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Taipei: China, most likely, has assumed, and assessed, that the sudden US-Taliban peace agreement and the rapid withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan will be an unfriendly move or more like a trap which may jeopardize Chinas security framework in Xinjiang. And that without a professional and comprehensive intelligence network in Afghanistan, China does not have a way to escape the trap.

Ahmad Zia Saraj, the chief of Afghanistans National Directorate Security, confirmed to the Afghan Parliament recently that a Chinese spy ring was arrested for espionage in December 2020. He pointed out that this is a sensitive case and that he could not disclose details about it. More interestingly, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, in a media briefing in January 2021 said that they were unaware of the case, and highlighted that China and Afghanistans relations have always been very friendly, and our cooperation is very friendly in every field and is proceeding normally.

Except for in Pakistan, China does not seem to have a resilient and reliable international intelligence exchange network in West and South Asia. Therefore, to encounter such a harsh situation without a professional intelligence backup, Chinas tactics to gather information involves going to the informal social networks with informants from all sectors, which may be inefficient in intelligence gathering, but could successfully penetrate the grassroots. That is why it is reported that the Chinese spy ring in this Afghanistan case were construction worker, carpenter, medical doctor, bakery and restaurant owners, a total of 13 people.

This amateurish Chinese intelligence network was easily exposed and also revealed Chinas profound anxiety on the clandestine Uyghur militants and settlements in Afghanistan and surrounding areas. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian, in November 2020, urged the US to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in an orderly and responsible manner. It seemingly implies that the US withdrawal would leave a mess, making Afghanistan a hotbed for Islamism to flourish once again. What was not uttered was that Beijing probably reckoned that the US might even deliberately devise a milieu where the Uyghur jihadists could survive and offset Chinas possible expansion in Afghanistan.

China prefers to refer to the Uyghur jihadists collectively under the title of East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which intends to establish an independent country violently, and reportedly has initiated numerous murderous riots in Xinjiang since the early 1990s. Their irredentist declaration assuredly irritates the Chinese authority and turns out to be the justification of the latters punitive crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang now.

Sean Roberts, in his recently published book, The War on the Uyghurs: Chinas Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority (2020), argues that soon after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, in order to seek Chinas support in launching a global war on terrorism, the US and its alliesthe UK, European Union etc.designated the ETIM as a foreign terrorist organization for its alleged association with Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, and imposed sanctions on it.

The fact is that the ETIM was never convincingly forceful enough in military terms. One of the founding jihadists of the organization, whom I interviewed in Istanbul in the summer of 2015, explained to me that ETIM was renamed as Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) shortly after the war on terror began in Afghanistan in 2002, for the purpose of mobilizing support and to recruit new blood from Central Asias Turkic ethnic communities. The new name, TIP, was to prevent confusing it with other jihadist organizations, as ETIM was dedicated solely to fight for Uyghur independence in Xinjiang. East Turkistan is parallel to Xinjiang, while Turkestan literally widens its connotation to include Central Asia, and all ranges inhabited by Turkic ethnic groups.

The ETIMs haunt was around the unmanned tribal zones of Northern Waziristan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and three of its leaders, Hasan Mahsum, Abdul Haq and Abdul Shakoor al-Turkistani were exterminated or seriously injured by US drone attacks in the war of terror. Additionally, Pakistan began a full-fledged military raid called Operation Zarb-e-Azb from 2014 to flush out comprehensively all foreign and local militants hiding in North Waziristan. It is reported that China assisted in the military operation with another name, i.e. Jingwai Qingyuan, literally meaning clearing up abroad. As a result, the Uyghur militants were forced to emigrate and transfer to Syria where they jointly fought the civil war with the Jabhat Al-Nusra (later renamed as the Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham Front, or Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham), an extension of Al Qaeda in Syria.

It came as a shock when the Trump administration removed the ETIM from the US terrorist list. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that there is no reliable evidence that the organization still existed. In other words, the US implied that Uyghur terrorists no longer existed. Meanwhile, there were reports and leaks from the Uyghur diaspora in Turkey that a bundle of Uyghur militants, who once fought in Syria, had followed Abdul Rashid Dostum (the Afghan Vice President and Marshal, and twice exiled in Turkey in 2008 and 2016) back to his stronghold in northern Afghanistan in 2018.

