The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan that was coordinated by the former Trump administration and spearheaded by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo is turning into a humanitarian disaster. A massive draught in the country has led to crop failures, and damage to infrastructure from years of insurgent wars have left the country facing a crushing food shortage.

The Taliban government has proven completely incompetent at being able to manage the nation’s economics or banking systems. Foreign banks are reluctant to invest in the country, because of the irate and flaky nature of Taliban leaders. “The Taliban’s human rights record, in particular with respect to women and ethnic minorities, makes the reluctance of the international community to legitimise the regime and allow funding to the Afghan state understandable. No one wants to fund the Taliban regime,” reports Al Jazeera.

That reluctance has been heightened by recent reports of clashes between Taliban fighters and Iranian soldiers along the Iran-Afghanistan border.

A recent United Nations report claimed that Afghanistan has no hope of economic recovery without the participation of women in the work-force, and that “97% of the nation’s people could be living in abject poverty by mid 2022.”

The failure of the Taliban to manage Afghanistan’s economy appears to highlight the pointlessness of the former US presence in Afghanistan, and how much better the United States is to be out of the country entirely. Now that the Afghan economy is collapsing, the United States can simply sit back and watch the Taliban become victims of their own incompetence, and offer food and medical aid in exchange for conditions such as increasing human-rights and work opportunities for women, rather than wasting endless blood and treasure trying to prop up the Afghan economy while simultaneously being derided as the oppressive occupying nation.