Afghanistan heading for disaster

Dec 29 2021 The Guardian

Gordon Brown: west is sleepwalking into Afghanistan disaster

Ex-PM warns poverty and starvation mean country is at risk of world’s biggest humanitarian crisis

Dec 30 2021

‘On the brink’: drought and politics leave Afghans fighting famine

Aid collapse after Taliban took control means just 2% of people have enough to eat, UN says

Let me make one thing clear: I do not want to help the Taliban stay in power and run the country and repress the people, I want to help the Afghan people survive.

More than half the population of the country, about 23 million people, are facing hunger in the coming winter months.

Even if we did not care about saving Afghan lives, we should help, if only out of self-interest. If 23 million people face starvation in Afghanistan, there will definitely be millions of desperate refugees, and some of them will eventually end up in the borders of our countries; providing of course that they survive the journey…

Well, what would You do? Stay in your war-torn country and watch your children die of hunger, or try to find a place where you could save them?

We spent a lot of money fighting the war, I think we can afford to spend some more to save the people who suffered from the war.

Giving help means we will gain access to the country and leverage with the Taliban; now is not the time for politics, we have to deal with that later.

And when the time for politics eventually arrives, we should remember what the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said about peace negotiations: "You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies."