One year after the appalling collapse of Afghanistan in August last year into the hands of the Taliban insurgents, the humanitarian crisis in that beleaguered South Asian country has gone from bad to worse.
The Biden administration's shameful and botched pullout of US forces signalled the last tawdry act of the 20-year crisis; now the widening legacy of food shortages, refugees and societal collapse, seems to define Afghanistan's "new normal" for the immediate future.
On the grand scale, the collapse of the Kabul government emboldened dictators seeing that a US ally would be allowed to fall like a rotten pomegranate. Russian President Vladimir Putin was energised to expand his plans for neighbouring Ukraine. China's Xi Jinping renewed his strategy to target democratic Taiwan. Blood was in the water. A geopolitical shift was in the making.