Dostum is an ethnic Uzbek and a warlord, having his personal fiefdom in north Afghanistan. Dostum embraced the US campaign in Afghanistan, and reportedly tortured and executed thousands of Taliban prisoners in the early days of the US-led war on terror. Dostums territory, commonly known as Afghan Turkestan or South Turkestan, geographically has proximity to Badakhshan and also to the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan where Uyghur militants are active. There are then allegedly two factions of Uyghur militants; one is under the shadow of Dostum, while the others with the Taliban forces are spread over a large area of rural Badakhshan, sharing a 90-kilometre border with Chinas Xinjiang.

From Chinas perspective, its a completely unacceptable development for north and east Afghanistan to be occupied by hundreds of experienced Uyghur militants. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, in a November 2020 news briefing, called upon the US not to backpedal international counter-terrorism cooperation, and expressed strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to the US decision. He also requested the US to refrain from whitewashing terrorist organizations, which might imply that US troops withdrawal is a tentative conspiracy, which would allow anti-China Uyghur militants to fill the vacuum and possibly fabricate turbulence on Xinjiangs back door.

Chinas Afghanistan peace plans are twofold. One is to establish the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism, which promotes joint counterterrorism and trade activities between Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and China. Beijing has also approached the Taliban leadership, with the support of Pakistan since 2019, to lay the groundwork for future collaboration. Beijing apparently underlined the need for not permitting the Uyghur insurgency gaining space in Afghanistan as a precondition for Chinese support for the Taliban resuming a political role in Kabul during the intra-Afghanistan talks.

What we should bear in mind is that the Afghan Taliban, while being in power in the 1990s, was allies with Uyghur militants and provided them with weapons and other equipment. Americas troops withdrawal from Afghanistan, will inevitably create a power vacuum there, which will likely be filled by local and foreign pro-Taliban militant groups. Beijing is aware that there is no certainty that the Taliban will keep their words if they regain a degree of power in Kabul. And Dostum would be another problem, with his own militia that contains Uyghur militants in north Afghanistan. The Uyghurs ability to launch cross-border attacks into Xinjiang is weak at present, but this could change quickly if China cannot settle the matter with and comfort the Taliban, Dostum and all the other political factions.

Encountered with such critical and mutually distrustful circumstances, China trying to construct its own intelligence network in Afghanistan should not come as a surprise. They were perhaps hoping that their Afghan counterparts would help eliminate the threat from the Uyghur militants in Afghanistan. But the failure of the Chinese spy ring in Afghanistan should have taught Beijing a lesson on its limited strengths when it comes to political manoeuvrings in Afghanistan.

Chienyu Shih is the Secretary General of Taiwan Association of Central Asian Studies, and also lectures on Central Asian international relations and Terrorism at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.

See more here:
The Uyghur factor: China perceives Afghanistan as a threat - The Sunday Guardian

A war hero has died 12 years after being blown up in Afghanistan.

Corporal Davey Timmins, 39, lost an eye and suffered brain damage in Helmand in 2009.

Doctors gave him 24 hours to live but he recovered and won the Queens Gallantry Medal in 2010.

But he developed PTSD and was discharged that year.

After years of illness he died in his sleep at his parents home in Barrhead, Scotland.

Mum Cathy, 67, a retired health worker, said: We wont know what Davey died from until there is a postmortem.

But I think his body could no longer cope with the mental trauma and physical pain.

"He took 14 tablets twice a day.

I dont want to speak badly of the Army but once he was medically discharged he got no help whatsoever.

"None of those soldiers who need help get it.

Twice-married dad Davey, a bomb disposal expert, joined the Royal Logistic Corps in 1999.

The Sunday People is campaigning for better treatment for mentally scarred veterans.

The Ministry of Defence said it took veterans health extremely seriously and will respond accordingly to the coroners report.

