CBS, PBS, The Guardian, and the Washington Post have all also run dispatches from the ground. “But I had never seen a crisis like this.” Reporting from Afghanistan for The New Yorker, Jane Ferguson described the situation as “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis” Saeed Shah reported for the Wall Street Journal that some parents are selling their children to survive.
“I’ve covered severe droughts, I’ve covered countries on the brink of famine,” Goldbaum said.
Last month, Christina Goldbaum, a Kabul-based correspondent for the New York Times, went on the paper’s Daily podcast and outlined how banks are running out of cash and severely malnourished children are overwhelming healthcare facilities. troops to come home.īonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities and weekend editor at The Week.In recent weeks, a number of journalists at major outlets have voiced their alarm about the economic catastrophe that’s unfolding in Afghanistan in the wake of the US withdrawal from the country and its takeover by the Taliban. It will still be time to stop reprising 18 years of strategic miscalculation and unrealistic expectations. That will still be true even if these hopeful talks with the Taliban ultimately fail. strategic priorities, Afghanistan comes nowhere close to justifying the trillion-plus dollars that the United States has spent there since it first intervened.” interests have never been other than marginal,” Bacevich noted. prosecution of this oft-forgotten war will not benefit Americans, either. We will not fight our way to remaking Afghanistan in the American image. occupation will not help Afghanistan move toward peace, let alone Western-style prosperity and democratic governance. The last 18 years have demonstrated that prolonging U.S. Still, if none of that happens - if discussions break down and the present progress is undone - the imperative of an American exit remains. Ideally, that exit would be accompanied by the conditions Khalilzad named: the Taliban’s rejection and policing of terrorist activity in Afghan territory, a durable cease-fire, and U.S.-facilitated intra-Afghan talks. While all Khalilzad’s negotiations deserve cheer and support, the administration would do well to remain focused on the higher-priority goal of an American exit from Afghanistan. The appointment of Khalilzad as the United States’ special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation last year seems to have been something of a turning point, and the challenge now will be to press forward on the basis of this week’s unprecedented progress, despite probable setbacks and the counterweight of inertia from Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment. negotiations with the Taliban - they began about a decade ago and have continued on an intermittent, often secretive basis in the years since - President Donald Trump’s impulse to “get the hell out” of Afghanistan and his affection for deal-making have here combined to necessary and overdue effect. Though this administration did not initiate U.S. Khalilzad’s announcement is a significant, if preliminary, vindication of a more realistic approach. Andrew Bacevich (ret.) wrote last month - for which “stalemate” is too kind a term. The war in Afghanistan is a “debacle of epic proportions” - as military historian Col. The problem is not that we did too little in Afghanistan it is that we did too much of the wrong thing at too high a price, for too long, in doomed anticipation of unachievable results. Yet, Afghanistan today remains in turmoil, with anemic institutions of governance and civil society, ongoing violence, a seemingly permanent refugee crisis, and a robust Taliban presence in (if not outright control of) large portions of the country. tax dollars - all of it borrowed, much of it lost or wasted. This war has cost tens of thousands of American and Afghan lives and trillions of U.S.