Kabul Is Running Dry and Solutions Might Come Too Late

August 15, 2025 Current News Articles

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

The New York Times

Aug. 13, 2025

The six million people living in the Afghan capital could be out of water by 2030. The government is scrambling for solutions, but financial reserves are as dry as Kabul’s water basins.

As the sunset enveloped Kabul on a recent summer evening, two neighbors blurted out insults at each other over access to a rapidly vanishing resource: water.

“You come with four canisters and you cut the line,” Aman Karimi hissed at a woman as he snatched a hose from her hands and filled his own buckets from a mosque’s tap. “It’s my turn, and it’s my right.”

Kabul is running dry, withered by scarcer rainfalls and snow melts and drained by unregulated wells. It has become so dry that its six million people could be without water by 2030 — and are now fighting about it.

Its water reserves are emptying nearly twice as quickly as they are getting replenished. The Taliban administration, short of cash, has so far been unable to bring water from nearby dams and rivers to the choking city.

Now, Kabul risks becoming the first modern capital to be depleted of underground water reserves, the nonprofit Mercy Corps warned in a recent report.

“We are increasingly fighting because water is like gold for us,” Mr. Karimi said, as he pushed a wheelbarrow filled with 40 gallons of water that his family of five would use for cooking, washing and drinking. Mr. Karimi, a tailor, said they recently moved into a new home because of skyrocketing housing prices, but the new one doesn’t have running water.

Kabul, surrounded by snowy mountains and crossed by three rivers, had never been known as a dry city. But while its population has grown roughly sixfold over the past 25 years, no decent water management system has been put in place to bring water from other sources or to regulate underground extraction from greenhouses, factories and residential buildings that are mushrooming across the city.

Water supply is a critical issue across Afghanistan. At least 700,000 Afghans are displaced every year because of climate change, primarily droughts, according to the United Nations. One third of Afghanistan’s 42 million people don’t have access to clean drinking water.

International donors financed multiple dam projects and initiatives to connect Kabul’s homes to a reliable pipe system, budgeting hundreds of millions of dollars. Most never saw the light of the day or were abruptly stopped after 2021, when the Taliban took control and other nations refused to recognize the new government after the U.S. withdrawal.

“Kabul has been struggling with water issues for two decades, but it never was a priority,” said Najibullah Sadid, an expert on water resources. “Now the wells are drying up and it’s an emergency.”

Kabul’s residents have been digging more and more boreholes in courtyards and in basements, puncturing a city drained by unregulated water extraction.

Just a fifth of Kabul’s residents have access to piped water, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Agency for International Development. But the plumbing is increasingly out of service, too. Even the national environmental agency relies on a tanker delivering more than 2,600 gallons a day, because its well has run dry and its pipes are out of service.

Kabul exists as if on an I.V. drip, with thousands of gallons of water supplied by hundreds of Chinese-made tricycles and Soviet-era trucks crisscrossing the city.

Those who can’t afford to buy water from delivery companies rely on the dwindling wells of mosques or charity from affluent residents. As the sun goes down, the wheelbarrows come out and the meandering streets and steep hills sparkle with large, sunflower-yellow cooking oil canisters turned into water containers.

On a recent morning, Haji Muhammad Zahir rushed downstairs as he heard a recorded message advertising water blasting down his leafy street. Water delivery companies have sprouted up across Kabul, including in affluent neighborhoods like his, where longtime residents now share their streets with former Talib fighters and officials.

A former head of the City Council and a retired mechanical engineer, Mr. Zahir said his well had run dry years ago and the public pipe to his two-story house was spluttering water only every three days. He urged the Taliban to keep Kabul afloat, but he added, “Where is the money for that?”

The government is scrambling to find funds. Across the country, four dams have been completed since 2021, including one 20 miles away from Kabul that, if connected through a pipeline, could bring water to thousands of households. Another pipeline project from nearby Panjshir Valley has yet to receive final approval from the country’s leadership.

Both lack funding: foreign donors have turned off the tap and private investments are scarce. “Our projects are big and we can only provide half of the funds,” Matiullah Abid, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s ministry of water and energy, said in an interview.

By the mosque where Mr. Karimi had scolded a neighbor, the line of people waiting for water had slowly thinned.

Among the last ones were Atefeh Kazimi, 26, who filled some canisters in exchange for a few afghanis, the national currency, for the mosque. She then trudged her wheelbarrow 30 minutes home.

