West must stop playing "Great Game" in Afghanistan once and for all

The Financial Times has published an opinion piece arguing that Afghanistan’s current policy is harming the prospects of women and girls the most. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

I was the first senior UN official to return to Kabul after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. America and its allies had been welcomed. But I recall one moment of dissent, when an elderly Afghan woman pressed an egg into my hand and angrily told me it was all that remained of her chicken farm, destroyed in the invasion.

As television cameras rolled, I mumbled something about a few eggs being not too high a price to pay for freedom. It makes for a melancholy memory. We are approaching the second anniversary of the Taliban’s declaration of victory on August 31 2021.

Some 28.8mn Afghans require immediate assistance, up from 18.4mn then; 6mn are one step from famine. Women and girls have been doubly hit by both the Taliban’s rollback of their rights — including to work and learn — and wider crises of poverty and hunger that harm them the most.

Once more Afghanistan is isolated: denied diplomatic recognition, aid drying up, sanctioned and its assets frozen. In the US and Britain, many are all too keen to brush the policy failures the country represents under the proverbial carpet; best forgotten before the next elections. But this is also part of a longer cycle, of geopolitical and regional competition that has consistently failed to put the Afghan people first.

Through most of the 1980s, the Soviet Union waged bloody war against mujahideen who were in part armed and funded by the US. In the 1990s, the rise of the Taliban was initially met with indifference in the west.

The 9/11 attacks and the invasion changed that, and in the 2000s and 2010s western governments built a fragile, over-centralised republic that crumbled when they withdrew. Whether the policy has been proxy war or neglect, invasion or sponsorship of insurgents, surge or drawdown, outsiders have consistently ill-served the country’s people in a way that has typically led to the next chapter in the tragedy.

Today’s isolation may seem justified in light of the Taliban’s brutality, human rights abuses and sheer misgovernment — and the fact that limited talks have run up against its refusal to cooperate without diplomatic recognition. But this has the perverse effect of harming the regime’s victims most. The UN’s call for $3.26bn in assistance this year had elicited only 25 per cent of that by early August, with Britain’s contribution falling from $454mn last year to $23mn so far this year.

Where organisations have been able to circumvent bans on women working, it has often been thanks to local, informal deals. Prioritising ordinary Afghans such as the woman with the egg involves dealing with the regime, even if that means making nominal concessions to it.

A contact group of western powers, Afghanistan’s neighbours, the Taliban and ideally Afghan civil society might thus pursue goals including a more humane counter-narcotics strategy, improved flows of aid, especially to women and girls, and much greater clarity on sanctions to encourage foreign investment in areas such as irrigation.

It might engage with Afghan actors beyond the Taliban, sowing the seeds of a more inclusive polity. All parties have a vital interest in preventing the country plunging over the edge.

Famine, state failure and even new conflict in Afghanistan would further destabilise Pakistan and the wider region, and make further refugees flee the country. Afghans now make up the largest cohort attempting to cross the English Channel.

This presents western and other leaders with a simple choice: keep pursuing “Great Game” politics or for once put the people of Afghanistan first. More than 30 years of the former have got us where we are. A new approach is long overdue.