Afghanistan is Now So Much Worse Than You Think.

Afghanistan. A land of mountains, fertile valleys, and ancient trade routes. A land that has long lived in the nightmares of those who sought to tame it — the Persians, the British, the Russians, the Americans. All have tried, all have failed. This is a place of bloodshed, going back as long as anybody can recall.

In 2001, the Al-Qaeda-friendly Taliban were driven from power as coalition forces led by the United States ushered in a brave, bold new Afghanistan. Aid poured into the country, elections were held, roads were built, girls were welcomed back into schools. It was still a long way from the dizzying days of the liberal 1970s, but it felt like Afghanistan was finally moving forward.

Fast-forward twenty years, and with the United States and its allies now departed, the rejuvenated Taliban barrelled practically unopposed towards Kabul. In just ten days, they swept through the country as the western-backed government crumbled with spectacular ease. On 15th August 2021, the Taliban entered the capital as President Ashraf Ghani fled.

Almost $150 billion was spent on rebuilding and strengthening Afghanistan, as well as more than $2 trillion on war efforts. But much of it came to nothing. Once again, the grip of the Taliban tightened around Afghan throats.

At first, there was some hopeful optimism. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this time around. Maybe they won’t be as harsh with the global community now looking on. But the reality is much worse than you think.

Over the last five years, Afghanistan has been sliding backwards at an alarming speed. Per-capita income has stagnated, unemployment is high, and many households rely on humanitarian assistance to survive. Millions of Afghans continue to struggle to feed themselves, with the World Food Programme estimating that roughly 17.4 million people could face severe hunger during 2026.

Suddenly, families are selling children just to feed others. Others are selling organs. More than 2 million girls have been excluded from education beyond primary school, while women face restrictions on employment, movement, public life, and even access to healthcare, which itself is unravelling. You’ve got the Afghan branch of ISIS carrying out terrorist attacks.

Drought, water shortages, vast numbers of displaced people, sanctions, banking restrictions, and just about everything else you’d expect to see in a country teetering on the verge of collapse.

Chaos at the Airport

The noose was tightening. By the 14th August 2021, all routes out of Kabul led into the clutches of the Taliban, who were steamrolling towards the capital. Fear was rampant on the streets and many rushed to the only place where hope of escape remained – the Hamid Karzai International Airport.

Tens of thousands poured towards the refuge as governments from around the world put the finishing touches to an evacuation process that was shambolic at best. Western intelligence experts had predicted it would be weeks, maybe even months, until the Afghan army and government collapsed in the face of Taliban advances. It took just ten days.

Suddenly, with the Taliban now at the gates of Kabul, governments were panicking and doing everything they could to get their people out of a country that was splintering. But it wasn’t just foreign citizens who wanted out. Thousands who had worked with the allies, many of whom had been promised help, desperately tried to flee. The fear of what would happen when the Taliban retook the country was palpable and led to the chaotic situation unfolding at the airport.

You remember images of the U.S. helicopter lifting off from the embassy in Saigon in 1975? This was Kabul 2021, and people were equally terrified.

It was bedlam. Tens of thousands of Afghans surged towards the airport. Interpreters, aid workers, journalists, former soldiers, and ordinary families all converged on the same place. Some clutched passports and paperwork, others carried nothing at all. The images stunned the world, and showed the level of panic that was gripping Afghanistan.

Crowds flooded the runways, people chased departing aircraft, and several men fell to their deaths after clinging to a U.S. Air Force transport plane as it took off. For many watching around the world, it looked less like an orderly withdrawal and more like the collapse of an entire state.

Over the next seventeen days, the airport became the centre of one of the largest air evacuations in history. American, British, and other governments worked around the clock as military aircraft landed and departed every few minutes.

Parents passed babies over razor wire to waiting soldiers, hoping they might find safety on the other side. Families stood for days in sewage-filled canals outside airport gates, often under the threat of violence, while Taliban fighters and foreign troops struggled to control the crowds. In total, around 123,000 people were evacuated before the final deadline arrived.

Yet the operation ended in tragedy when an ISIS-K suicide bomber struck Abbey Gate on 26 August, killing at least 170 Afghan civilians and 13 American service members. Four days later, the last U.S. aircraft disappeared into the night sky. Twenty years, thousands of lives, and around $150 billion had been spent trying to build a new Afghanistan. Structurally, the country was in a much better state, but as the Taliban regained complete control, much of its population feared for the future.

Ancient Blood

Afghanistan has long had a painful and tumultuous history. With its position at the crossroads of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East, it has, for thousands of years, been a meeting point for empires, religions, trade routes, and armies.

Go back 4,000 years, and you’ll find an area known as Bactria, which covered parts of Afghanistan, southern Uzbekistan, and western Tajikistan. Bactria was on the major trade routes and its merchants carried goods, ideas, religions, and technologies through the region centuries before the Silk Road reached its peak.

