The end of the world’s deadliest war has not put a stop to the suffering of the Afghan people. To the contrary, hunger and destitution following the Taliban’s takeover of the country seem poised to kill more Afghans than all the bombs and bullets of the past two decades. The Afghan state is teetering on the edge of full collapse, as the UN warns that the country is fast becoming the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.

Some of the escalating misery cannot be avoided: when a war economy disintegrates, the adjustments will always be hard, especially when crops are failing as they are in 2021. Not surprisingly, the Taliban were better at fighting an insurgency than running a modern economy and have shown little sign of compromise since seizing power. But donors’ decisions to cut off all but emergency aid is the biggest culprit.

International actors must revisit that fateful choice, finding ways to work with the Taliban in restoring crucial public services, if they are to stave off a calamity for which they would shoulder much of the blame.

The enormity of the economic shock that hit Afghanistan in August is a consequence of donors, first, building an extremely aid-dependent Afghan state since 2001 and then, after the Taliban takeover on 15 August, dramatically curtailing that aid.

Before U.S. and international troops withdrew, virtually every essential state function depended on donor money. With the troops’ departure, the Afghan political order collapsed, and the Taliban swept into Kabul. Immediately, donors refused direct cooperation with the new Taliban regime, cutting off the funds that had paid salaries for civil servants and other costs of government institutions. They also froze Afghan state assets and allowed pre-existing sanctions on the Taliban to become de facto sanctions on the Afghan government.

Today, donors are providing humanitarian aid, but this limited type of emergency assistance is insufficient to arrest the worsening humanitarian and economic crises.

The human cost is already immense. Hundreds of thousands or even more deaths, and unspeakable scenes of deprivation, seem likely over the winter months. The devastation is born in large part of Western politics: donors adopted isolation policies calculating that voters would react badly to headlines about aid money propping up the Taliban regime. So far, the U.S. has decided that not a single penny can be spent on programs that materially assist the new government, even for girls’ schools.

The tragic reality is that most of the disaster now unfolding in Afghanistan would not have occurred with a different set of decisions by foreign donors.