Alexander Matheou is Asia Pacific director at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Like other humanitarian leaders who have visited Afghanistan in recent weeks, I left the country talking of crisis.

I visited projects, talked to Afghans, listened to the small diplomatic community remaining in Afghanistan, and met Taliban leaders, including the acting Minister of Foreign Affairs Amir Khan Muttaqi.

I raised the same issues of the critical need for independent, neutral and impartial humanitarian action, the urgent necessity to bring in supplies, to scale up, and the importance of employing women in these activities.

I received standard responses that have become familiar to all on official visits. Yes, we will support you to work. Yes, we want you to scale up urgently. And yes, you can employ women in health and education services. In the future, women will be employed in all sectors, I was told, we just need a little time to work out the practicalities.

Knowing that was as good it was going to get in the short term, our next urgent priority was how to scale up maternal and child health care and routine immunizations for diseases like polio, measles and tuberculosis. Health services are close to collapse and these diseases are threatening to reemerge. We need to step up efforts to contain any outbreaks and eradicate diseases like polio altogether.

COVID-19 is far from over for Afghanistan with less than 2% of the population fully vaccinated according to the Johns Hopkins University Vaccine tracker, while vaccinations are stalled in many areas.

Supporting the urgent rollout of vaccinations is critical, along with economic security for women, clean water in schools and emergency aid for millions of people who are going hungry due to drought and displacement. The needs are clearly enormous. We are determined to do our bit to help.

While in Afghanistan, I was aware of an argument that humanitarian leaders should not be making such visits to meet officials or discuss investments that could reach Afghan institutions practicing high levels of discrimination against women and girls. This view cuts right through a divided international community and humanitarian system.

One side claims that we should use all possible sanctions and financial leverage to isolate the Taliban and pressure them to protect the rights of women and girls.

The other argues that this is banging a head against a brick wall and that the best we can realistically do is seek to influence over time through constructive engagement with carrots and sticks, while the worst we could do is be responsible for mass starvation and suffering across the country, affecting women and girls just as much, if not more than men.

Both sides have merit, although humanitarian organizations tend to lean toward engaging constructively to ramp up assistance. Lives depend on it.

Not that we like this situation one little bit. Our staff are depressed and worried about their children's future. Many wives, sisters and daughters are sitting at home, having been forced out of school and work.

So far, life in the capital has not returned to the extremes of 25 years ago. Everyone is grateful for that. But no one knows what will happen over time, which factions will come out on top, or how much restraint is being shown purely for short-term goals of consolidation and recognition.

What is clear is that a combination of chronic, recent and new factors is tipping the country into a deep humanitarian crisis that is affecting everybody.

The chronic, decadeslong factors are poverty, the devastating effects of one of the longest ever armed conflicts, widespread drug addiction and traditional vulnerability to disasters, including droughts, earthquakes and floods like the one that recently wiped out an entire village in northern Afghanistan.

Severe drought and displacement were already severely affecting more than a third of the population. New factors since August are the international freezing of Afghanistan's assets that has resulted in a debilitating lack of access to cash for urban Afghans. The cutting of international financing for primary health care services is deadly for rural Afghans, particularly women.

Afghan families living in Budhak village in Kabul, pictured on Oct. 13: severe drought is affecting more than a third of the population.   © Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

This combination of factors risks pushing the resilient people of Afghanistan to the brink, triggering untold suffering, loss of life and what Afghanistan's neighbors fear most of all: mass flight across borders.

Preventing these crises from escalating is in everybody's interests. It is also humane. It will require a combination of measures, including the unfreezing of assets to enable the payment of salaries, restarting health financing, albeit under a new model, and ramping up humanitarian assistance, particularly for the displaced, and those who have lost everything due to drought and conflict. All this must happen urgently.

These short-term measures only address survival. They will not address the lack of hope or prospects. Those are beyond our grasp as humanitarian organizations. Over time, those prospects will be shaped by myriad geopolitical and local interests, deals, alliances and rivalries that are well out of sight for most of us, especially during short visits.

Still, while recognizing our limitations, we know that humanitarian assistance and health care are urgently needed in Afghanistan, and it is better to seek to provide it, than to stand aside.