Fast-forward to the 4th Century BC, and the unstoppable tide of Alexander the Great and his armies crushed Bactrian resistance. But Alexander’s death soon led to more turmoil when his heir in the region was defeated, with much back and forth leading to the creation of the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Kingdoms.

These were eventually replaced by the Parthian Empire, which was soon replaced by the Kushan Empire, and all of this before we’d even got into the AD era. From the 7th century onwards, Arab armies brought Islam to the region. Over several centuries, Afghanistan gradually became predominantly Muslim, but still with plenty of chopping and changing that saw the Ghaznavid Empire and later the Ghurid Empire expanding into modern-day Iran, Pakistan, and northern India.

Then the dreaded beast from Mongolia arrived. The Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, savaged the region on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. While Afghanistan had endured countless invasions before, the Mongol campaigns of the early 13th century devastated entire cities, depopulated large areas, and permanently altered the region’s development.

Balkh was one of the oldest cities in the world and an important centre of culture, trade, and religion, but the city suffered immense destruction, with medieval chroniclers describing widespread slaughter after its capture. Bamyan suffered especially harsh treatment after a grandson of Genghis Khan was killed during the siege. Contemporary accounts describe the city being virtually annihilated, with inhabitants and even animals reportedly slaughtered in retaliation.

The number killed during this period is notoriously difficult because chroniclers were well-known exaggerators, but a reasonable estimate would put the number at between 500,000 and 2 million deaths.

Over the following centuries, Afghanistan was controlled by various regional powers, including the descendants of the Mongols and the empire of Timur. Modern Afghanistan is often traced to 1747, when Ahmad Shah Durrani united various Afghan tribes and established the Durrani Empire. But even while a rough idea of what would one day become Afghanistan was emerging, the region remained incredibly fragmented. Tribal identities and local power structures were often much stronger than central government authority, and, as we’ll see, in that way, not much has changed.

And so we come to the first great modern empire that tried to tame Afghanistan and failed miserably. By the 1830s, the British Empire was flying. It was still years away from its peak, but it had emerged as the dominant global empire spanning roughly 13–18 million square kilometres (about 5–7 million square miles). To put that into a global percentage, it represented around 10-12% of land territory on Earth.

The problem for Britain was that there was another immense Empire looking to flex its muscles: Russia. The British were worried that increasing Russian influence in Afghanistan could cause trouble for British India, which lay to the south. So it was decided that the best course of action would be to invade and set up a comfortable buffer state that would look independent but was very much controlled by the British behind the scenes.

Like the other invasions that we’ll be coming to, this one initially went very well. British and East India Company forces marched through southern Afghanistan in 1839 and captured Kandahar, Ghazni, and Kabul with relative ease. But two years later, things exploded as the country revolted. With negotiations having failed, in January 1842, around 16,000 people—roughly 4,500 British soldiers and 12,000 camp followers—left Kabul after agreeing to withdraw.

Yet this wasn’t a simple withdrawal. The nearest British garrison was in Jalalabad, 140 km (90 miles) away, a journey that required trudging through mountain passes in winter. The column was harassed relentlessly by Afghans along the way who gradually chipped away at the British numbers. Slowly, the column was whittled down.

Only one man, William Brydon, an assistant surgeon in the Bengal Army, made it to the Jalalabad region– though about 115 British officers, soldiers, wives and children were captured or taken as hostages and survived to be subsequently released.

When a search party found the wretched skeleton of a man with his bloodstained uniform, one member asked, ‘Where is the army?’ To which Brydon famously replied, ‘I am the army’.

The British had learnt a painful lesson, but one they couldn’t accept. In 1878, again with nervousness over Russia in the air, Britain invaded again. And this went pretty much exactly the same. Initial success, followed by a massive uprising.

On 27th July 1880, 2,476 British and Indian troops under Brigadier-general George Burrows faced down 25,000 Afghans at the Battle of Maiwand. And lost, badly. Roughly half the British force died that day, and while they would have their revenge a few months later, at the Battle of Kandahar, it became a symbol of Afghan defiance.

Britain withdrew most troops but installed Abdur Rahman Khan as ruler. Afghanistan remained internally independent, but Britain controlled its foreign policy. And that brings us into the 20th Century.

The Taliban Returns

The dramatic scenes at the airport made the headlines, but the change was immediately severe and often unseen across Afghanistan.

For twenty years, Afghanistan had become heavily dependent on foreign money. According to the World Bank, Afghanistan received approximately $77 billion in official development assistance between 2001 and 2019 alone, and the U.S. alone ploughing in roughly $132.5 billion for reconstruction and relief efforts, including security forces, governance, infrastructure, education, health, and development projects.

In 2021, when the Taliban reached Kabul, foreign aid was about 40% of Afghanistan’s GDP. Let’s just think about that for a moment. At that time, Afghanistan’s GDP was approximately $20 billion, meaning that foreign money coming in was equal to about $8 billion per year. Most developed countries receive foreign aid equal to well below 1% of GDP and even many developing countries receive only a few percent. Afghanistan’s figure of roughly 40% placed it among the most aid-dependent countries in modern history.

