Steve Coll writes:

At the end of last week, all of Afghanistan’s airports remained closed to commercial flights. Neighboring countries had shut their borders. Long after the world’s attention turns away, the great majority of the population will “remain inside Afghanistan,” Filippo Grandi, the current U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said. “They need us.” Drought, economic collapse, and covid have left millions of Afghans “marching towards starvation,” David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Programme, warned.

On 9/11, Americans discovered that their security was inseparable from that of Afghans suffering in a distant, shattered country ruled by the Taliban and adopted by bin Laden, the Taliban’s guest. Al Qaeda is still there, although intelligence agencies judge that it is now far less capable of striking the continental United States. Still, the presence of a branch of the Islamic State and the Taliban’s return to power can hardly be comforting. Fawzia Koofi, a women’s-rights activist who escaped to Qatar last week, after earlier surviving an assassination attempt by the Taliban, told the BBC, “If the world thinks that this is not their business . . . trust me, sooner or later this will actually go to their borders again.”

It would be unfortunate if the lesson America draws from its Afghan debacle is that it should forswear large investments in human dignity and health in very poor countries. The climate crisis and the pandemic make plain that we face new border-hopping threats to our collective security. For both moral and practical reasons, the United States has cause to provide substantial humanitarian aid to troubled nations and even, in a supporting role, to strengthen their security—perhaps having fashioned a foreign policy, if it is not too much to hope, informed by a measure of humility and a capacity for self-reflection. [Continue reading…]