Read the original:
War hero blown up in Afghanistan dies 12 years later as 'body couldn't take more pain' - Mirror Online

WASHINGTON (FOX 5 DC) - The head of the National Guard says at least 10,000 troops will be deployed inD.C.by Saturday, and an additional 5,000 could be requested from other states.

National Guard members are pouring into DC ahead of the Inauguration. On Wednesday, some National Guard members took a break within the Capitol building itself - one week after it was assaulted by pro-Trump protesters.

As the Military Times reports, that figure is twice the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

There are currently 6,200 Guard members in the city from D.C. and five nearby states. The increase in requests for Guard members on Monday comes as officials brace for more, possibly violent protests surrounding the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

READ MORE:National Guard deploying at least 10K troops to DC

Last week, the Guard helped erect a seven-foot non-scalable wall around the previously besieged Capitol building.

They have also helped to secure the inauguration perimeter, which includes not only the Capitol, but stretches into the District as well.

READ MORE:DC officials now working to secure inauguration perimeter before Saturday

Earlier this week, photos of National Guard members resting in the Capitol went viral. The D.C. National Guard released a statement on the Guardsmen being armed and resting during their shifts.You can read it in full here.

Excerpt from:
Twice as many troops in DC for inauguration than in Afghanistan and Iraq combined - FOX 5 DC

As the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan reaches the two-decade mark this year, NATO officials have made clear that they have bigger fish to fry. In the alliances new Strategy 2030 report, Afghanistan is mentioned just six times.

Yet as NATO positions itself for the next decade, the alliance has been transformed by its experience in Afghanistan and the lessons it learned there.

The cooperation of the 50-plus nations involved was a growth experience for the alliance, says Ian Lesser, executive director of the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. The bloc learned a lot ... in terms of habits of cooperation and interoperability that were tested everyday. Member forces also made use of some high-tech systems that many nations wouldnt have been exposed to in peacetime.

The alliance's lessons in Afghanistan may be in recognizing the corrosive effects of corruption and the ways in which the U.S. and its NATO allies inadvertently encouraged it, says retired Col. John Agoglia.

The billions of dollars that flooded into Afghanistan after the invasion made graft commonplace. We need to understand how we put money into an environment who were giving it to, what are the oversight mechanisms?

Brussels

As Americas longest war reaches the two-decade mark this year, one of President-elect Joe Bidens first orders of business will be figuring out a way forward in Afghanistan and, by extension, a roadmap for NATOs mission in the country.

Neither the Taliban nor Al Qaeda is at the top of Americas national security threat list anymore, and NATO officials, too, have been clear about their belief that they have bigger fish to fry. In the alliances new Strategy 2030 report, Afghanistan is mentioned just six times in 40 densely-packed pages.

The war in Afghanistan is a mission on which the success or failure of NATO was once thought to hinge. In its early days, the war was billed as not only a post-Cold War rebirth of the alliance, but also its 21st-century evolution.

No longer. The new security agenda, according to the report, will be dominated by competing great powers, in which assertive authoritarian states with revisionist foreign policy agendas in other words, China and Russia seek to expand their power and influence.

Yet as NATO prepares for the next decade, its challenges will be tackled by an alliance transformed, for better or worse, by its experience in Afghanistan and the lessons it has learned there. The question, analysts say, will be whether it chooses to heed them.

Afghanistan became NATOs marquee mission with the U.S. invasion in 2001, the first time in history that the alliance invoked Article V, which declares that an attack on one is an attack on all. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was ultimately composed of allies from 50-plus countries, including non-NATO partners.

In the early years of the war, the running joke among U.S. forces, however, was that ISAF stood for I saw Americans fight, or I sunbathed at FOBs (forward operating bases, which are heavily fortified and largely safe). The underlying critique was that some allied governments used restrictions called caveats to prevent their troops from carrying out night missions, for example, or from deploying to certain more violent parts of the country and, as a result, U.S. and other fighting forces carried a heavier load.

