Afghanistan Peace CampaignThe Miami Herald
August 21, 2026
For a young Afghan girl preparing for her sixth-grade exams, the fifth anniversary of Taliban rule this weekend was also a countdown to the day her formal education ends.
Under the hardline government, girls can’t study past the sixth grade.
“I am 12 years old, preparing for my sixth-grade exams – the last I will be allowed to take,” the unidentified girl told the Guardian. “What future am I studying for, when that path no longer exists?”
Her predicament embodies how profoundly life has changed since the Taliban took over the country five years ago and the growing anger in the country because of it.
The Taliban swept back to power on Aug. 15, 2021, when the United States and its NATO allies ended their 20-year operation in the country, leading the Western-backed government to collapse. Five years later, Afghanistan is safer but poorer.
For example, violence has sharply fallen under its rule: The government has successfully beaten back its main enemy, the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, the militant group’s local affiliate behind repeated bombings over the past five years. As a result, roadside bombings and terror attacks in Kabul are rarer now.
“Afghans can travel to parts of the country that were once effectively inaccessible without fearing for their lives,” Al Jazeera said. “For a country where even movement within the capital was dangerous, this is a significant achievement.”
Yet greater security within Afghanistan has not brought prosperity. While the economy is growing again – 4.3 percent in 2025 – a rapidly expanding population, aid cuts, weak investment and severe restrictions on women have left millions in dire poverty.
Almost one-quarter of young Afghans remain unemployed. Meanwhile, about 21.9 million people – 45 percent of the population – are expected to need humanitarian assistance this year. At the same time, Afghans complain about poor wages that make it impossible to afford the basics, much less plan for the future.
The Taliban’s successful enforcement of its 2022 ban on poppy cultivation has also intensified rural poverty. “The cash crop’s sudden disappearance has wreaked havoc on farmers,” World Politics Review reported. “A year after the ban, in 2023, agricultural income fell more than 92 percent, from an estimated $1.36 billion to $110 million.
Still, the most profound damage may emerge decades from now. Some 2.4 million girls have been shut out of secondary school, while women are barred from higher education, most jobs and even from leaving their homes without a male relative. The bans could cost Afghanistan $9.6 billion in lost economic activity by 2066.
“The greatest danger facing Afghanistan today is not only that 20 million women and girls are being systematically erased from public life,” wrote human rights lawyer Belquis Ahmadi for Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security. “It is that the world is slowly learning to live with it.”
For years after the Taliban’s takeover, the West shunned the country, demanding that it honor its promises to protect women’s rights and freedoms. However, more recently, foreign governments have been increasingly engaging with the Afghan government, putting practical interests ahead of isolation. While Russia remains the only country formally to recognize the Taliban government, India, China, Iran and Central Asian states have expanded diplomatic and business contacts in pursuit of trade, influence and security.
The West has also re-engaged amid fears of an Islamic State resurgence, with US officials meeting Taliban counterparts and European governments discussing the return of rejected Afghan asylum-seekers in meetings in Brussels that the Taliban portrayed as a coup, Le Monde reported.
Moreover, the Lowy Institute noted that in the US and Europe there are increasing restrictions on demonstrations against the Taliban and other forms of protest: “Major democracies and Western-aligned states increasingly behave as if the Taliban were a durable reality.”
That’s quite a switch from the first time Afghanistan was taken over by the Taliban – from 1996 to 2001 – when “the world largely forgot about the country,” noted Comfort Ero of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank.
Still, the major exception is Afghanistan’s continuing conflict with Pakistan, once the Taliban’s chief foreign backer.
Pakistan declared an “open war” on Afghanistan earlier this year following a surge in militant attacks by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which it says operates from Afghan territory. That has resulted in air and ground strikes by Pakistan and retaliatory hits from the Taliban in the border regions.
Still, analysts say that predictions that either the Taliban wouldn’t last even five years because it would likely succumb to infighting under the strains of governing or would moderate in pursuit of international recognition have been proved wrong. But that doesn’t mean the government is secure, they add.
“What has emerged … is a government that is administratively more capable than its critics expected and politically more brittle than its own propaganda suggests,” wrote the London-based news site Afghanistan International.
Supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada continues to hold ultimate authority and surrounds himself with other hardliners. Meanwhile, neither more moderate Taliban figures nor divided opposition groups appear capable of forcing change.
Still, analysts believe that despite the violence subsiding, the population has been alienated because of a lack of rights for both men and women, the economic crisis and deteriorating living conditions, persecutions, executions and forced disappearances of those deemed enemies and a lack of opportunities for anyone not connected to the rulers: They are ethnic Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan and make up about 42 percent of the population.
They add that they believe change is coming from within, possibly leading to another period of deep insecurity and violence for the country. At least three groups have recently announced armed resistance against the Taliban in Badakhshan, a resource-rich northeastern province.
“The Taliban are using medieval ideas of governance to rule a country which faces complex 21st century challenges,” said Michael Semple of Queen’s University Belfast in an interview with RFE/RL.
“Armed resistance is growing,” he added. “The main thing prolonging the Taliban rule is the absence of an effective resistance able to mobilize people on the ground. I think that there is every chance that the Taliban emirate will be overthrown, but I suspect that the force that will overthrow it is not yet in the field.”