Afghanistan Peace CampaignThe ICG said that as the use of sanctions has increased, so, too, has awareness of their collateral effects.
The International Crisis Group (ICG), said in a new report that sanctions have become an increasingly prominent tool of US statecraft, but urged Washington to align sanctions policy with peacemaking efforts.
The ICG said that as the use of sanctions has increased, so, too, has awareness of their collateral effects.
“While the US looks to sanctions to further its goals in numerous conflicts, sanctions also sometimes obstruct peacemaking – that is, activities in the service of violence prevention and conflict resolution,” it said. “The more Washington uses sanctions, the more far-reaching the downsides are and the more pressing it is to address them.”
To align sanction policy with peacemaking efforts, the ICG said, the US administration “could do so by setting clear objectives for sanctions programs, subjecting them to rigorous periodic review, expanding and making permanent carveouts for peace activities, and addressing private-sector concerns about investment in previously sanctioned jurisdictions.”
It said sanctions can also impede US efforts to encourage private-sector investment in post-conflict settings. Investors often lack the confidence to enter markets where sanctions exist, even when the US Treasury has issued licenses specifically authorising certain transactions or when sanctions have recently been lifted, in part or in full. In these situations, sanctions have a “chilling effect” on business activity or, in the words of one former US official, hang over a country “like a black cloud”.
According to the report, private firms often express confusion about the scope of permitted activity and may err on the side of caution by refusing to do business in these places altogether.
“Such have been the calculations of many companies that had been active in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, which pulled out of the country despite the general licenses published by the US permitting extensive private-sector transactions as part of efforts to stave off state collapse,” the report said.
The ICG cited that the effects can seem trivial (some diplomats working on Venezuela in 2019 and 2020 were told to avoid buying anything, even a cup of coffee, for sanctioned members of the Maduro government), but in other cases they can prove a hurdle to dialogue.
“For example, some US officials have expressed regret at the designation of Afghanistan’s Haqqani network as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), which they said made it harder for the US government as a whole to come around to the idea of dialogue with the group on ending the conflict in Afghanistan,” it said.