Still, the cooperation was a growth experience for the alliance, says Ian Lesser, executive director of the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. These caveats did in some ways hinder the ISAFs ability to operate, but it operated nonetheless, and learned a lot by that in terms of habits of cooperation and interoperability that were tested everyday.

At the same time, the experience transformed the militaries of many NATO member nations. In Germany, some 90,000 troops have deployed to Afghanistan over the years. Theres no German general today who doesnt have military or even fighting experience there, says Markus Kaim, senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. The same goes, too, for a generation of soldiers in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Canada.

Member forces grew accustomed to collaborating on intelligence sharing and mission planning that made use of some high-tech systems that many nations wouldnt have been exposed to in peacetime, says Anthony Cordesman, defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This in turn, led to a much better appreciation for allied capabilities.

And it led to an even greater appreciation for allies themselves including non-NATO partners, many of whom, like Australia and South Korea, took part in the Afghanistan war.

If we think about any military engagement of NATO going forward, well conceptualize it not as 30 member countries of NATO, but as a loose platform that includes other organizations and non-NATO partners as well, Dr. Kaim says. NATO needs partners, he says, because NATO is aware that it cant shy away from deep political changes were seeing.

The NATO 2030 report emphasizes making the bloc a more political alliance, which means making it a place where core security concerns of all sorts are discussed, Dr. Lesser says. The Asia-Pacific region, especially China, is a case in point. Its a recognition that the definition of what bears on Euro-Atlantic security has expanded tremendously.

This focus on great power competition, coupled with the varying levels of disenchantment with missions that dont end cleanly, means that the appetite for launching military operations again anytime soon will differ across the alliance.

It starts with the question of whether NATO members consider Afghanistan a success. Was it worth all the effort, the blood? Most people would likely answer not really, Dr. Kaim says. Militarily, an alliance with impressive weapons uprooted Al Qaeda but did not defeat the Taliban, which, though an effective guerrilla force, was never a highly sophisticated threat. On the nation-building front, You spent an incredible amount of money to achieve remarkably little, Dr. Cordesman says.

Yet the definition of success itself reflects the different strategic cultures within NATO. While America is deeply uncomfortable with the notion of not winning, for many NATO allies, analysts say, it was enough to show solidarity, to be present, and to make a contribution.

More broadly, Afghanistan was seen as the price to pay, and the right thing to do for NATO in return for the reassurance those countries get from the alliance on the bigger existential threats they face, Dr. Lesser says. The fact that theyve been present in Afghanistan is simply part of the insurance policy, and you have to pay these premiums over time.

And even as most members came out of their Afghan experience more cautious about exporting democracy, the 2030 report acknowledges, it also argues that its nonetheless vital that NATO doesnt allow democratic erosion.

For this to happen, NATO must take some key lessons of Afghanistan, including the corrosive effects of corruption and the ways in which the U.S. and its NATO allies may inadvertently encourage it, says retired Col. John Agoglia, former director of both the U.S. Armys Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute and the Counterinsurgency Training Center-Afghanistan, both in Kabul.

The billions of free-flowing Western dollars that flooded into Afghanistan after the invasion made graft and fraud easy and commonplace. We need to understand how we put money into an environment who were giving it to, what are the oversight mechanisms? What could be the second and third order impacts?

Corruption "undermined the legitimacy of the Afghan government, reduced its effectiveness, and created a source of resentment for its own population," which in turn drove Taliban recruitment and made it "much more difficult" for NATO to achieve its key mission goals, "from security to effective governance," Karolina MacLachlan, policy officer at Transparency International in London, wrote in NATO Review.

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At the same time, in bolstering some former Soviet republics to help resist Russian democratic undercutting and influence, as in Afghanistan, we may have to deal with some people who have blood on their hands, some who are corrupt, some who are trying to reform, Colonel Agoglia says. Weve learned a lot about understanding the limits of power, how to shape it as best you can, and how to take what you can get and its not always going to look pretty.

I get the great power competition, but its won and lost in the trenches doing these things so that if you actually do have to go into combat, he adds, you own the day.