And all this money was used to, essentially, run the country. Years of war meant that industrial production was limited, exports were relatively small, and tax collection remained weak. Large parts of the country were rural and poor, and even if they could contribute something, it wasn’t going to be much.

Afghanistan wasn’t spending a lot compared to, say, western countries, but it was still spending money. Schools, roads, and hospitals were being built. Teachers, administrators, and soldiers needed paying. And here’s where things get even worse, because that figure of 40% is related to the entire nationwide economy, but around 75% of public spending came from foreign grants.

That meant many government workers, soldiers, civil servants, police officers, and even healthcare professionals were being paid with money coming from abroad – while international organisations employed huge numbers of people directly or indirectly. The system was deeply flawed, for obvious reasons, and often corrupt, but it kept the country functioning – just about.

When the Taliban returned to power, much of that system disappeared almost overnight and Afghanistan experienced one of the sharpest economic collapses in the modern world. International donors suspended most development assistance, the World Bank and IMF halted major funding programmes, and roughly $9 billion in Afghan central bank reserves were frozen overseas.

The consequences were shockingly immediate. Afghanistan’s economy contracted by around 20–21% in 2021 alone, one of the largest single-year economic declines recorded anywhere in recent decades. The banking system entered a liquidity crisis, businesses struggled to access cash, and many government employees lost their salaries as state revenues collapsed. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reported that within a single year, a decade of economic gains had effectively been wiped out.

Within months, millions of Afghans were facing acute food insecurity. Families that had previously survived on modest incomes found themselves unable to afford basic necessities. Prices rose while employment opportunities collapsed and humanitarian organisations warned that entire communities were being pushed towards oblivion.

By early 2022, 95% of households were experiencing insufficient food consumption and food insecurity, while at least 55% of the population was “expected to be in crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity,” according to the UN. 82% of families had lost some or all of their income since August 2021, and nearly one in five households reported sending children to work to help cover costs.

There were countless horrendous stories around Afghanistan, but one which really hit the headlines was a small village on the outskirts of Herat that came to be known as “one kidney village” because many residents had sold a kidney to survive deepening poverty.

According to The Time of India:

Some parents said they underwent surgery simply to feed their children or avoid eviction. In several cases, multiple members of the same family had sold kidneys.

Where were the kidneys going? Well, that takes us down another dark alleyway. Despite being officially outlawed, Afghanistan had a thriving illegal organ donor trade. It existed before the Taliban returned, but the post-2021 economic collapse made it far worse.

The basic pattern is brutal: poor Afghans sell a kidney sometimes for as little as $1,500. Buyers are usually wealthier patients who need transplants and cannot wait and brokers connect both parties. Hospitals perform the surgery, often relying on “consent” forms while rarely investigating whether poverty, debt, or coercion have anything to do with that so-called consent.

Al Jazeera and AFP reported that wealthy patients travelled to Herat from across Afghanistan, and sometimes from India and Pakistan, while a 2021 report revealed that Loqman Hakim Hospital had carried out more than 1,000 kidney transplants in five years. The whole industry is horrific, and sadly increasingly common.

The Soviet Quagmire

But horrific and Afghanistan have a long history. For thousands of years, people have fought and died in its mountains and on its plains, and in its cities. Yet for nearly eighty years, from the start of the 20th Century until Russia finally got its hands on the country, Afghanistan prospered – well, sort of at least.

The country stayed neutral in both world wars, and had a series of relatively stable leaders who led the country in a modernisation drive from almost completely rural to tentative growth and wealth. Not everything was smooth sailing, and leaders had to learn to balance progress with the deep conservative and tribal values that many hung grimly onto.

Mohammad Zahir Shah ruled for forty years between 1933 and 1973 and this became one of the most stable periods in Afghan history. Neutrality during World War II meant that Afghanistan escaped devastation, and as the Cold War began, leaders carefully played both sides to maximise gains. The Soviets built roads, airfields, and technical projects, while the Americans funded agricultural development, irrigation schemes, and infrastructure.

One of the most famous projects was the massive Helmand Valley development effort, often compared to America’s Tennessee Valley Authority. This ambitious project included the construction of two dams, irrigation, flood control, and roads, as well as widespread education, healthcare, and agricultural reform. This was a huge undertaking, costing $80 million between 1960 and 1971 (around $690 million today).

To cut a long story short, it was far from successful, mainly because American engineers assumed that the soil would be similar to the U.S. Southwest – which it wasn’t – leading to poor drainage that caused widespread waterlogging and salt accumulation that left vast sections of farmland unproductive. And a quick side note, in the areas that it did work, in a few decades, these irrigation initiatives would be vital in supporting Afghanistan’s booming opium trade.

By the 1960s, parts of Kabul looked surprisingly modern. Universities expanded, women attended schools, and foreign tourists visited, with the “hippie trail” bringing thousands of Western backpackers through Afghanistan on their way to India.