There was a mosque closer to her house, but its well had run dry.

Safiullah Padshah and Yaqoob Akbary contributed reporting.

Elian Peltier is an international correspondent for The Times, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Dispatches From Afghanistan Show How the U.S. Lost Its Way — and the War

August 12, 2025 Analytical articles

By Elliot Ackerman

Elliot Ackerman, a Marine veteran of the war in Afghanistan, is the author, most recently, of the novel “Sheepdogs.”

New York Times

Aug. 12, 2025

A new book by the veteran correspondent Jon Lee Anderson captures a long war’s noble goals and crippling missteps.

TO LOSE A WAR: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, by Jon Lee Anderson

In one of the final scenes of Mike Nichols’s 2007 movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” Representative Charlie Wilson of Texas, played by Tom Hanks, pleads with his colleagues to approve reconstruction money for Afghanistan. The country’s mujahedeen, backed by the C.I.A., had by this point defeated the Soviets after a long and bloody war over the course of the 1980s.

American policymakers were ready to move on and Wilson, begging for one one-thousandth of the sum the U.S. government had recently appropriated to fight its secret war, says: “This is what we always do. We always go in with our ideals and we change the world and then we leave. We always leave. But that ball though, it keeps on bouncing.”

Jon Lee Anderson’s “To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban” follows the bouncing ball. One of this country’s pre-eminent war correspondents, Anderson covered Afghanistan for more than two decades as a reporter for The New Yorker; this collection of his dispatches, all but one published in the magazine, spans that time, beginning in 2001, shortly after the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the U.S.-affiliated Northern Alliance, and ending in late 2021, with a grim portrait of Afghanistan’s myriad challenges — from crippling drought and economic collapse to political feuds — in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal.

In his preface, Anderson characterizes Afghanistan as “more of a battleground of history” than “a nation.” The early chapters deal with the rise of American power in Afghanistan in the aughts, as well as the Taliban’s precipitate fall in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Weeks after those attacks, Anderson traveled to Kabul at an inflection point. The Taliban were on the run. Osama bin Laden was on the loose. And the country stood on the cusp of a promising future unimaginable only weeks before.

In those heady days, Anderson interviewed Ghulam Sarwar Akbari, a former Afghan communist who, like Wilson in Nichols’s movie, blames U.S. disengagement after the Soviet defeat for Afghanistan becoming a terrorist haven: “After the Soviets left, and the mujahedeen were victorious, America, instead of helping them to create a good government, forgot about Afghanistan. America shouldn’t have done this.”

Reading Anderson’s early dispatches is like stepping into a time capsule. His Afghan and American subjects give voice to the conventional wisdom of a period nearly 25 years behind us. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, he meets with Jack Idema, a private security contractor, who cites the urgent need for a large American military presence, without which “we’re gonna be right back to where we were five years from now.” That interview took place in 2001. One of the remarkable aspects of Anderson’s reporting is its scope of perspective as well as time. In his telling, the war — and, with it, Afghanistan’s promising future — deteriorates before our eyes, page by page.

In a 2010 dispatch from Maiwand, in the country’s south, Anderson writes: “The situation that the U.S. military finds itself in in Afghanistan is an odd one. Formally speaking, it has been deployed in Afghanistan since the autumn of 2001, and yet, in areas like Maiwand, it is essentially a newcomer.” In the same chapter, he embeds with the U.S. Army’s Third “Wolfpack” Squadron of the Second Cavalry as its soldiers struggle to contain the Taliban insurgency. Already, American military deaths are beginning to mount. This chapter begins with the death of Joseph T. Prentler, a young U.S. soldier killed in an I.E.D. strike. Slowly, the dream of a quick American victory fades as the casualties — both American and Afghan — add up.

One of those casualties is the clarity of purpose with which the United States entered the war after 9/11. Afghanistan was supposed to be the “good” war, fought for a righteous cause: the destruction of Al Qaeda and the dismantling of the Taliban regime that offered the group a haven. This was a government that inflicted human rights abuses on its own people, enforced a barbaric form of Shariah law and refused to allow girls to attend school, making Afghanistan the worst place in the world to be a woman.

In one of his later chapters, Anderson follows Lt. Col. Stephen Lutsky as he wages a failing counterinsurgency campaign in the restive Khost Province. Lutsky describes how many Afghans were willing to cut deals that often undermined American efforts, saying: “For Americans, it’s black or white — it’s either good guys or bad guys. For Afghans, it’s not. There are good Taliban and bad Taliban, and some of them are willing to do deals with each other. It’s just beyond us.”

