Afghanistan: Abandoned by God and the West
Afghanistan's 40 million inhabitants must now ask themselves why a majority of them supported the Taliban's return to power. Why?
The elderly remembered the draconian regime of the pious holy warriors.
They knew that the West would not accept the Taliban. Yet the collapse of their economy surprised the Afghans more than the fall of the old government had surprised the West.
Why did no one see the catastrophe coming?
The Taliban lacked a think tank to warn them. The West believed until the end that it had the situation under control. Mutual recriminations are useless. In the West, one may think that the famine will teach Afghans to hate the Taliban and their Islamism. The Taliban will be happy that the famine will teach Afghans that there is food and money from the West only if one worships the dollar and betrays Allah.
So why the catastrophe?
The Afghanistan of today is a very different country than the one of 2002, when the Taliban first ruled and were driven out by the Western coalition. Back then, there were 22.6 million Afghans, growing at an annual rate of 4.6 percent - a record increase in global terms. No wonder the country is now, in 2022, populated by 40.8 million Afghans, still continuing to increase at 2.34 percent per year.
In the years of Western dominance, the population has almost doubled. This fact is the elephant in the room of all considerations about Afghanistan. The West, which occupied the country in order to wipe out the Islamic terrorists of Bin Laden & Co - and in the process overthrew the Taliban - boosted the growth trend of the population.
Rising national income, connection to the world economy - that meant years of hope and progress for the Afghans, who reacted with more births despite the war ongoing in the country. But because the boom was financed from abroad, Afghanistan became a subsidy economy without a domestic basis.
Afghanistan's economy: an artificial flower which withered when the subsidies disappeared
The West, without even thinking about it, took responsibility for the survival of the new half of the population.
Afghanistan cannot feed itself in this situation, and the consequent extreme food shortage is shocking, comparable only to famines in the wake of crop failures such as the potato famine of the 1840s in Ireland.
That the Afghans must be helped is obvious. That the Taliban are so unsavory that no one wants contact them makes the plight tragic. As always in such situations - think Syria - the wrongdoers would be the first ones to benefit from international aid. Wellfed Taliban in American army jeeps controlling the distribution of Western food donations to starving hordes of beggars, that would be images likely to shock the world.
Heinrich von Loesch