This period also brought huge change as the country experimented with elections, a parliament, greater press freedom, and political participation. Although political parties were not fully legalised, various ideological groups emerged, including liberals, Islamists, communists, and nationalists. Universities became centres of intense political debate and future communist leaders and future Islamist leaders often attended the same campuses.

But things soured as the 1970s progressed. First, the monarchy was scrapped, with Afghanistan being a republic, but increasingly factionalism began to pull the country apart. Some wanted to be more closely aligned with Iran, others the Soviet Union, and others the west.

Everything exploded in April 1978. After the assassination of a communist activist, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) launched a military coup known as the Saur Revolution. President Daoud and much of his family were killed and communists seized power. What came next was similar to what had been seen in other communist take-overs.

Radical land reforms that became deeply unpopular, restrictions on other political parties – violence. Thousands were imprisoned or killed, and entire provinces erupted in rebellion.

It seemed as if Afghanistan was about to tip into full-blown civil war, but thankfully for the communists, this provided the perfect excuse for Russia, now of course the Soviet Union, to finally make its move. However, things weren’t exactly cut and dry for the communists.

To begin with, the Soviets didn’t trust Hafizullah Amin, Afghanistan’s communist leader. He was thought of as unreliable, and his friendly overtures towards the United States made him few friends in Moscow. But then this whole messy situation got messier when the U.S. ambassador, Adolph Dubs, was kidnapped – perhaps by police officers working with the Afghan government, perhaps a group closely aligned with the Soviet Union.

Dubs was being held at the Kabul Hotel when Afghan forces attempted a rescue which, to put it nicely, was completely botched, but also had the air of a complete set-up that left Dubs dead with several bullets in his head. The whole episode remains mysterious to this day because all the assailants were also shot, but what emerged was a poisoned relationship between Afghanistan and the United States.

As this was going on, Afghanistan was fracturing. Discontent with the communists was exploding across the country, and Amin repeatedly asked for Soviet military assistance. And finally he got it, but not in the style he was expecting.

On 25th December 1979, Soviet trucks and other military vehicles rolled across the border, under the pretext of helping the communist government. Two days later, 700 Soviet troops dressed in Afghan uniforms, occupied major governmental, military and media buildings in Kabul, including their primary target, the Tajbeg Palace, where Amin was all but in hiding. Exactly how it happened has never been revealed, but Hafizullah Amin, Afghanistan’s leader, was assassinated by Soviet soldiers.

Babrak Karmal was quickly installed as leader, a man loyal to Moscow, and a man the Soviets believed would be able to stabilise the country. But that was their first massive miscalculation. Their second was the assumption that their stay in Afghanistan would be a short one. They assumed they could secure the cities and build up the military quickly – six months, a year tops.

But like so many before them, Afghanistan turned into a place of nightmares. The Afghan rebellion was fierce from the very beginning. The term Mujahideen means ‘those who struggle’ and is often used as if there was some large, well-organised resistance, but in reality, this was a patchwork of tribes and groups that often disliked each other, but hated the Soviets more.

The Mujahideen remained in control of most of the country outside the major towns and cities. Soviet tactics relied on air power, armoured columns, search-and-destroy operations, and punishment raids against villages suspected of supporting rebels. Mountain valleys became killing grounds. Villages were bombed, crops destroyed, and civilians forced to flee.

Afghanistan became one of the world’s largest refugee crises. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that 400,000 Afghans had fled to Pakistan by the end of 1979, with another 200,000 in Iran. At the height of the war, around 3.5 million Afghans were in Pakistan and another 2 million in Iran.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) became the main pipeline for foreign support. The United States, Saudi Arabia, China, Britain, and others backed the resistance in different ways and a CIA programme, known as Operation Cyclone, supplied money and weapons through Pakistan.

The war changed sharply after the Mujahideen began receiving Stinger anti-aircraft missiles in 1986. Soviet aircraft and helicopters no longer had the same freedom and the psychological damage was huge – the Soviets were soon looking for a way out.

As the war dragged on, the costs mounted dramatically. Estimates vary, but at least 500,000 Afghan civilians were killed, while some researchers place the total death toll well above one million. Thousands of villages were destroyed, farmland was littered with mines, and an entire generation grew up surrounded by violence.

The Soviet Union also paid a heavy price, officially losing more than 14,000 soldiers, with tens of thousands more wounded, disabled, or suffering from illness and psychological trauma. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he inherited what he later described as a “bleeding wound” and he made it clear the Soviet Union needed to get out as quickly as possible.

Soviet troops began leaving in May 1988, and on 15th February 1989 the last Soviet commander, Boris Gromov, crossed the Friendship Bridge back into Soviet territory. For Moscow, the war was over. For Afghanistan, it was just the start of another cycle of horror.

The Soviet-backed government survived until 1992, but after its collapse, the victorious Mujahideen factions turned on each other, plunging the country into civil war. Kabul’s population plummeted from 2 million to around 500,000 as the capital became a horrifying battleground. Entire neighbourhoods were reduced to rubble, with some estimates putting the death toll in the city alone at 25,000 during this period. By the mid-1990s, Kabul resembled images of Dresden or Tokyo during the very worst bombings of World War II.

