No band-aids since the early nineties
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No band-aids since the early nineties is a line John Kiriakou attributes to Afghan doctors he met in 2000, and which he uses as his standing example of the gap between a sanctions regime's written humanitarian exemptions and its effect on the ground. He raised it on the DeProgram programme in July 2025, while the hosts were discussing the collapse of medical provision in Gaza.

The policy as written

Kiriakou sets the period precisely: "from 1996 to 2001, when the Taliban were running Afghanistan the first time ... there were Clinton administration trade sanctions against the Taliban in Afghanistan." The carve-out was explicit and, he says, repeated: "they always said no, no, no, no, it's not medical supplies or food. We don't prohibit that at all."

The policy as found

His own visit contradicted it. "When I was there the first time in 2000 and I visited a hospital ... the doctors, and I found this to be true at other hospitals too, they were like, 'We haven't seen a band-aid since the early 90s.'"

The shortage was not partial. "It's like nothing. Nothing at all," he says. What remained was "field medicine." Offered the comparison of a MASH unit, Kiriakou accepted it with one correction, the facilities were indoors, but barely: "You have a roof that may or may not leak. That's what you've got. It's a nice tent, basically."

The parallel he draws

The story was told as an analogy rather than a digression. The hosts had been discussing photographs of starving children in Gaza and Kiriakou's insistence that the famine was administrative rather than agricultural: "There's plenty of food. We see these pictures of children starving to death. We're seeing reports of surgeons in the middle of performing surgery, passing out and fainting from a lack of food. There's plenty of food."

Afghanistan in 2000 was, in his telling, the same mechanism at an earlier date: a policy that exempted medicine on paper while producing hospitals without bandages. The visit is also among the earliest datable points in his own account of his time in Afghanistan, which he describes here as his "first time" in the country.

See also

- The Taliban
- John Kiriakou
- Famine in Gaza
- Afghan heroin policy
