1st Online Conference

Immediate action is needed to improve the situation in Afghanistan. The World Food Program for Afghanistan estimated in its October 2022 Situation Report No. 31 that humanitarian assistance – food, medicine, fuel, shelter, safe water, livelihood assistance – is needed for 25 million people in Afghanistan. In March 2022, the United Nations requested $4.4 billion to provide humanitarian and medical assistance for the year, but as of August, only $1.8 billion had been received.

Medical and health-related supplies must be delivered urgently, preferably through bilateral agreements to provide medicines, vaccines, water decontamination equipment, food, fuel, and a system for sharing knowledge with other doctors worldwide.

For immediate medical care, the ad hoc network of remaining hospitals in the country needs to be expanded, including the five clinics operated by MSF, the Turkmenistan-funded hospitals in western Afghanistan, the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul, and other such facilities. It would also need to be clarified which of the former 2300 clinics in the World Bank-funded Sehatmandi project are still available after the project is scheduled to be discontinued by the World Bank in June 2022.

All options must be exhausted to provide additional medical facilities. Military-style field hospitals and clinics can be established, possibly in conjunction with sites where the World Food Program operates logistics depots for the UN Humanitarian Air Service. These depots are located in Fayzabad, Kabul, Kandahar, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif, Bamyan, and Maymana.

All means must be used to combat infectious diseases – from vaccines to decontaminated water and hygiene measures, pesticides, nutritional supplements, etc. Besides Covid-19, virtually all infectious and parasitic diseases continue to spread – malaria, dengue, tuberculosis, measles and others. For example, measles is prevalent in all 34 Afghan provinces. A special effort to eradicate polio should be supported by the entire world, because Pakistan and Afghanistan are the last countries where the poliovirus is still rampant.

Support for immediate medical projects can hardly be expected at present from the Western world, which would actually have a deep moral obligation to rebuild Afghanistan, but instead they are freezing Afghan foreign funds. Immediate efforts should be made to secure financial pledges from an alliance of friendly neighboring states in Central and East Asia, as well as assistance from organizations such as the Red Cross, the Red Crescent and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which opened an office in Kabul on Nov. 13, 2022, to expand humanitarian and economic aid.

Pledges have already come from six neighboring countries (Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and China) after a March 2022 meeting in Tunxi, China. The final document stated, “China will honor its commitment to provide emergency humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan and provide humanitarian assistance such as food, winter supplies, COVID-19 vaccines, and medical equipment, and China is willing to provide additional humanitarian assistance through bilateral and multilateral channels…. [China] will support the operation of Afghanistan’s medical and health systems….”

The Ibn Sina Brigade Under the current provisional conditions and until a full public health capacity is built, we propose to pursue the concept of the Ibn Sina Brigade. By this we mean a mix of medical professionals and volunteers who will survey the health situation throughout the country and provide basic medical care and improve the hygiene situation with simple tools.

The top priority is to train doctors. Statistically, there are not even 0.3 doctors per 1,000 people in Afghanistan. By comparison, Uzbekistan has 2.37 and Cuba more than 5 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants. To achieve this, large training centers – Ibn Sina faculties in large cities – must be built to train thousands of new doctors over the next ten years. Trained doctors in the diaspora should also be motivated to return home. The same training applies to all other specialties, from nursing to medical technicians, laboratory experts and so on. The training of female doctors has increased in Afghanistan in the last year. Which is important to comply with Sharia law, which provides that only female doctors should treat female patients.

Many health workers need to be recruited and trained in the communities. They must fill the shortage of medical personnel, which will continue for some time. The goal is to integrate as many young people as possible into productive and useful professions in order to train them and at the same time deploy them in the health sector. In this way, they can serve society in various health care functions while completing their own vocational training.

Ibn Sina brigades can be used primarily to perform various tasks in rural areas related to filtration and decontamination of water, establishment of sewage and wastewater treatment plants in order to reduce waterborne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, coli, and salmonella. Community health workers can also be used to monitor and detect possible water contamination and identify contacts in the event of an infectious disease outbreak.

A major problem is also the treatment of heroin addicts and the overall presence of drugs – a relic of the long occupation by American and NATO troops. Up to 10 percent of the Afghan population is addicted, and methamphetamines are increasingly playing a role. All drug addicts must be freed from addiction and reintegrated into society. And the complete eradication of opium poppy cultivation, transportation and drug use in Afghanistan is in the immediate, direct interest of all nations in the region. Affected farmers must be supported with alternative cultivation options