By the time the earthquake struck, flattening mud-brick homes across Afghanistan’s eastern mountains last week, many nearby health clinics had already been shuttered for months.
Mushtaq Khan, a senior advisor for the International Rescue Committee, felt his building jolt from all the way in the capital, Kabul, on Sunday night. He woke the next morning to a horrifying death toll slowly trickling in. First, 200 lives lost; then 500; 800; 1,000; and finally, by Thursday, there were over 2,200 confirmed deaths, with some rural villages still unreachable by rescuers.
As his team searched for survivors, he wondered what could have happened if the gutting of the US Agency for International Development hadn’t forced four of their clinics in the country’s hardest-hit province to close earlier this year, cutting off 60,000 rural Afghans from care.
How many lives could be saved if the emergency aid came rushing in like it did before? If the roads had been built in time, or if the food assistance was at the ready like it used to be, they could have surely reached more people more quickly in the disaster’s wake.
“The way we are responding now would’ve been way different,” he said.
At the beginning of this year, the US cut almost $1.8 billion worth of aid to Afghanistan. Because of those cuts alone, the country’s GDP will likely shrink by a full 5 percent this year, cutting off food, shelter, and medical care for millions of Afghans. In 2022, after a magnitude 6.1 quake hit southeastern Afghanistan the US gave $55 million for food, health, and sanitation supplies. The next year, it gave $12 million in the wake of yet another earthquake. But this time, the US offered nothing.
Globally, we are at risk of unraveling decades of progress in making disasters less deadly, driven by investments in infrastructure, early warning systems, and better coordination between the patchwork of actors and agencies that kicks into gear when crisis strikes. Foreign aid has always been a critical part of that puzzle in low-income countries like Afghanistan. A steady flow of foreign aid helps facilitate the kind of development — the roads and resources — needed to make emergency response truly effective when disaster strikes.
The US isn’t alone in slashing aid. As a result of the worldwide retreat in funding lifesaving development programs, every disaster is now deadlier than it needs to be — and every aid worker is left navigating an increasingly dysfunctional system.
“The resources are really, really scarce right now,” said Khan. If the money was there like it used to be, he told Vox that he “would be on the ground working side-by-side with my team right now. We are really feeling the difference.”
How disaster relief works
When an earthquake or a cyclone strikes a poor village, what normally happens first is that the country’s government puts out a call for international relief.
Then, a hodgepodge of NGOs, United Nations agencies, and foreign governments would spring into action. USAID would typically pledge a few million dollars to the government of the affected country or — as would be the case for an unfriendly ruler like the Taliban — to a United Nations agency or humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross working on the ground.
Sometimes, the US would even lend out one of its highly specialized search and rescue task forces to respond to a disaster overseas, as it did to Haiti, Turkey, Peru, the Bahamas, Nepal, and Japan after earthquakes, flooding, and hurricanes over the past decade.
The coordination would kick in really quickly. Most humanitarian organizations didn’t even wait for the contracts to be signed before flying their teams straight into the epicenter to work with local agencies and nonprofits on the ground.
After decades of collaboration, most humanitarian organizations trusted that “the US government would pay its bills” or reimburse them eventually for the costs incurred, said Jeremy Konyndyk, who ran USAID’s disaster assistance branch under the Obama administration and now leads the advocacy group Refugees International. By having those relationships at the ready, a response can kick in much faster when disaster strikes. “Sometimes you need the relief to move faster than our grant processes.”
That trust didn’t come overnight, nor did USAID’s capacity for responding quickly to global disasters, he said. Over time, “it evolved and it grew and iterated,” he said. “It became this really amazing professional operational, deployable machine.”
What makes the most difference in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is not an injection of emergency donations. It’s not as simple as crowdfunding a search and rescue team. Instead, long-term infrastructure projects — often fueled by foreign aid — are what really wax the wheels of disaster relief, ensuring that help can come as fast and efficiently as possible.
It’s important that the protocols are already in place and the rescuers are already on call to respond effectively by the time disaster strikes. But, it’s equally important that the clinics are open, the roads are paved, the water is clean, and the houses are strong enough to withstand some damage.
Achieving those goals through global cooperation has been extremely important for low-income countries, where disasters are still far more deadly than in rich countries, despite efforts to improve early warning systems worldwide.
But, they have made progress, which helps explain why earthquakes, cyclones, and floods used to kill far more people a century ago than they do today, despite there being way more people now, more data reporting, and more disasters tied to climate change than before.
The new math of who gets saved
But now, with the death of USAID and plenty of other countries taking sledgehammers to their own aid agencies, everything about disaster relief has gotten a lot more sluggish.
