The world failed Afghans

M Ashraf Haidari. Credit: Special arrangement

August 15, 2021 marked one of the darkest moments in Afghan history, as well as in the history of the United Nations Charter. The world watched with silence for several months before 8/15, as the Pakistani military had been providing the Taliban with full-spectrum support to topple the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. This grossly violated the UN Charter, which requires the UN member-states to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, avoiding any overt and covert aggressive measures for invading and occupying each other’s territories.

To the contrary, however, the Taliban and their sponsor availed themselves of the opportunity to do exactly the opposite, following the abrupt decision by the United States government to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan. To halt the aggression of the Pakistani military through the Taliban, the UN Security Council should have acted on the key provisions of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which created the framework for “Action with Respect to Acts of Aggression”. But, much to the disappointment of the Afghan people, the UN Security Council just issued general statements of concern about the situation in Afghanistan. Nothing more!

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Consequently, Afghanistan has suffered from one of the worst brain-drains in its recent history, as 1000s of educated Afghans have fled the Taliban’s oppressive rule over the past year. As the Taliban is a UN sanctioned militant group, the world has refused to recognize it, freezing Afghanistan’s foreign exchange reserves. Without human and financial resources, the country’s once developing state institutions have crumbled, failing to provide Afghan citizens with such basic services as health-care, education, clean water and sanitation, as well as to prevent and manage recurrent natural disasters.

At the same time, the Taliban have banned women from work and girls from education, effectively depriving the Afghan society, polity, and economy of female participation with a direct adverse impact on Afghanistan’s socio-economic development. Since August 2021, for example, Afghanistan’s maternal, child, and infant mortality rates have returned to their pre-2001 grim status. As a result, more Afghans have died under the Taliban’s misrule over the past year than annually in the years that preceded the fall of the Islamic Republic.

Moreover, in complete violation of the many UN Security Council resolutions and their own commitments under the Doha Agreement, the Taliban have harbored major regional and global terrorist groups. The Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri moved to Kabul shortly after the Taliban took over the capital. The Taliban’s minister of interior, Sirajuddin Haqqani, had been hosting and protecting al-Zawahiri before he was killed by the US drone strikes on July 31 last.

Further, Afghanistan under the Taliban now produces the world’s largest share of illicit drugs, including opium, heroine, and increasingly meth. While drugs wreck the lives of young addicts at home and throughout the world, revenues from drugs finance the Taliban’s repressive regime, daily persecuting, disappearing, and extrajudicially killing Afghan citizens. Their targets are often former members of the Afghan national security forces, as well as ethnic Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmans and nationalist and pro-democracy Pashtuns.

These ever-growing intertwined challenges of terrorism, drugs, economic collapse, and humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan pose major threats to regional stability and international security. To prevent another 9/11-like tragedy emanating from Afghanistan, the responsible member-states of the UN, including India, must revive Afghanistan’s dead peace process and enable it to produce a sustainable political settlement.

Any resulting agreement among all Afghan sides, including the Taliban, should form an inclusive government, consistent with Afghanistan’s Constitution and international obligations. A multinational implementation force under a robust UN peacekeeping mandate should be deployed in Afghanistan until an inclusive government can take over and consolidate itself to the extent that it can maintain and sustain peace on its own.

(The writer is Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Sri Lanka and previously served as Deputy Ambassador to India. He tweets at @MAshraf Haidari)