The Afghan quandary

The U.S. and the allies it led into war in Afghanistan now face a genuine moral quandary. Their 20-year effort to defeat the Taliban and turn the country into some sort of democracy has failed; now the Taliban are running things, and millions of people are starving. Whose job is it to feed Afghanistan now?

From a pure humanitarian point of view, the question is senseless. People are starving; they must be fed. But as a student of government, I'm not sure the matter is so simple.

The Taliban have no particular experience in seeing to it that people get fed, nor has that ever been their especial interest. If the donor nations decide that the river of aid that kept the country solvent these many years should continue to flow to the Taliban’s Afghanistan, at least arguably we/they will be enabling this medieval cult of violence cloaked in supposed Islam.

There could be a neat division of labor for generations henceforth: The western world sees to it that Afghans don't starve while the Taliban accomplishes its own tasks — outlawing music, preventing women from being regular people who get to do things, beheading nonbelievers, stuff like that. Would this be a good result?

I don’t think so. However, there’s a question as to whether a good result of any kind is possible there. The reason to cut off aid and let the Taliban sink or swim on its own would be the hope that they will fail and be replaced by something better — but good governance has never happened in Afghanistan, period, which casts doubt on that strategy.

I’m not sure anyone else is sweating this stuff, though; the current thinking seems to be that the Taliban is the enemy of ISIS, and therefore the Taliban is OK after all.

Eric Kuhn Middletown