Publication
OFAC, Famine, and the Sanctioning of Afghanistan: A Catastrophic Policy Success
In 2021, American military forces withdrew from Kabul, and the sanctioning of Afghanistan began. In this article, Matthew Hoye, Associate Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, argues for a regulatory analytical perspective to examine this case.
- Author
- Mathhew Hoye
- Date
- 09 May 2024
- Links
- Read the full article here
In this article, Hoye makes nested analytical, functional and explanatory arguments. He explains the analytical argument as entailing that targeted sanctions are best understood not as tools of international coercion but primarily as domestic regulations. The functional argument is that the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) uses tactical and strategic ambiguity to maximise its regulatory reach over financial institutions, humanitarian aid organisations, and money transfer organisations. The explanatory argument returns to the puzzles. Hoye argues that without any signal from OFAC, which was highly anticipated, and demonstrating OFAC's significant regulatory influence, the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban led to the immediate disengagement of the international financial community, humanitarian aid organisations, and remittance providers from Afghanistan. This rapid disengagement had severe effects on the availability of food. So, from the perspective of international relations, the sanctioning of Afghanistan appears to be a 'catastrophic policy failure'. However, according to Hoye, this is only descriptively true but analytically misleading.
Thus, Hoye argues for a regulatory analytical perspective. From that perspective, the sanctions against Afghanistan embody the ideal of maximal domination secured through strategic and tactical regulatory ambiguity in the service of privatized global financial surveillance that OFAC has been working toward for twenty years.