It’s time for a thread about why Afghanistan looks the way it does today, at the end of 2021, on the verge of famine and universal poverty.

Not to restate the bleeding obvious, but Afghanistan had literally just left a state of open war for the first time in 43 years, barring a fragile quiet after the civil war.

Please do not underestimate the level of destruction you can wreak on a country and a people in 43 years. The majority of Afghanistan’s women and girls are still illiterate. An enormous challenge in itself.

Why did so little come of the hundreds of billions of dollars in development aid that international donors threw at Afghanistan? Simple put, that money was put in the service of a compromised Potemkin state and a contracting industry that took all the money for themselves.

If the legacy of a broken development system was simply embezzlement on an industrious scale, it would have been less damaging than the reality in Afghanistan, which meant aid money empowered bad faith Afghan actors willing to use the US occupation to their benefit.

That’s what happened to the money. What happened to the Potemkin state last under Ashraf Ghani’s nominal control? It had so little sway or legitimacy that it and its security forces folded as neatly as a house of cards, as so many of us predicted.

The US put its finger on the scale in every Afghan election, going so far as to send its own Secretary of State to negotiate a settlement for power between Ghani and Abdullah.

What happened to the Afghan economy? First of all, the Afghan economy grew relative to the number of international forces on the ground. That means the economy of war drove most of GDP. Reduce force presence without finding other ways to grow the economy and GDP fast contracts.

So, since 2014, economic conditions in Afghanistan were steadily deteriorating largely outside the gaze of international attention. And the war became deadlier, year on year, with no clear body count of combatant or civilian.

Alongside a severe drought crippling the agricultural sector, the Afghan economy simply could not grow in an environment of permanent war and uncertainty. And neither the Afghan government or its backers had a real solution.

When the Taliban arrived at the Arg in August, the economy was already in terrible shape. Millions of Afghans were already struggling as day laborers had lost work because of COVID. The humanitarian situation was grim, with officials raising raisin the alarm at the start of 2021.

Then what happened? Most people when they speak about “unfreezing Afghan assets” or “removing sanctions” are actually missing a critical issue. The real driver of collapse was @USTreasury’s decision to revoke the credentials of Da Afghanistan Bank, the Afghan central bank.

What does this mean? In lay terms it means the central bank cannot carry out most of its core functions, such as settling dollar transactions or handling foreign currency swaps or even purchasing afghanis.

In real life terms it means Afghans cannot access the small amounts of cash they need to buy food or fuel. It means business owners can’t pay their staff. It also means humanitarian organizations now struggle to access the currency they need to pay for operations and salaries.

So when I point the finger at US officials for driving the Afghan economy to collapse, this doesn’t mean that somehow the Taliban can somehow be absolved of all their sins and choices.

But it was international actors who funded the vast majority of state services in Afghanistan, especially the health care sector (which is also collapsing) and who cut that support at what was already a critical humanitarian moment.

What did everyone expect? That the Taliban, having won a 20-year war against the US, would turn around and become secular democrats? Get ahold of yourselves.

I think Taliban leadership has no future in Afghanistan because they cannot acknowledge or apologize for the decades of harm and trauma they caused for the Afghan people at large. But this doesn’t mean those people should starve to death to teach the Taliban a lesson.

TLDR don’t starve Afghan babies because you dislike the Taliban.