Saad Mohseni writes:

In Afghanistan, young babies are now starving to death. Those parents who fear this fate are selling off their children to survive themselves. More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people do not have enough to eat and are “marching to starvation,” in the haunting words of the World Food Program. By next year, the United Nations warns, 95 percent of the country could be plunged into poverty.

Two months after the Taliban’s takeover, Afghanistan is reeling from the quadruple crises of conflict, coronavirus, climate change and economic collapse. Together, they have created a humanitarian situation that threatens to become more dire by the day — all of which happened under the watch of the international community. Meanwhile, international terrorist groups, like al Qaeda and the Islamic State, are reconstituting and could pose a threat to Western targets within the next year, according to counterterrorism officials. And yet, the Biden administration still has no real Afghanistan policy.

Washington has been principally focused on the evacuations of U.S. citizens and green card holders, as well as resettling Afghan allies who fled. It has paid little attention to the fate of the millions who were left behind after the withdrawal of international forces in August. Diplomatic engagement has been downgraded, with more junior officials appointed as the State Department’s special representative to Afghanistan and to head up the “Afghan affairs unit” in Doha, Qatar. The U.S. also stayed away from a recent meeting in Moscow, effectively ceding its space to the other members of the “troika plus” group on Afghanistan: Russia, China and Pakistan.

President Joe Biden may wish to forget about Afghanistan, but there’s never been a more urgent need for the U.S. to stay involved. A military withdrawal should not mean diplomatic disengagement, no matter how politically embarrassing the episode was for the White House. The crises that are consuming Afghanistan threaten to exacerbate the very problems Washington intervened to deal with in the first place. Biden does not have to formally recognize the Taliban, but neither can he wish away their control of the country. Working closely with international partners, the U.S. should ensure aid gets to those who need it most — even if that means dealing with the people they battled for 20 years. [Continue reading…]