Continue reading here:
War in Afghanistan: What has NATO learned from 20 years of fighting? - The Christian Science Monitor

Zareena, 30, holds her fifth child, 1-year-old Fariba, at the ward for malnourished children at the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

An Afghan woman stands over her granddaughter in a Kabul hospital ward for malnourished children. Parvana, just 18 months old, keeps vomiting, but she's too weak to move on her cot. So the vomit dribbles down her neck and pools into the hem of her worn velvet tracksuit.

"We didn't have enough to feed her," says her grandmother, Haji Rizva, who pats away the mess with the fringe of her scarf. She came to the hospital on behalf of Parvana's mother, who is at home and pregnant. "Sometimes we only have tea for two, three days. We don't even have bread." (The women are only referred to by their first names because of the discrimination they could face if identified.)

Parvana, 18 months old, lies on a gurney at a ward for malnourished children at the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

Haji Rizva says her sons can't find work. To get to the hospital, she had to borrow $8 for the taxi a huge sum for her. The medical treatment is free, but Haji Rizva didn't know that. So she left Parvana's baby brother at home with the family. She says the boy is too weak from the hunger to move but she didn't think she could afford to treat them both.

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A December report from the United Nations finds that nearly half of all children younger than 5 in Afghanistan, a total of some 3.1 million, are facing acute malnutrition. That's a 16% jump since June 2020.

Of those children, nearly a million are believed to suffer from severe acute malnutrition effectively, starvation and need food urgently to survive.

"COVID has actually accelerated a very difficult situation to begin with," says Melanie Galvin, the chief of nutrition in Afghanistan for UNICEF. "We've seen an escalation over the past year, even in the past few months, in estimated children in need," she says.

"We have a huge number of children that are wasted. You can call it starvation. It's synonymous with starvation," she says.

The line is thin between hunger and starvation, and Afghanistan's weak economy, dealt a blow by the pandemic closures, threatens to push more families over the edge, like Shaista's. She requested NPR only use her first name, like other Afghan women in this story. Last month, in her tiny home in a crowded muddy lane on the outskirts of Kabul, she boiled a pot of water on the wood-burning stove to make them think that supper is coming.

Shaista sits in her tiny home on the outskirts of Kabul. Her youngest, a 3-year-old girl, sits on her lap; some of her other seven children sit beside her. Behind them, she is boiling a pot of water on the wood-burning stove. But she's told the children it is dinner, and she tells them, "just wait for your father." Then she hopes they'll fall asleep, because there's no food to give them. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

Shaista sits in her tiny home on the outskirts of Kabul. Her youngest, a 3-year-old girl, sits on her lap; some of her other seven children sit beside her. Behind them, she is boiling a pot of water on the wood-burning stove. But she's told the children it is dinner, and she tells them, "just wait for your father." Then she hopes they'll fall asleep, because there's no food to give them.

"Just wait for your father," she tells the children when they ask for food. "Then they fall asleep," she says. "I cry at night, thinking of how I can't feed them," she says, as her brood crowds around her in their one-room home. Her oldest, 15, sits protectively by the door, and her youngest, a 3-year-old girl, sits on her lap.

She estimated her age at around 35, and said of a hard life, this year was the hardest. Her husband was injured in an accident. Her son began selling firewood to support the family. But he hasn't sold much, because the pandemic hit and Kabul shut down for weeks in the spring.

Shaista's 15-year-old son looks out onto a muddy alleyway on the outskirts of Kabul. He began selling firewood this year to help out his family after his father was injured in an accident. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

"Corona made everything worse," says Shaista. The economy hasn't recovered, and her son still doesn't sell much wood.

Many other families are suffering. In a poor Kabul neighborhood, women with their babies line the stairs of a building unmarked for safety reasons where Care International runs a free medical clinic. Nooria, 25, waits with her 9-month-old daughter Nargis, who has a cough she can't shake.

Nooria used to be a teacher, but after the pandemic began, she says her employers couldn't pay her, so she quit. "I didn't even have biscuits and tea to feed my daughter," she says. Her husband's work as a rickshaw driver dried up, and it hasn't really picked up since the lockdown ended.

