While the United States, along with its allies, left Afghanistan in August 2021 in spectacularly humiliating circumstances, the departure was never entirely complete, nor bound to be permanent.  Since then, Washington has led the charge in handicapping those who, with a fraction of the resources, defeated a superpower and prevailed in two decades of conflict.

In a fit of wounded pride, the United States has, in turn, sought to strangulate and asphyxiate the Taliban regime, citing human rights and security concerns.  The Talibans Interim Foreign Minister, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, makes the not unreasonable point that the ongoing crisis is the imposition of sanctions and banking restrictions by the United States.

In May this year, Idaho Republican Senator Jim Risch, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led 18 of his righteous colleagues in introducing the Taliban Sanctions Act, promising more chastising.  Ostensibly, the Act seeks to impose sanctions with respect to terrorism, human rights abuses, and narcotics trafficking committed by the Taliban and others in Afghanistan.

The brief for prosecuting an even more aggressive stance against the Taliban never ceases to bulk, be it to arrest the mistreatment of women and their inexorable marginalisation, or the claim that the country is now essentially a bandit state which is both a danger to itself and its neighbours.  Over a year into Taliban rule, breakdown of the state, bankruptcy of financial institutions, economic collapse and diplomatic isolation have pushed Afghan society to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe, writes a former senior advisor to Afghanistans Foreign Minister, Arian Sharifi, currently an academic at Princeton Universitys School of International Affairs.

Sharifi goes on to analyse the Taliban in what resembles a portrait of the ramshackle government he served.  The Taliban today is deeply divided, making it unable to pursue a unified course of action.  They also ruled a country with more than 20 terrorist groups with a long-standing presence in Afghanistan.

In typical good taste, Sharifi delicately ignores his role in having advised a corrupt government whose strings were firstly pulled, then abandoned, by Washington and its allies.  His poisonous pen fails to acknowledge the attempt by his own past sponsors to systematically contribute to that very failure, bankruptcy and ruin.  He can, however, take some hope in recent reports suggesting that Afghanistan will again become a playground for what British imperialists dubbed in the 19^th century the Great Game, the Anglo-Russian competition for influence...