EDITORIAL: Experts on Afghanistan are a dime a dozen these days. And in the middle of all the noise about the right way forward, PM Imran Khan hit the nail on the head when he said that the West should “incentivize” the Taliban to get them to make the kind of progress that everybody wants there. And there isn’t a lot of time to do it in. The Taliban are desperate for cash, so it won’t be long before they are forced to look for other options if the more prominent capitals take their sweet time deciding. For, making history by snatching the country back from the mightiest military machine the world has ever seen also brings with it the burden of running the whole place. That runs into money - lots of it - and so far there’s nothing to suggest that the Taliban don’t understand where their best chances of getting quick cash lie; and how to get it.
Right now there’s no way to get the money to them because the international community isn’t going to recognise the new regime in Kabul until it forms an “inclusive government,” shows respect for women and minority rights, etc. In a way PM Imran Khan was trying to say that such an approach amounts to putting the cart before the horse. And it is true that things don’t seem to be getting anywhere and the main problem is that the Afghan government is bankrupt. So why not turn the aid back on and then see if they deliver on their promises or not; and do it before they start exporting poppy or make deals with rogue governments?
There is, as has been argued in this space before, a fine line between recognition and engagement. The British government has already admitted that it would have to “engage with the Taliban”, considering ground realities, even if recognition is out of the question for the time being. Besides, keeping Afghanistan cash-starved right now will hurt the people there much more than the government. The United Nations (UN) has just warned that food supplies will run out by the end of the month and unless a lot more money than the $1.2 billion pledged last week is put together very soon, a humanitarian catastrophe will surely unfold in Afghanistan. That is why the US couldn’t have done worse than freezing close to $10 billion of the Afghan central bank’s money to keep the Taliban from getting their hands on it.
Islamabad has clearly learnt some right lessons from 20 years of war in Afghanistan, and its spillover effect in this country. That perhaps is why it is providing the best advice as well. That makes it a little strange that Washington seems to be revisiting its “do more” tone of the past, even after the Pakistani government facilitated the talks that led to the end of the war. Such an approach would be to nobody’s benefit and the time is coming to point out that if the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was unseemly, to put it very mildly, its actions since the departure risk making a bad situation much worse.
A direct comparison with the old Soviet war is not possible, of course, but there is some weight in the argument that the US is bent upon repeating a mistake from that time; of leaving the region as soon as its business was done here. Just the fact that the previous mistake resulted in the making of al Qaeda, and the 9/11 attacks, and everything that followed, ought to be enough to keep Washington from going down the same road again. Yet that’s exactly what it is doing.
By squeezing Afghanistan and blaming Pakistan, instead of making sure the Afghan government doesn’t collapse completely, America is only betraying frustration at a very humiliating loss; that too at the hands of very ordinary, poor peasants and clerics most of whom barely manage two full meals a day. Hopefully, the Americans will take their foot off the brakes and let aid back into Afghanistan in time to avoid a major catastrophe. On top of hunger and famine, there is also the ever-present threat of civil war. And the only thing that can calm things down right now is a lot of institutional financial support.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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