The Taliban, which seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, put out an appeal for aid shortly after the earthquake struck at the end of August. So did the leader of a local rebel group in Sudan last week, after a devastating landslide killed over 1,000 people in a region already ravaged by war and famine.
While a few countries have stepped in to help in the aftermath of the earthquake — including the European Union, China, India, and the United Kingdom — aid workers like Khan say the absence of the US is directly impacting their response. “It’s just a complete mess,” said Konyndyk. “As a functional matter, the US government is simply out of the business of disaster aid globally,” and “it’s done huge damage.”
Those search and rescue task forces the US used to send? They’re still technically on retainer, but in what Konyndyk called an “entirely insane” twist, the Trump administration cancelled the emergency transport contracts that used to get them where they needed to go — meaning that it’s now basically impossible to get them overseas, especially on a time crunch.
It took four days to get those task forces to Texas after the floods this summer — the same first responders that made it to Syria and Turkey after the 2023 earthquake in just two days.
The USAID subagency that once handled global disaster logistics has been quietly subsumed into the much smaller office within the Office of Refugee Resettlement as part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Not that it seems to be doing much anyway. After a magnitude 7.7 earthquake killed 3,800 people in Myanmar back in March, the US was mostly absent in the disaster response. The UN’s human rights expert for Myanmar recently told the Associated Press that a mixture of aid cuts and the notable absence of US logistical support has severely hampered the country’s ability to recover.
Previous earthquakes had led to the deployment of a full US-led rescue team with dozens of rescuers, search dogs, and heavy machinery that could pull people out alive. This time, the US flew in a team of just three aid workers to assess the damage and then promptly fired them all via email mere days after their arrival as they slept in the rubble-strewn streets of the earthquake zone.
The situation in Afghanistan is even worse. After the Taliban’s takeover, the US remained the country’s largest source of aid by far, sending billions to the poverty-stricken country over the past four years.
“You just name any crisis — we are seeing it over here,” said Khan, who’s especially worried about how damage to water and housing infrastructure could increase the prevalence of disease and make it impossible for families to weather the coming winter. It would be one thing if this were the only crisis on his plate, but the earthquake is only the latest in a series of crises, including a severe drought that has left about one-third of the population facing acute food insecurity and the millions of Afghans forced out of neighboring nations.
“These are very resilient people,” he said. “They just need backing.”
A recipe for disaster…or relief
Saving more lives is about more than money for any individual disaster; it’s about addressing a brewing logistical nightmare that’s making the world less safe and far less prepared to respond to all different kinds of crises.
Take Sudan. Western media didn’t even report on the deadly landslide that occurred there — which destroyed an entire village — until two days after the disaster hit. And, the ongoing civil war makes it extremely difficult to get humanitarian aid inside the country anyway, particularly in the region most affected, where many have sought refuge from the violence precisely because the area is so remote.
But almost unthinkably, the destruction of USAID — which funded the bulk of humanitarian relief that did make it into the country — has made things even worse. It ruptured longstanding relationships, unceremoniously firing some of the only people with the logistical expertise needed to navigate such tricky terrain. No matter what comes next, it won’t be easy to build back.
“We are facing a huge loss of capacity and trust,” said Patricia McIlreavy, head of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, who has spent decades working in humanitarian aid, including in Sudan.
“There may be others who fill those gaps. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a real unknown,” she said. “How will it look? How will people get support? Will they get support?”
In the meantime, she fears that all of the “cuts in funding, but also cuts in capacity, and cuts in expertise and relationship-building” could have dire consequences long after the dust settles.
“People on the ground in Sudan, people on the ground in Afghanistan, don’t have a vote on any of these changes,” she said. “All they know is nothing is coming.”
At the end of the day, natural disasters don’t see borders. There’s something very human — apolitical, even — in the impulse to support one another in the wake of such tragedies.
And with climate change accelerating the pace and intensity of natural disasters around the world — but especially in places like Afghanistan and Sudan — like it or not, we are all in this together.
Granted, the US used to anchor a vast global emergency response infrastructure, and individual donations are absolutely no replacement for that.
But in Sudan — where local volunteer networks have managed to bring lifesaving relief to places that many western donors gave up on years ago — anything is still better than nothing, especially if you choose to support for the long haul. The same is true in Afghanistan, where aid workers have trudged for hours in search of survivors to pull from the rubble.
“We all have a belief that help will come, and when we erode that hope, I think we do something to who we are as people,” said McIlreavy. “How are we advancing together if we can’t believe that we are somehow there for each other?”
