For its own good, the US should lift some of the sanctions against the Taliban.
President Biden’s indifference to Afghan women, to the modernizing society the US built there, to the heavy investment of American blood and treasure there, perhaps most of all to the stable government held in place by a small and safe American military force, is a stain on American history.
All this, however, should not govern American policy going forward.
Afghanistan faces two interrelated problems that, if unaddressed, will hurt this country. The US has the ability to address both of these problems. Does the US have the will? Or will America’s sclerotic Afghan policy prevent us from seeing and acting on these two issues?
The first issue is the coming humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. It is next to impossible for Afghan farmers to bring crops to market because of American sanctions, so the farmers turn to growing poppies, i.e., to fueling the worldwide supply of drugs.
And worldwide it is.
Afghanistan is responsible for a whopping 85% of the world’s supply of poppies! Reduced to poverty, Afghan farmers turn to the one crop that will keep them alive.
And the farmers, at least, have an alternative, however unpalatable to them and to the rest of us. Others in Afghanistan have no alternative. A humanitarian crises there in the coming winter months will leave Afghanistan ripe for the blandishments of terrorists, not to mention international shame aimed not only at the Taliban but at the US. The US could mitigate these ugly possibilities by lifting certain sanctions against the country that prevents its people from bringing normal products (fruits, grains, etc.) to market.
Needless to say, it is embarrassing, indeed shaming, to lift certain sanctions against a band of terrorists that fought for 20 years, that we mostly prevailed over, and that stands for everything we do not: lack of religious freedom, lack of democracy, inequality between the sexes, to name a few. But it is in our national interest to acknowledge facts on the ground and to act accordingly.
This would require America to assert some authority in Afghanistan once again, if only to ensure that aid reaches its intended recipients. It was always unrealistic for the US to believe that it could simply wash its hands of Afghanistan, cold turkey, black-and-white, and virtually instantaneously. A mental shift in US policy represents the toughest challenge here.
The second pressing issue is the viability of the remaining Afghan elementary and middle schools that educate women. Their teachers cannot be paid; their classrooms are difficult to keep open; their long- and-short term prospects are dim. The implications for an increasingly rigid, fanatic government in Afghanistan are clear. Here again, targeted American flexibility is required. That requires American will. Blanket, overall sanctions, however “feel good” to a defeated enemy, i.e., the US, are counterproductive.
Beyond these two immediate issues in Afghanistan, other, broader, geopolitical realities demand American flexibility.
“Be careful what you pray for” is an adage much appreciated in Afghanistan’s neighboring Pakistan these days. Pakistan was the Taliban’s ally. Pakistan wanted the US to lose in Afghanistan. Pakistan got what it prayed for — now what? Pakistan faces a porous border across which not only may terrorists flow from Pakistan to Afghanistan, but from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Suddenly, an emboldened fanatic government in Afghanistan does not loom as necessarily comforting for Pakistan.
What does this mean for the US? Consider this background:
• Pakistan is a country that puts people on trial for disobeying a tenet of Islam; religious intolerance, not only of non-Islamic religions, but of strands of Islam itself, is more than a social reality. It is a legal reality whose punishment is the death penalty. Although the death penalty has not been officially imposed in these religious intolerance trials, people have taken the law into their own hands and executed defendants. Once intolerance is legalized, it cannot be confined to the courtroom.
• Pakistan is a country ruled by the military with a civilian veneer. And Pakistan, of course, is a nuclear power.
• Pakistan retains its animus against America’s ally India over India’s continued control in Kashmir.
Against this background, the likelihood of emergent terrorist groups opposed not only to the West but to each other — across the Afghan-Pakistani border — must be followed as a strategic possibility. It is not just the dangers of a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that the indifferent and incompetent American withdrawal from Afghanistan exposed, but a broader, regional danger.
An American “hands off” policy of punishing sanctions on the Taliban, together with American renunciation of all involvement in Afghan affairs, invite terrorists in both Afghanistan and Pakistan to act with impunity.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
