The UN Secretary General’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan, Markus Potzel, has said that Western countries should reopen their embassies in Kabul, even if that means a kind of recognition of the Taliban, in power for the last year and a half.
Potzel, who was German ambassador to Afghanistan between 2014 and 2016, believes that a diplomatic presence in Kabul would allow for a «better assessment of the situation» rather than from a distance. «It’s difficult to do it from Doha or Berlin,» the UN representative has assessed in an interview for RND.
«Germany and other Western countries have interests in Afghanistan, let’s not forget that,» said Potzel, for whom it would be a good idea for more Western countries to have representation in the Afghan capital again.
Potzel, however, clarified that having a diplomatic legation there does not necessarily imply «recognition of the Taliban regime,» but rather an interest in a stable Afghanistan in which the Islamic State and drug trafficking networks would not find it easy to develop, he explained.
«The international community has an interest in combating terrorism. It has an interest in ensuring that drugs are not grown and traded. It has an interest in ensuring that the people of the country are offered prospects so that there is no repeat of a wave of refugees like the one we saw in 2015. These are all interests that, in my opinion, are worth fighting for and being present on the ground,» he stressed.
«The humanitarian situation is precarious. Winter has arrived. People need fuel, they need something to eat, they need medicine (…) On the one hand, we don’t want to support the regime, and on the other hand, we don’t want to let people down,» he has expressed.
Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August 2021 after the departure of the United States and its allies, Western countries have rushed to close their embassies and evacuate their personnel, leaving behind dozens of Afghans who collaborated with them.
No country has so far recognized the de facto government of the Taliban, which after initially offering a pretended attempt to deny that a fundamentalist regime as oppressive as that of 1996-2001 would be reestablished, in recent months has initiated a series of measures reminiscent of those years, such as not allowing women to have access to education.
Potzel himself has criticized some of these «draconian» restrictions that the Taliban have imposed against women, such as being forbidden to travel without the company of a male family member, or to attend parks, gyms or public baths. «I don’t see that the Taliban have changed,» she has said.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
