Afghanistan is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. The end of the 20-year war may have silenced the guns for a while, but the war-torn country is at serious risk of imploding due to the worsening conditions it faces. This could have grave consequences for regional stability and international security in the form of mass migration and refugee influx, as well as a renewed proxy war and transnational terrorism.

The current humanitarian crisis was in the making before the Taliban takeover in August. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, about 18.4 million people, nearly half of the population, were already in need of humanitarian and protection assistance in 2021. A third of Afghans were facing acute food insecurity and more than half of all under-fives were expected to face acute malnutrition. Moreover, violence had displaced half a million Afghans.

However, with the Taliban in power, humanitarian relief efforts suffered a setback, as the staff of UN agencies and other organizations were evacuated. The World Bank stopped its developmental activities. Under US pressure, the International Monetary Fund also suspended Afghanistan’s access to $440 million of emergency aid allocated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Consequently, on Aug. 31, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that “a humanitarian catastrophe looms” in Afghanistan and urged donor governments to “dig deep” to fund an emergency appeal. The UN needed $606 million to provide relief to 11 million suffering Afghans by the end of 2021. Donor nations responded beyond expectations by pledging $1.2 billion at an Afghan aid conference in Geneva last month.

The 76th UN General Assembly’s high-level session — the general debate, in which the leaders of 193 member states speak on global issues for more than a week — begins on Tuesday, with US President Joe Biden expected to advocate multilateralism in his address on the opening day. This is precisely what the UN currently needs, after having seen its founding role in preventing war and ensuring peace consistently eroded in the last three decades of rampant US unilateralism across the world.

Even though the five permanent members of the Security Council — namely, the US, Russia, China, the UK and France — have the final say in matters of global peace and security because of their veto power, the UNGA, where all member states have equal representation, plays an important role by framing the annual global agenda, deliberating current world challenges and deciding requisite policy options.

Of course, from COVID-19 to climate change, and with so many conflicts burning or brewing, the issues facing the world body are so grave that only a rules-based international order grounded in the spirit of multilateralism can pave the way for their viable resolution. Multilateralism may help in building the necessary global consensus to deal with the effects of a conflict (which the UN does relatively well), but it also needs to tackle its root causes (where the UN is found seriously lacking).