It was also a time of mass killings, torture, kidnapping, looting, and sexual violence. Many began to lose faith that any of the warlords promising the earth would ever deliver peace, and out of that chaos emerged the Taliban, a new militia created and supported by Pakistan and the ISI that followed a strict Islamic code. They made gains around the country, taking first Kandahar, then Herat, and by 1996, controlled Kabul and many of the major cities.

Backward Steps

And so, we come to two points in Afghanistan’s history where exactly the same thing has happened. The Taliban has gained control.

In 1996, many welcomed these new religious overlords who promised to finally bring an end to the bedlam that the country had been in since the 1970s. Once in power, though, their rule became brutally restrictive.

Women were largely removed from public life, girls’ education was shut down, music and television were banned, men were forced to grow beards, and the religious police patrolled daily life.

Public punishment became one of the defining images of the first Taliban state. Kabul’s football stadium, once a place for sport, became the setting for executions and amputations. In 1999, secretly filmed footage emerged that showed a woman in a blue burka being dragged onto the pitch and then executed with three bullets to the back of her head. Her name, it later emerged, was Zarmina, or Zareena.

The mother of 7 had been accused of beating her husband to death with a hammer two years prior and her death was the first female execution under Taliban rule.

Hundreds were executed through the Taliban’s judicial system, while many thousands were killed in massacres, reprisals, and ethnic violence after the wider civil war. While everybody suffered at the hands of the infamous ‘Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice’, the effect on women was catastrophic. Within months of taking Kabul in 1996, the Taliban introduced rules that transformed everyday life.

Women generally could not work outside the home, attend secondary school, let alone university. Travelling without a male guardian was out of the question, as was appearing in public without full-body covering.

Many female doctors, teachers, civil servants, lawyers, and academics suddenly lost their jobs. At the time, women made up roughly 25% of Afghanistan’s civil service workforce, and in Kabul many schools relied almost entirely on female teachers. When the ban took effect, thousands of women lost their livelihoods immediately, and numerous schools closed because there were no teachers left. For those widows who had lost a husband during the civil war or the Soviet invasion - with one UN estimate putting that figure at 10,000 in Kabul - this meant their only source of income suddenly evaporated.

For young girls, their futures changed overnight. To be brutally fair, options were limited well before the Taliban, especially as the country was being torn apart by the civil war. But the new draconian prohibitions on female education meant that a narrow scope became virtually nonexistent.

Instead of going to secondary school and then university before finding a decently paid job, their lives would now be restricted to marriage and childbirth, while often being kept behind closed doors. By 2001, female literacy was estimated at around 5%, among the lowest rates in the world, and millions of girls had spent the previous five years with little or no access to formal education.

Yet, quite remarkably, many families resisted. A 1997 report found that aid organisations were secretly supporting 125 girls’ schools and 87 co-educational schools and home schools across Afghanistan. By 2001, humanitarian agencies estimated approximately 45,000 children were attending clandestine schools, often hidden inside private homes. Considering the expected punishment for something like secretly educating women, these acts were astonishingly brave.

So, how does this all compare with Taliban 2.0? Well, initially the group preached repentance, promising the world that things would be different under their rule this time. At their first press conference after taking Kabul, Taliban spokesmen tried to present a softer image – promising amnesty, saying that women would have rights “within Islamic law,” and claiming Afghanistan would not be used as a base for attacks against other countries.

But that was mostly bluster in the face of international scrutiny. Human Rights Watch reported that the Taliban intensified their crackdown through 2024, with Afghanistan becoming the only country where girls and women were, once again, banned from secondary school and university – while also experiencing severe barriers to employment, movement, speech, and assembly. If you are a woman in Afghanistan, life today looks remarkably similar to what it did in 1996. UNESCO reported in August 2025 that almost 2.2 million Afghan girls were barred from education beyond primary level.

Yet there is one cruel twist that makes today even worse. In 1996, the country was a shattered wreckage and hope had long drained out of the Afghan people. But the U.S. invasion and establishment of a democratic government was supposed to herald in a new era. With new schools, universities, and ideas emerging, a woman’s world in Afghanistan was filled with more possibilities than ever before.

Today, those possibilities have largely been crushed under the repressive Taliban boot. In a matter of just a few years, women have gone from thinking about higher education, starting a business, and travelling and working abroad, to being told to forget all of that. Your place is at home. And never forget that.

In December 2024, Taliban authorities reportedly banned women from medical education, deepening fears of a future healthcare shortage, which is especially damaging in Afghanistan because many women cannot seek care from male medical staff in conservative settings.

The morality police have roared back to life. With women, it’s about clothing, movement, public visibility, and work, but men have also faced pressure over beard length, prayer attendance, dress, and public behaviour. However, this time there seems to be more pushback. In early June 2026, at least 30 women were reportedly arrested in Herat for violating dress rules, leading to a large protest that was violently dispersed by the Taliban.

