In Afghanistan, where the Taliban rules with an iron fist amid flagrant human rights violations, engagement by the international community is marked by a history of "lost opportunities", according to Under-Secretary-General Marting Griffiths.

“I think we have lost we've lost some opportunities to engage further” with the Taliban, Griffiths, who holds the humanitarian affairs portfolio and is the emergency relief coordinator, said on Tuesday.

 “There is a certain way of engaging with them, taking into account I think the appalling edicts”, he said. 

“We haven't been able to craft a formula which allows us to have across-the-board engagement” with the Taliban, he said.

Investments and attention to the economy would provide an entry to Afghanistan and it is for “key member states to take that forward”, he said.

Griffiths said that he hoped the meeting the UN is organising in Doha on June 30 will set the agenda for coordinating the international approach to Afghanistan.

When the Taliban took over in 2021 after the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, “we had some hopes then, we had indeed some written commitments”, he said.

“And those hopes have been dashed. The edicts against women and girls have come one after the other”, he said of the Taliban fiats against education for girls and women working outside the home. 

These were the culmination of 20 years of lost opportunities, he said.

Griffiths, who is leaving the UN at the end of this month after more than 30 years of humanitarian work, said the world situation is worse now than when he started.

“God knows it's a bad world”, he said of the impunity with which violence and humanitarian disasters continue despite resolutions by the Security Council.

Although the UN was founded to end the “scourge of war”, he said, “We're not winning on ending conflict”.

“It's essentially because the attention and commitment to the use of negotiation and dialogue to end conflict is a trait, a norm, a commitment which is now no longer an essential component of international diplomacy”, he said.  

At the same time, he saw hope for humanity in the basic kindness he had witnessed among the poor, for example, when impoverished people shared their meagre food resources with refugees.