EDITORIAL - While it’s not too late

As of this writing yesterday it seems that virtually all of Afghanistan, except for its capital Kabul, has fallen to the Taliban.

By all accounts the Taliban also aims to occupy that city, now choked with throngs of refugees who fled before its advance in other parts of the country. Like we said in a previous editorial, we don’t expect them to stop at nothing short of total domination of that country.

The western powers that previously occupied Afghanistan have a lot of responsibility to make sure that it doesn’t fall into the hands of the Taliban again. Make no mistake that what is happening there is partly their fault; they tried to remake the Afghanistan system of governance into something acceptable to their standards and left it alone too soon.

It was a system that was too weak, even after almost two decades of nurturing. A people who are ethnically divided and used to a tribal law system will not immediately be able to grasp the nuances of democracy only after one generation.

Fortunately, US President Joe Biden seems to have understood the severity of the situation and ordered the deployment of 1,000 US troops to help secure the emergency evacuation from Kabul, on top of the 3,000 American soldiers deployed there in recent days and the 1,000 still assigned there.

Their presence, even if it is not to directly engage the enemy, will no doubt give the Taliban forces some pause. They are not likely interested to go toe-to-toe with enemies with better logistics, armaments, and air support after all.

Of course, we hope more action will be taken and by other western powers that have a stake in this region.

Again, many will ask why this should be the concern of others outside Afghanistan. They will say we are already dealing with too many issues.

They are actually right in that regard. But the problems we have now --including climate change, the pandemic, political unrest, and economic situations in many countries around the world, for example-- are usually the result of something we didn’t do yesterday, or a few years back, or a decade ago.

Extremism, hate, and intolerance grew in that region, and was left to fester for decades. The result was the most horrific terrorist attack in human history that continues to affect many of us until now.

Given its history, the Taliban will be the likely source of even more problems in the future, it’s better to do something about them now while they are still fighting rather than later when they have dug in.