Freedom is being slowly squeezed from the Afghan people. Journalists, activists, former government employees, and critics have faced detention, enforced disappearance, torture, and extrajudicial killings. In the first half of 2025 alone, Afghan human rights monitors recorded 251 people who were reportedly extrajudicially executed, mysteriously killed, or wounded by Taliban forces or associated groups.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented at least 231 cases of corporal punishment between April and June 2025, including public floggings for offences such as adultery, alcohol consumption, and homosexuality. Detainees have reported torture methods including electric shocks, waterboarding, beatings, and threats against family members. So much for a progressive Taliban.

The Towers Fall

The recent, modern history of Afghanistan, for most outsiders at least, begins at 8.46 am on 11th September 2001 when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. 17 minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower and any remaining doubts about a possible accident immediately evaporated.

Of course, on that day, as New York became a city of rubble and chaos and death, there was nothing immediately to link the terrorist attack with Afghanistan, but within days, the eyes of the U.S. government had fallen on Osama bin Laden and his believed hiding place in Afghanistan. Less than a month later, on 7th October, President George W. Bush announced that U.S. operations in Afghanistan had begun. And the fate of this beleaguered country took another dramatic turn.

This is the period that was sandwiched between the two Taliban eras. A period that both devastated the country even further, but also allowed the Afghans to dream of something different. As with the British and the Soviets, when the Americans and allies arrived in October 2001, the official leaders of the country were quickly toppled. Operation Enduring Freedom had begun with a walk in the park, but the words Enduring and Freedom rarely go well together in Afghanistan.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. To begin with, there was genuine hope. Schools reopened, refugees returned, businesses reopened, and international aid flooded the country. The effect was immediate. In March 2002 alone, around three million children returned to classrooms, roughly one-third of them girls, many of whom had never attended school before. The country had a buzz to it, but it didn’t take long for things to swerve off course.

One of the earliest issues was rampant corruption. With the foreign community writing what amounted to blank cheques, money arrived faster than Afghan institutions could absorb it. Government officials syphoned off huge sums, sometimes setting up ghost businesses or even schools. On paper, things were going well, but if you actually dug into some of the new constructions, you would go there and see nothing but a pile of rubble.

In 2011, a massive scandal broke that implicated the heads of the Kabul Bank in a Ponzi scheme that reached close to $1 billion and saw them spending lavishly, while giving out huge under the table loans to family and friends. The whole thing was about as filthy as you could get and involved family members of President Karzai. Three years later, investigators had recovered only about 10% of the stolen money. That was the big one, but these kinds of stories were common throughout Afghanistan, and played a major part in slowly destroying the legitimacy of the central government.

And then you had the Taliban that continued to lurk in the shadows. Initially pushed into the mountains and over the border into Pakistan, the Taliban returned with a vengeance just a few years later. By 2007, despite 40,000 foreign troops in the country, Afghanistan was said to be under real threat of falling into Taliban hands once again.

The next seven years were a savage war of attrition that took a toll on both sides. But it was clear that Taliban resolve was stronger. The foreign troops, like the Soviets before them, needed to get out of Afghanistan, but the Taliban wasn’t going anywhere. On 2nd May, the U.S. finally got its man. Bin Laden was killed, but not in Afghanistan, in Pakistan. There was rejoicing, yet for troops in Afghanistan, the bloody grind continued as if nothing had changed.

In 2014, the U.S. and the British ended formal operations in the country, but the reality is that foreign fighters were in Afghanistan right up until 2021, desperately trying to prop up an Afghan army that repeatedly showed itself to be inept in the face of hostile aggression.

But at this point, another player arrives on the scene to complicate the situation – Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISIS–K). Yes, if things couldn’t possibly get any worse for Afghanistan, the country now has its own homegrown branch of the group that caused so much chaos in Iraq, Syria, and around the world.

The group was officially established in 2015, mainly composed of disillusioned Taliban fighters and foreign jihadists from Central Asia. And you might assume that the Taliban and ISIS might be on friendly terms, but no, they hate each other. At one point in 2015, ISIS-K controlled large parts of eastern Afghanistan, particularly in Nangarhar Province, and the group became notorious for its brutality even among Afghan insurgent groups.

Yet most of their attacks have come through suicide bombings, car bombings, rocket attacks, and assassinations. They’re not picky. Over the years, ISIS-K has gone after just about everybody in Afghanistan, sowing seeds of fear that even the Taliban didn’t come with. You now had a rather bizarre situation where an insurgency was fighting and an insurgency, and both of them were fighting the government.

One of the most horrifying incidents occurred in May 2020 when gunmen attacked a maternity hospital in Kabul operated by Médecins sans Frontières. 24 were killed, including mothers, newborn babies, and healthcare workers. It was shocking, even by Afghan standards. A year later, on 8th May 2021, a massive car bomb exploded outside the Sayed al-Shuhada School in western Kabul. As students and teachers scrambled to escape, two further devices detonated, with 90 killed and 240 injured.

