It’s the same old story – the poor neglected wayward kid gets taken in by a manipulative thug; except this time it’s on a much larger scale. The Taliban is taking advantage of the poverty and suffering caused by Western foreign policy and allowed by the neglect of the world.
The Taliban have regained control over the southern half of Afghanistan and their frontline is advancing daily, a group closely monitoring the Afghan situation said in a report Tuesday.
“The Taliban frontline now cuts halfway through the country, encompassing all of the southern provinces,” the Senlis Council report says. The Senlis Council is an international policy think tank with offices in Kabul, London, Paris and Brussels.
The report from Senlis, which has reported extensively on Afghanistan over recent years, says also that “a humanitarian crisis of starvation and poverty has gripped the south of the country.” The report blames “the U.S. and UK-led failed counter-narcotics and military policies” for this situation…
“The subsequent rising levels of extreme poverty have created increasing support for the Taliban, who have responded to the needs of the local population,” the report says.
“We are seeing a humanitarian disaster,” Emmanuel Reinert, executive director of The Senlis Council told IPS. “There are around Kandahar now camps with people starving, kids dying almost every day, and this is obviously used by the Taliban to regain the confidence of the people, and to regain control of the country.”
I guess the late and great Martin Luther King’s words still ring true today, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period … was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”