With Afghanistan fully controlled by the Taliban, daunting challenges lie ahead.

 

Taliban fighters at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday. The group now faces the problem of governing a desperately poor and polarized country.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

NYTS, New York, 1 Sept 21 : Afghans are confronting a new reality: a country firmly under the control of the Taliban amid escalating economic and humanitarian crises.

The American withdrawal marked the end of a 20-year occupation that cost over $2 trillion, claimed more than 170,000 lives and culminated in a takeover by the very insurgents that the United States had sought to remove. But Saad Mohseni, the owner of Tolo, Afghanistan’s largest broadcaster, emphasized the huge hurdles facing the Taliban, including winning support from everyday Afghans.

“People’s expectations have grown dramatically after the past 20 years of freedom and liberation, and the pain is yet to come,” he said. “Will the Taliban engage the world with a more inclusive approach? Or will they return to the ways of the past?”

The Taliban now need to form a government that many Afghans and foreign governments may not even recognize. Basic services like electricity are under threat as many state employees have not turned up for work. Washington has frozen Afghan government reserves, and the International Monetary Fund has blocked Afghanistan from accessing emergency reserves.

“Today, almost half of the population of Afghanistan — 18 million people — need humanitarian assistance to survive,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said in a statement on Tuesday. “One in three Afghans do not know where their next meal will come from. More than half of all children under 5 are expected to become acutely malnourished in the next year. People are losing access to basic goods and services every day.”

Conditions will probably soon get much worse, with food stocks likely to run out at the end of September, said Ramiz Alakbarov, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan.

In Kabul, “we may be on the brink of an urban humanitarian catastrophe,” he said. “Prices are up. There are no salaries. At some point, millions of people will reach desperation.”

Mr. Guterres called in his statement for “all parties to facilitate safe and unimpeded humanitarian access for lifesaving and life-sustaining supplies” such as food and medical equipment.

A U.S. military official said that every American who had wanted to leave and could get to the airport had been taken out. But a number of Americans, thought to be fewer than 300, remain either by choice or because they were unable to reach the airport.

Some people turned to social media to ask for help getting relatives out of the country. “My family were at the entrance of Kabul airport for 4 days, after that being left behind, please help them from a third country,” one man who identified himself as a former British military interpreter wrote in a publicly visible message on Twitter to a British lawmaker.

Since capturing Kabul, the Taliban have sought to rebrand themselves as more moderate. But many in Afghanistan recall the group’s rule in the 1990s, which deprived women of basic rights like education and encouraged punishments like floggings, amputations and mass executions.

The early signs of the Taliban’s behavior do not look encouraging. Since capturing Kabul on Aug. 15, they have cracked down on protests, violently suppressed the news media and rounded up opponents.

And while pledging to respect women’s rights, they warned the women of Afghanistan that it might be safest for them to remain at home. That is, until the rank-and-file Taliban fighters have been trained not to mistreat them.

Adam Nossiter, Azi Paybarah and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.