And on 26th August 2021, as thousands of Afghans crowded outside Kabul airport hoping to escape Taliban rule, an ISIS-K suicide bomber detonated explosives at Abbey Gate, killing 170 Afghan civilians and 13 US service members.

With Afghanistan now standing alone, the situation was much more complicated than many perceived. By ISIS standards, the Taliban were moderates, but also a group that brought back painful memories. Afghanistan’s current chapter was about to begin.

Hunger, Repression, Violence

As the date ticks up to the modern day, there are not a lot of positives coming out of Afghanistan. For war-weary civilians, the situation is perilously close to becoming tragic, with an estimated 17 million people—nearly half the population—facing acute food insecurity, and 4.7 million with emergency levels of hunger.

Some are choosing the unimaginable. Alarming reports are emerging from Afghanistan about the increased number of children being sold by families to stave off starvation. One woman spoke to a representative of World Vision and said:

We are starving; all of us. We don’t have anything to eat, and we survive picking food from the garbage. That’s why it’s better to sell one of my daughters so that my other four children can survive.

She also said that she sold her three-year-old daughter, Jamila, for just $600.

The difficult truth is that nobody knows exactly how many Afghan children are being sold. In 2021, UNICEF warned that it had received credible reports of families offering daughters as young as 20 days old for future marriage in exchange for a bride price or dowry. Even before the Taliban takeover, UNICEF partners recorded 183 child marriages and 10 cases involving the sale of children in just two western provinces, Herat and Badghis, during 2018–2019. The children involved ranged from 6 months to 17 years old, but UNICEF stressed that these were only known examples and that real figures are likely much higher.

The system behind it is equally complex. It’s thought that most child sales are for adoption purposes, rather than direct marriage. In Afghanistan, adoption is taboo, but demand is high, and when people are on the brink of starvation, apparently you never need to look too hard to find a family willing to sell a child.

The country’s economy remains slumped. Despite modest GDP gains, population growth means that the country is slipping further back from where it needs to be. More than 80% of households are in debt, while nearly three quarters rely on negative coping strategies, selling tools, livestock, or sending their children to work, to manage getting through the day. Nearly five million Afghans have returned to the country since 2023, many arriving in communities already facing severe economic hardship.

It’s a cycle that only seems to be worsening.

Like other areas in the region, Afghanistan is suffering from climate insecurity, with 64% of the country affected by drought on a regular basis. Access to adequate drinking water has also dropped sharply, from nearly 60% to close to 40%. Since 1969, Afghanistan has experienced eight major droughts, including crises in 2018 and 2021 that affected more than 13 million and 11 million people respectively. Meanwhile, glaciers in the Hindu Kush mountains have shrunk by nearly 40% over the past four decades, threatening one of the country’s most important sources of freshwater.

Afghanistan, perhaps more than anywhere else on the planet, is desperate for international aid, but since 2021, and the Taliban takeover, aid has plummeted. According to CSIS, international humanitarian funding fell from approximately $3.8 billion in 2022 to $1.9 billion in 2023 — a decline of roughly 50% in a single year. By 2024, the UN’s humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan had received only about 31% of the funding required, forcing many programmes to close or scale back.

Then you have the violence that continues to plague many parts of the country. Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan, ISIS–K have claimed responsibility for hundreds of attacks, many inside Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. They range from suicide bombings to car bombings, shootings in the street to kidnappings that end in the most horrifying way – a beheading and a video.

But now Afghanistan has yet another enemy to worry about – Pakistan. Everything here revolves around the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), often called the Pakistani Taliban, who are separate from the Afghan Taliban, but share ideological roots and historical connections. The TTP, designated a terrorist organisation by the UN, wants to create its own state in Pakistan and frequently unleashes attacks on soldiers, police, the government, civilians, kids – just about anybody.

Pakistan accuses the Afghan Taliban government of allowing TTP fighters to operate from Afghan territory, an accusation that is officially denied, but unofficially, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. The Afghan Taliban has repeatedly told Pakistan that it aims to clamp down on the Pakistani Taliban, without ever really doing anything. And Pakistan has lost patience.

On 21st December 2024, TTP militants attacked a Pakistani military position in South Waziristan, killing 16 Pakistani soldiers. Pakistan responded with airstrikes against targets inside Afghanistan that it said were militant camps, but that the Taliban claimed were nothing more than residential buildings and that civilians, including children, were among the dead.

At the same time, Pakistan launched a major deportation campaign against Afghan refugees, and by 2025, more than one million Afghans had been expelled from Pakistan, creating enormous pressure on Afghanistan’s already fragile economy.

Things really got heated on 9th October 2025 when Pakistan carried out airstrikes in Kabul, Khost, Jalalabad, and Paktika, targeting the TTP. Two days later, the Taliban responded by launching an attack on multiple Pakistani military posts along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. The fighting continued for another week, before a ceasefire came into effect.

