Afghanistan: hungry, desolate and forgotten

Two years ago this month, the United States suddenly decided to bring its presence in Afghanistan to an end and have its soldiers go home. Over the next few days, Washington's allies followed suit.
At the presidential palace in Kabul, President Ashraf Ghani decided, without informing the members of his government, to leave the country. He escaped at a time when he ought to have stayed on to reassure his people that they would be safe.
And yet Ghani had much to fear from the advancing Taliban. The brutality with which the Taliban, in their first phase of seizing Afghanistan, treated President Najibullah and his brother must have preyed on his mind. He surely did not wish to meet a similar end. From that point of view, Ghani's flight was understandable.
What is not understandable, though, is the alacrity with which America and its allies, having been in the country for two decades, abandoned Afghans to their fate. The pitiful images of terrified Afghans sprinting beside departing US military aircraft, with many clinging to the wings in their desperate bid to run from the advancing Taliban, will forever be a blot on human conscience.
Two years on, hardly anyone remembers Afghanistan. It has become a blip on the human radar. It is as if a country called Afghanistan does not exist or has simply withered away. Today, more than half of the Afghan population goes hungry. Civil servants who once served the government in the two decades before August 2021 do not have their jobs. The Taliban, despite making promises of ruling differently than they did between 1996 and 2001, have gone ahead with taking one medieval step after another.
They have pushed girls into their homes, informing them insensitively that no girl beyond the age of thirteen will have a right to education. In effect, the Taliban have gone out on a limb to make sure that Afghan girls grow into adulthood far removed from the rest of the world. For the Taliban, official policy is geared to a promotion of illiteracy for the country's female population.
In Kabul, much of which today resembles a place imprisoned in the 19th century owing to the scars testifying to its tragedy in the years since the Soviet invasion of December 1979, the Taliban leadership remain busy promoting policies that are in effect an absence of policy as we know it. The presence of the notorious Ministry for the Promotion of Virtues and Prevention of Vice is in itself a powerful commentary of the absolute lack of intellect which underscores the professionalism, or the absence of it, of the Taliban. Vice is when women go out to work, and virtue is when such women are stopped from doing their jobs.
Since August 2021, hundreds of women, employed as teachers in schools, colleges and universities, have been pushed back into the claustrophobia of their homes, for the Taliban have decreed --- and they base the decree on the false notion of God agreeing with them --- that when women go out to work, they indulge in vice. Women working with men in offices, for these Taliban, is tantamount to engaging in promiscuity.
The Taliban live in a world of their own, where women who have worked for international organisations and NGOs must now remain at home on pain of medieval-style floggings. Much though Afghanistan's new rulers may reassure the world that they will not return to their old ways, they have in point of fact gone back to the sordid behaviour which defined them in the old days.
Away from Kabul, concealed from the eyes of the world, prisoners are maltreated in public through floggings and with amputations of the hand in cases of thievery. There have been reports of officials who served the government in the twenty years between 2001 and 2021 being murdered by trigger-free young Taliban on instructions from the leadership.
And yet the problems which assail Afghanistan today cannot all be attributed to the Taliban. It should have been for the US and NATO powers to negotiate, before their precipitate withdrawal from the country, the modalities on which the Taliban would govern. Those modalities could have included guarantees of human rights, rule of law, women's rights and education and the need for Kabul to engage with the rest of the world in its efforts to guarantee a secure future for Afghans.
It is now obvious that the western presence in Afghanistan for over twenty years was an exercise in futility, given that the western-style democracy the Americans and their allies tried to build in the country was an exercise in failure. Indeed, twice in the recent past Afghans have rejected political systems imposed on them by foreigners. The Soviets mistakenly believed that they could impose communism on Afghanistan. Likewise, the Americans, under George W. Bush, thought a nation-state could be built out of its centuries-old tribal culture.
Political systems imported from outside have never proved credible or sustainable for nations going under foreign occupation in our times. Iraq and Libya, apart from Afghanistan, come to mind. That apart, western responsibility for the miseries Afghans have been going through in the last two years is patent today, with sanctions on the country keeping them in a state of deprivation.
It is not likely that the Taliban will be removed from power any time soon, which means the West will be doing itself and Afghanistan's people a whole lot of favour through reviewing the sanctions and indeed negotiating with the Taliban leadership on sanctions withdrawal. As much as $10 billion in Afghan assets are frozen abroad. From an ethical point of view, that money ought to be returned to the Afghan leadership in the broad interest of the welfare of Afghanistan's people.
Of Afghanistan's 42 million-plus population, as many as 20 million face starvation as a result of economic problems caused by sanctions, poor governance and a spate of droughts in the country. Farmers across much of the country have been in a dire state owing to crop failures in these past couple of years. And, of course, the country has not had the privilege of receiving foreign aid in terms especially of food.
Since August 2021, Afghanistan has been treated by the rest of the world as a pariah. That is a dangerous position to adopt which, if not abjured, will cause instability in the region. An increasingly hardened, embattled Taliban will resort to even harsher methods against Afghans, with many of them forced to seek refuge in neighbouring Pakistan and Iran.
In the councils of the world, Afghanistan needs to be prioritised once again. Ukraine is no reason for governments to be dismissive of Afghanistan's plight.

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