Taliban govt warned about high unemployment rate

Islamabad : Afghan leader, academician, and development economist Dr Ghulam Farouq Azam has warned the Taliban government in Afghanistan about the growing chaos in the country amid high unemployment rate.

"The Afghan Taliban should face this daunting challenge by creating employment opportunities for people, who have become unemployed, otherwise the people will create hurdles to governance and thus, causing the government's failure," he told an interactive session at the Institute of Policy Studies here.

Dr Azam, who served as economic adviser to former Afghan President Daoud Khan and remained part of two governments in Kabul before the advent of the Taliban in 1995, said the previous Kabul government had created an administrative void that needed to be filled.

He said the Taliban didn't trigger the collapse of the US-backed Afghan government machinery and instead, the system failed on its own.

The expert believed that educated, skilled Afghan refugees in Pakistan could fill the void created by the departure of Western-funded, anti-Taliban workforce in Afghanistan.

He said the Taliban had inherited a country with an economy on the verge of collapse but they would prove their mettle as better administrators than the Ashraf Ghani-led government. "Unemployment one of the biggest challenges in Afghanistan, now has around half a million people, who were part of the Afghan army, police, and militias and were getting salaries from the United States, have become jobless.