The International Crisis Group (ICG) senior consultant, Graeme Smith, in an interview with a Hong Kong-based newspaper, the South China Morning Post, said that helping people in Afghanistan without benefiting the Taliban is impossible.
“There is no textbook for a situation where a group of enlisted terrorists take over an entire country, so everybody is making up the rules as they go along,” Graeme Smith said. “It is impossible to do that without also benefiting the people running the country,” he added.
The Crisis Group official considers the reluctance of the International Community to interact with the Taliban to be caused by the restrictive and extremist policies of the group.
“Right now, we are locked in this toxic relationship where the outside world is trying to help the people without helping the Taliban. Which is a farce. It can’t be achieved.” Smith said.
According to the newspaper, the US and its allies in the western countries remain virulently opposed to engaging with the Taliban. A representative of US department wrote to the newspaper “legitimacy is earned by actions, and the Taliban’s decisions have put them further than ever from international recognition,” and “with each new restrictive policy they make prospects for normalization more remote, both within Afghanistan and with the international community.”
The newspaper further added that isolated, friendless, impoverished Afghanistan is hardly in a position to pay for the repairs itself. According to World Bank data from 2021, Afghanistan with US$368.75 GDP per capita was among the lowest in the world. Without outside help, the Taliban does not have any way to raise or to borrow the money it needs to provide key services to its citizens.
But, according to the newspaper, the Taliban leadership instead of admiring weakness, seems to have chosen a different tactic: denying public services to half the country, ostensibly on moral ground.
