Taliban squats on suffering of afghani people and slices it’s workforce in half just because.
20 years in the wilderness fighting a guerrilla campaign against a hostile invading army does little to cultivate a base of moderate bureaucrats.
They know the donations would come.
The donations can’t come so long as they remain head of the national government. The US sanctions regime forbids it.
Talibs took over Afghanistan in mere days because the existing government (whatever platform they even had) was too codependent on american presence. Corrupt and weak, without any political or military might, it predictably flopped.
The prior government was made dependent on US presence as a control on their domestic authority. This was a feature, not a bug. Americans gave the Iraqi government too much slack, and they immediately started forming diplomatic relationships with their Iranian neighbors. So we ran Afghanistan differently, hobbling the Kabul government such that they couldn’t do anything without US consent.
Then we left, and the administration collapsed like a house of cards, because that’s all it really was. Just the window-dressing of a liberal democracy over a foreign military dictatorship.
But when we left, we also ripped out the base of the Afghan economy. We looted the national treasury. We shut down all the interstate electronic infrastructure. We froze access to foreign markets. And we threatened any business that hoped to do trade into Afghanistan with the same kind of penalties. Consequently, we crashed the Afghan economy and effectively blockaded it from access to fertilizers, medicines, and food imports that the state was relying on up to this point.
That is ultimately what’s driving the current famine. Afghan is effectively under siege by threat of the US federal government.