At peace talks in Doha, a representative from Pakistan threatened to ‘obliterate the Taliban.’ Big words, but if the U.S. and Britain couldn’t do it for nearly 20 years, it’s difficult to see how far Pakistan would get. Talks got precisely nowhere, and since then, the situation between the two countries has been as tense as it gets. The border remains closed, badly affecting the Afghan economy much more than the Pakistani, and further airstrikes have occurred as recently as 10th June 2026.

And to round out this dizzyingly bizarre set of circumstances, it was announced in May 2026 that Afghanistan and Russia had signed a military cooperation agreement. Not many were expecting something like this. Many in the Taliban are former Mujahideen, who, of course, famously fought off the Soviet Union in the 1980s. So what are these two up to together?

We’re not sure. We do know that Russia removed the Taliban from its list of terrorist organisations a year – for good behaviour, I guess? And has also become the only country in the world to formally recognise the Taliban government. But what else lies behind this agreement is highly debatable.

Some say it will be to help service Soviet-era machinery still being used in Afghanistan. Others believe it’s more to do with stemming ISIS attacks. Or is it another Russian agreement that means that suddenly foreign soldiers start appearing on the Russia/Ukraine frontline? All we can really say is, watch this space.

So Much Worse Than You Think

Afghanistan is now a country sliding backward at an alarming rate. With military tensions with Pakistan building, continued ISIS-K attacks, a collapsing economy, widespread poverty, malnutrition, and drought to contend with, it feels like Afghanistan is entering a defining era. Yes, this country has been through hell and back on countless occasions, and yes, its people are some of the most resilient on Earth, but how much more can they withstand?

For thousands of years, this crossroads between east and west, this mountainous monster has been fought over and died for. This is a land of bloodshed, a place where empires come with their heads held high and leave with their tails between their legs. But today, the country is straining horribly under the yoke of terrible luck, climate insecurity, and extremism. Hunger, violence, repression, shattered dreams, a place where hope is fading fast.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the economic impact of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan?

When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, Afghanistan experienced one of the sharpest economic collapses in the modern world. The economy contracted by around 20–21% in 2021 alone, leading to widespread food insecurity and poverty. Millions of Afghans faced acute food insecurity, and many families resorted to selling children or organs to survive.

How did the international community respond to the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan?

Following the Taliban’s takeover, international donors suspended most development assistance, and the World Bank and IMF halted major funding programs. Approximately $9 billion in Afghan central bank reserves were also frozen overseas, exacerbating the economic crisis.

What was the situation at Hamid Karzai International Airport during the Taliban’s takeover?

During the Taliban’s takeover, tens of thousands of Afghans surged towards Hamid Karzai International Airport in a desperate attempt to flee the country. The scene was chaotic, with people clinging to departing aircraft and several falling to their deaths. The airport became the center of one of the largest air evacuations in history, with around 123,000 people evacuated before the final deadline.

What is the current state of education for girls in Afghanistan under the Taliban?

Under the Taliban’s rule, over 2 million girls have been excluded from education beyond primary school. The Taliban has intensified its crackdown on female education, making Afghanistan the only country where girls and women are banned from secondary school and university.

What are the main challenges facing Afghanistan’s economy today?

Afghanistan’s economy is facing severe challenges, including a collapse in foreign aid, widespread poverty, malnutrition, and drought. The country is also dealing with military tensions with Pakistan, continued ISIS-K attacks, and a struggling economy that has led to high levels of food insecurity and unemployment.

How has the Taliban’s rule affected women in Afghanistan?

The Taliban’s rule has severely restricted women’s rights and freedoms. Women face restrictions on employment, movement, public life, and even access to healthcare. The morality police have enforced strict dress codes and public behavior rules, leading to arrests and protests.

What is the situation with ISIS-K in Afghanistan?

ISIS-K (Islamic State Khorasan Province) has been carrying out terrorist attacks in Afghanistan since its establishment in 2015. The group is known for its brutality and has targeted various groups, including civilians, government officials, and even the Taliban. ISIS-K’s presence has added to the instability and violence in the country.

What is the current state of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan?

Humanitarian aid to Afghanistan has significantly decreased since the Taliban’s takeover. International funding fell from approximately $3.8 billion in 2022 to $1.9 billion in 2023. The UN’s humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan has received only about 31% of the required funding, leading to the closure or scaling back of many programs.

What are the main causes of food insecurity in Afghanistan?

Food insecurity in Afghanistan is caused by a combination of factors, including economic collapse, drought, water shortages, and the displacement of millions of people. The World Food Programme estimates that roughly 17.4 million people could face severe hunger during 2026.

How has the Taliban’s rule affected the healthcare system in Afghanistan?

The Taliban’s rule has led to a deterioration of the healthcare system in Afghanistan. Women have been banned from medical education, leading to fears of a future healthcare shortage. Many women cannot seek care from male medical staff in conservative settings, further complicating access to healthcare.

Sources

• Original Places video: Afghanistan is Now So Much Worse Than You Think.
• Hero image source by Saga1111 / openverse, by-sa.