Her family eats when there's money for food. That includes her two children she's also got a young son. "They eat when we eat," she says. "Whatever we have has to be enough."

Nooria says the nurses here counseled her before, a few months ago when they told her Nargis was malnourished."They say you have to feed her nutritious food. But if there's no money how can we feed her?"

The counseling is important, health workers say, because hunger in Afghanistan is more than a lack of money to buy food. In traditional households, men eat first, leaving women and children with the remains. That mindset particularly hurts pregnant and lactating women, who need more calories. The counselors advise women about the importance of breastfeeding and when to wean their children, and male health workers raise awareness with men about ensuring the women and children in their families eat well.

Two posters on the glass partition in a ward for malnourished children at the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul show the correct way to breastfeed a child. Proper, frequent breastfeeding is key to avert malnutrition among babies, but health workers say many Afghan women don't know that. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

One midwife at the clinic, who could not be named for security reasons following Care International rules, said she saw about 35 babies every day with their mothers. Of those babies, she estimates that about six to 10 were malnourished.

Many of the most severe cases of malnourished babies are referred to the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in central Kabul, where, on a recent December day, women clad in burkas clutched swaddled babies as they waited to see a doctor.

Inside, grandmother Haji Rizva was here with her granddaughter Parvana. So was Zareena, 30, who watched over her fifth child, 1-year-old Fariba, who cried every time her mother put her down.

Zareena says for months, she was giving her daughter water mixed with non-dairy creamer. She says she thought it was cheap milk powder: she's illiterate and so is everybody around her. She also spooned her daughter the remains of vegetable stews and sometimes gave her bread and tea.

Her husband used to earn small change by hauling groceries for customers out of crowded bazaars, but the work dried up. Now, her oldest boy sells old plastic bags: other families buy them to burn for fuel. He's lucky to make $2 a day. Some days he brings home 50 cents.

Scenes like this jar with the sheer amounts that the U.S. spent in Afghanistan some $2 trillion, according to Brown University's Costs Of War Project, which investigates how much the U.S. spent on the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of that spending was military-related, but Congress also appropriated nearly $138 billion since 2002 for Afghanistan's reconstruction. About a third of that was drained out by waste, fraud and abuse, according to the U.S. Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which audits and investigates that spending. And yet that still leaves billions. So why are Afghans starving?

"It's a million dollar question, isn't it," says Heather Barr, co-director of the women's rights division at Human Rights Watch, who has done research in Afghanistan for the group. She says for years, international aid spending in Afghanistan was chaotic and largely focused on short-term goals. It wasn't meant to solve complicated problems like malnutrition, which isn't just about providing food aid. It must be addressed by other development efforts ranging from improved access to water to educating women about proper nutrition.

Diplomats meant to oversee programs often stayed no longer than a year. And as violence escalated, even good programs were thrown into disarray.

"The cumulative effect of all that is pretty disastrous. We have a country which has still got some of the worst development indicators in the world after an extraordinary amount of money being spent, but a lot of that money wasn't really spent on programs that could have led to real recovery," says Barr.

And now, the United States and the broader international community are giving less even as the crisis escalates. This year, a pledging conference for Afghanistan promised $12 billion to $13 billion dollars to the government over the next four years, 20% less than what the international community pledged in 2017, according to the Afghanistan Analysts Network.

So of those nearly one million children who are starving, Galvin of UNICEF says the group hopes to help a third through food aid and medical treatments with the funding it has.

"The international community is largely done with Afghanistan," Barr says. So is America, she says. "There's just no realistic expectation that the U.S. is going to remain interested in Afghanistan, ready to continue bankrolling Afghanistan's deeply financially dependent government."

And already, kids like Parvana, who are lucky enough to be treated, face an uncertain future. Her grandmother Haji Rizva says when they go back home, Parvana will eat what they eat. But the cruel reality is that often, that's nothing at all.

See the article here:
'I Cry At Night': Afghan Mothers Struggle To Feed Their Children In The Pandemic - NPR