Afghanistan
Reports
Vanda Felbab-Brown
Director - Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors
Co-Director - Africa Security Initiative
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
![Afghan Islamic Taliban fighters fire a Soviet-made cannon against former government forces on the front line, 30 km north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, November 5. [The dismissal of the Pakistan's government of Prime Minister Benazir-Bhutto could have important ramifications for Afghanistan's Taleban militia, now locked in war with a northern alliance.]](https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Afghan-Islamic-Taliban-fighters-fire-a-Soviet-made-cannon-against-former-government-forces.jpg?w=617&crop=0%2C28px%2C100%2C347px&ssl=1)
For the past year, you've seen that perhaps no leverage that the US and the West thought it had — aid, sanctions, the freezing of Afghanistan's reserves — has really had an effect on Taliban behavior. The Taliban has essentially done what they had always done. The Afghan people have been in a humanitarian crisis because the Taliban hasn't budged.
[Who is to blame for Afghanistan's current crises is a] tug of war in some ways. The people who are suffering are ordinary Afghans. [Politically, it’s difficult for the US to release foreign financial assets as long as the Taliban remains in charge.] The US can’t really just say, ‘Okay, you know what, we’re going to unfreeze your central bank funds and essentially insert liquidity in the economy,’ because that really looks like you’re essentially letting the Taliban get away with it.