Afghanistan faces economic cataclysm with no dollars coming in
- War-stressed Afghanistan heavily reliant on outside dollars
- Taliban’s return to power plunges group into realities of governance
With the Taliban cementing its grip over Afghanistan, the country faces an economic cataclysm as world powers and international financial institutions move to withhold or freeze billions of dollars in assets and aid from a government run by a pariah movement.
The militant group’s blitz into the Afghan capital, Kabul, leaves it in charge of a war-stressed state heavily reliant on outside dollars that over the last two decades have covered three quarters of government spending. Some of that may be in jeopardy as the Taliban is subject to a bevy of sanctions from the US, European Union and the United Nations.
Without that money – Kabul received US$4.2 billion in development assistance in 2019 – the government is all but bankrupt. The Taliban is facing enormous pressure to show Afghans and the world that, beyond upholding the tenets of Islam, it can pay civil servants, buy fuel, pick up garbage, run hospitals and develop a country more modernised and transformed from when the group first ruled between 1996 and 2001.
The Taliban’s return to power – its sneaker-wearing, camo-fitted fighters roam the capital – has plunged the group into the realities of governance. Sporadic protests against it have broken out across the country by a population that has grown accustomed to smartphones, civil liberties, education and other freedoms that came with years of American occupation.
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The group is suppressing resistance while attempting to show the international community, including China and other regional investors, that, despite its militant roots and Islamist fundamentalism, it can lead a nation. Image has become increasingly important: Taliban spokesmen have been reaching out to foreign journalists in Kabul, suggesting the group is not what it was 20 years ago, when women were forbidden from working and forced to wear burkas.
Not far from where those spokesmen congregate is another image, that of thousands of Afghans running a chaotic gauntlet of dangers, including truncheon-wielding Taliban fighters, to make their way to the airport and escape the country.