Poverty Kills More Afghani’s than Direct Conflict | United Nations

http://worldnewsvine.com/2010/03/poverty-kills-more-afghanis-than-direct-conflict-united-nations/

A report by the United Nations found that more people living in Afghanistan have been killed by poverty than by Operation Enduring Freedom. It is estimated that some 9 million people have been killed by poverty, with another large portion of the population living slightly above poverty. Despite aid funneled into the Afghani government, the poverty rate has not changed significantly over the past decade. The data was gathered from a variety of impoverished areas in Afghanistan and is associated with a variety of other problems in country. The Commission proposed additional funds, international aid and the support of the Afghani government in promoting human rights.

I feel that this is relevant to our study of International Politics in several ways. First of all, this goes back to the slide Professor Wilcox showed on the first day of class. International Politics doesn't need to take the form of high level institutions or grandiose political forums. It can take the form of poverty in the mountains or human suffering in the Middle East. More importantly, however, this definitely concerns our examination of poverty. The Commission that came to these conclusions didn't do so by examining what poverty was, but by making assumptions about the nature of poverty and then proscribing a way of addressing poverty as they assume it exists. Their assumptions are exactly in line with what Pasha claimed people assumed were associated with poverty. The Commission reduced poverty to statistics, putting a certain number of people "below" the poverty line and certain people "above" the poverty line (although they did recognize in the article that this was a rather arbitrary distinction). It also then came up with a way to approach solving the issue of poverty in Afghanistan. This is the reason though I defend the importance of critical theory and believe that critical theory is relevant to policy discussions. The UN has created policy to deal with poverty but didn't challenge and assess the qualifiers of poverty. It could very well be that there solution does not match the problem, simply because the UN's understanding of "the problem" is incomplete. Therefore, I question the effectiveness and validity of the UN's proposal.