On Monday, an engineer set himself on fire in a Kabul street because he could not find work to feed his wife and three children. He died in hospital. It was the latest sign of desperation in Afghanistan, a nation that has seen people selling vital organs and even their daughters to buy food. ‘The country is experiencing the sharpest surge in malnutrition ever recorded,’ according to the World Food Programme, quite a claim for an organisation with data going back six decades. Seventeen million people face acute food insecurity, with women and children the hardest hit.
Apart from paying for repression the Taliban do little other governing, and take no responsibility for the collapse of the economy or the starving and dying people around them
Severe drought is a factor, but Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis is manmade. The men who made it are the misogynist tyrants of the Taliban, whose only governing principle is repression of women, backed up with extreme violence. The assault on rights and dignity for women is not just an add-on, an element of the Taliban’s moral code, it is the foundation on which they base their control of Afghanistan. Apart from paying for repression they do little other governing, and take no responsibility for the collapse of the economy or the starving and dying people around them.
Life for women gets worse by the day. There are some women still working in limited roles in health and midwifery, but as they retire they are not being replaced as there is no training, so access to basic health care is deteriorating. Secret girls’ schools and protest groups face fear being discovered by an increasingly sophisticated spying network. With China’s support, the Taliban are installing 60,000 security cameras around the country. In another technique from the Nineteen Eighty-Four playbook, they are demanding that people, including children, spy on their own families, according to the most comprehensive survey of women since the Taliban takeover in 2021. ‘Many women cooperate with the intelligence group,’ one woman told researchers. ‘I am afraid that the neighbours will report me.’ The Taliban make an absurd claim that their rules are designed to protect women, but this survey by the women’s rights group Farageer found that more than 60 per cent of Afghan women feel unsafe.
The worsening crisis has meant that thousands of people continue to flee Afghanistan in search of a better life and in most recent years Afghan migrants have been the largest group among those crossing the channel. Afghanistan is also once again a crucible for global terrorism, including acting as host for al Qaeda’s global HQ.
Nine ambassadors from the former Afghan republic remain in post almost five years after the fall of their government, flying the flag for another vision for Afghanistan, and are granted diplomatic immunity. But the UK and US were among the countries who forced the closure of their embassies, and there are increasing signs of a move towards ‘normalisation’ of relations with the Taliban, putting pressure on the remaining ambassadors to close their doors.
Russia is the only country to have formally recognised the Taliban, but there is creeping recognition by China, which has an embassy in Kabul in all but name, and others. Despite the humanitarian crisis, the instability caused by major refugee flows and the threat of terrorism, the UK is going along the same road. Apart from securing access to send in humanitarian aid, the UK wants to improve links with the Taliban to return migrants. Twenty other European countries have signed a joint appeal to the European Commission to negotiate a returns policy with the Taliban, and some, including Germany, have shamefully allowed Taliban diplomats to open consulates on their soil to facilitate migrant returns.
Given deep fractures at the top of the Taliban, as previously reported in The Spectator, and the increased likelihood that their hold on Afghanistan cannot last for ever, the single-minded determination of western nations to improve relations and pretend that Afghanistan is a normal country where returned migrants can live at peace is at best fanciful, and at worst dangerous. If the Taliban fracture with no alternative political plan in place, Afghanistan will collapse into chaos, with armed militia groups and increasingly dangerous Islamist terrorists fighting over the scraps.
Three years ago, the world signed up to a plan which charted a path to move towards a more inclusive government in Afghanistan. It proposed increased engagement in return for the Taliban agreeing to improve human rights, particularly for women, and engage in talks with opposition figures. The west’s current moves towards engagement without preconditions shows a failure of nerve and political will to support a return to stability in Afghanistan.
A more coherent policy would include some element of coercion, threatening to withhold money, at the same time opening space for armed opposition, while actively pursuing unity among opposition groups to create a platform for dialogue. Groups which include many members of the government of the former republic meet in various configurations in Europe, but without international sponsorship will not make the final leap towards unity. It would take very little funding to support this process, but instead of creating political space to build a coherent opposition platform, the west wants to open the doors to the Taliban. They seem to have forgotten that any Taliban consulate would be a Trojan horse for a terrorist regime.
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