How aid can nudge the Taliban

Five months after the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the country has become the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. About half of its 40 million people are hungry, with dire forecasts for the winter. In response, both the United States and United Nations announced major relief efforts on Tuesday. The U.S. will give $308 million in new humanitarian aid while the U.N. made a global appeal for $4.4 billion in assistance.

Yet the big news may be this: After taking stock of the Taliban’s harsh style of rule, both the U.S. and U.N. vowed to bypass the new government and work directly with independent humanitarian groups.

The aid will be distributed based on listening to the priorities of local Afghans. It is designed to build up individual resiliency and encourage consensus around shared values. And it will be inclusive of all Afghans regardless of ethnicity or gender.

This bottom-up, pro-women approach may help prevent the U.S. and U.N. from working directly with a morally suspect regime and prevent aid money from being diverted to the Taliban’s purposes. It could also allow Afghans to follow local norms of self-governance, challenging the Taliban’s top-down authoritarian rule.

“We would do well to figure out what it is that’s going to be helpful for the Afghan people, and then work backwards to negotiate with the Taliban on that basis,” Azza Karam, a professor of religion and development at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, told Foreign Policy magazine.

This listen-first approach is not new in international aid. The Biden administration, for example, promises to provide 25% of U.S. aid to local organizations, especially in Central America, up from 6%. Yet in Afghanistan, the listen-and-learn approach is a necessity.

“Just because we’re the United States does not mean we’re going to solve the problem with more people and more money,” says Robert Jenkins, a top USAID official. “We need to engage locals. ... We need to listen to them.”

Applying this approach in Afghanistan could be a model for other trouble spots. “By the end of this decade, 85% of the extreme poor – some 342 million people – are going to be living in fragile and conflict-affected states,” says USAID Administrator Samantha Power. “So we have to shift our focus, not just in terms of where we work but with whom we partner.”

American aid, she adds, must be “rooted in the societies in which we work.” In Afghanistan, the aid could help restore hope of self-governance. It could keep democratic values alive during Taliban rule.