosity.”The declaration came amid numerous reports of Afghan parents selling their daughters to feed the rest of their families as starvation grips the country. The Taliban have also said they are developing a new education curriculum for 2022. While State told SIGAR it has no evidence that such a curriculumhas yet become operational, a December 2020 report from the group’s education com- mission reveals a central theme: the desire to remove “foreign influence” andmusic from the school curriculum. The U.S. Congress established SIGAR in 2008 to provide independent, objective oversight of Afghanistan relief and recon- struction projects, for which approximately $146 billion has been approved since 2002. (Military spending accounted for another $800 billion.) It has been led since 2012 O pen policy differences introduce obvious strains into the U.S.-European relations, but even areas of apparent agreement can conceal differing European and American perspectives. One such area is NATO expansion eastward. Here, as Thomas L. Friedman pointed out recently, while theWestern Europeans have gone along with the American initiative, they have done so in part because military integration of a state like Poland into NATO may pose fewer immediate problems than economic integration into the EU, something eastern Europeans seek just as ardently. Assuming that Russian hostility can be contained by the United States, and that America will bear the lion’s share of the cost of bringing the armed forces of new members up to NATO standards,Western Europeans prefer to expand NATO before expanding the EU. In the minds of some European leaders who profess support for NATO expan- sion is also the awareness that there are powerful opponents to expansion in the U.S. Senate, which will have to approve any formal commitment to increase the number of countries covered by American security guarantees. The road to NATO expansion, in other words, has non-European checkpoints that do not exist on the road to EU expansion. Why has the climate of transatlantic relations changed and how can it be improved? The explanation and the means of improvement must be sought in both Europe and the United States. Liberated from the constraints of the Cold War, especially from the need to hang together in order not to hang separately, Europe and the U.S. are less inclined to subordinate their separate continental interests to the common good or to suppress traditional old world/new world rivalries and prejudices. Each in its own way is preoccupied with internal prob- lems and acts in isolation from the other. Is American leadership really indispensable? It certainly is until Europeans get their act together and agree on common EU foreign and security policies. —Monteagle Sterns, retired FSO, from his article, “America &Western Europe, ” in the Focus on Strained U.S.-European Relations, April 1997 FSJ . 25 Years Ago Strains over NATO Expansion gramme reported in September that up to 97 percent of Afghanistan’s population was at risk of slipping below the poverty line by mid-2022. The World Health Organiza- tion and the U.N. World Food Programme estimated that 3.2 million Afghan children under age 5 will have suffered from acute malnutrition this past winter. The U.S. and the international com- munity have not ignored Afghanistan’s dire straits. Aid continues to flow into the country—albeit at reduced levels. “As of January 2022, the United States, the single largest donor, was provid- ing $782 million in humanitarian aid in Afghanistan and for Afghan refugees in the region,” SIGAR states. “Funds will flow fromUSAID through independent humanitarian organizations.” Meanwhile, the pandemic continues