The Worldbank has announced that: “The Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) donors today decided to transfer out $280 million in ARTF funds by the end of December 2021 to UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP). This decision is the first step to repurpose funds in the ARTF portfolio to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan at this critical time.” The announcement comes as the Taliban government is struggling to feed the population of a country that is no longer being propped up by a massive and on-going US occupation. Famine in Afghanistan is the result of a massive drought, and damage done to crops and key communications, transportation and agricultural infrastructure by Taliban fighters. The BBC reports that 3 million Afghan children are on the verge of starvation after the failure of the nation’s wheat crop.

Other radical fundamentalist religious groups have also been staging violent attacks on Afghan cities. Al Jazeera reports that on Friday, December 10th, “at least two people have been killed and four others injured in two separate bomb explosions in the Afghan capital Kabul… when a bomb exploded on Friday on a minibus in the Dasht-e-Barchi district of Kabul…Dasht-e-Barchi is largely populated by the mostly Shia Hazara community, which for years has been the target of violence by the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), an affiliate of the ISIL (ISIS) armed group. In November, a similar bomb attack on a minibus in Dasht-e-Barchi killed two people and wounded five others. That attack was claimed by the ISKP.”

The country is also struggling from a lack of doctors, nurses, and educators, as thousands of Afghan professionals fled the country to avoid being tortured or murdered by Afghan forces. That phenomena illustrates one of the key problems that affects all populist movements: populist leaders appeal to the economically and socially frustrated by fostering their resentment of “elites”, but a society isn’t able to function without medical, educational and administrative professionals to perform key roles, and attempts to replace highly educated with individuals who are barely literate and have no professional training or experience typically leads to bumbling and even comical results.

Biden’s “tough-love” strategy with Afghans doesn’t seem to be widely understood in the US, but it’s the only viable option with a country like Afghanistan. No foreign power can defeat the Taliban or any other extremist group because once a foreign power shows up all of the extremist groups focus on the occupying power and all of the nation’s problems are blamed on that foreign government. Sometimes the best possible course of action is to take a step back, let the extremists fight among themselves, and wait for the anger and frustration of the people build to the point where they boot out the extremists, then turn around and ask for international support for a moderate government that doesn’t include religious zealots and gun-toting psychopaths.