Ultimately, the tragic U.S. withdrawal in August 2021 proved Lutsky’s point: The war was “just beyond us.” Today, the conventional wisdom from the end of the 1980s, when Tom Hanks’s Charlie Wilson was pleading for reconstruction funds, has been turned on its head. Ideas like “nation-building” and “regime change” have become politically toxic on both sides of the aisle.

Maybe that’s sound policy. Or maybe those policymakers should read Anderson’s reporting. If they do, they will find a book that is as deeply humane and profoundly rendered as any I’ve read about Afghanistan, or any other war. “To Lose a War” is a monument to both good intentions and folly, a humbling reminder that the ball keeps on bouncing.

TO LOSE A WAR: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban | By Jon Lee Anderson | Penguin Press | 371 pp. | $30

UN report says its female staff in Afghanistan have received death threats

August 12, 2025 Current News Articles

Al Jazeera

Taliban rulers say they are not behind the threats and are investigating, according to the United Nations.

Explicit death threats have been made against dozens of Afghan women working for the United Nations in Afghanistan, according to a new UN report, where their rights have been severely curtailed since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.

The UN mission to the country said female national staff were subjected to direct death threats in May, in the latest update on the human rights situation in Afghanistan published on Sunday.

The report says the Taliban told the UN mission that their cadres were not responsible for the threats, and an Interior Ministry investigation is under way.

The Interior Ministry spokesman, Abdul Mateen Qani, however, said no threats had been made. “This is completely incorrect”, Qani told The Associated Press news agency.

“The ministry has an independent department for this, and we have a strategic plan for protection and security so there is no threat to them in any area, nor can anyone threaten them, nor is there any threat to them.” Qani did not answer questions about an investigation, according to AP.

The threats came from unidentified individuals related to their work with the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, other agencies, funds, and programmes, “requiring the U.N. to implement interim measures to protect their safety”, according to the report.

The Taliban barred Afghan women from working at domestic and foreign nongovernmental organisations in December 2022, extending this ban to the UN six months later. They then threatened to shut down agencies and groups still employing women. Aid agencies and NGOs say the Taliban have disrupted or interfered with their operations, allegations denied by authorities.

The UN report is the first official confirmation of death threats against Afghan women working in the sector. The report also highlighted other areas affecting women’s personal freedoms and safety, including inspectors from the Vice and Virtue Ministry requiring women to wear a chador, a full-body cloak covering the head. Women have been arrested for only wearing the hijab.

Women have also been denied access to public areas, in line with laws banning them from such spaces.

A UN report from August 2024 found that Afghanistan’s Taliban government has “deliberately deprived” at least 1.4 million girls of their right to an education during its three years in power.

ICC targets Taliban for persecution of women

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants in July for two top Taliban leaders in Afghanistan on charges of abuses against women and girls.

ICC judges said at the time there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect Taliban Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhunzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani of committing gender-based persecution.

“While the Taliban have imposed certain rules and prohibitions on the population as a whole, they have specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms,” the court said in a statement in July.

The Taliban has “severely deprived” girls and women of the rights to education, privacy, family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion, ICC judges said.

The Taliban has rejected the ICC warrants as “baseless rhetoric”, saying it does not recognise the ICC’s authority, and underlined the court’s failure to protect the “hundreds of women and children being killed daily” in Gaza.

UN: Risk of Complete Erasure of Afghan Women from Public Life ‘Serious’

August 12, 2025 Current News Articles

Bibi Amina Hakimi

TOLOnews’ Reporter

12 August 2025

Meanwhile, some women once again call on the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to provide them with opportunities for education and work.

The UN Women warns that the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan has become increasingly unbearable, and the risk of their complete removal from public life is serious.

The UN Women stated: “Four years after Taliban fighters retook the capital Kabul on 15 August 2021, gender equality agency UN Women is warning that the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan is increasingly untenable.”

At the same time, concerns are not limited only to educational and employment deprivation.

The UN has reported that in May, dozens of its female staff members in Afghanistan were explicitly threatened with death due to their cooperation with international organizations.

Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said: “Based on monitoring body, UN Missions Human Rights Service, the update also notes that in May, dozens of women working for the United Nations were subject to explicit death threats from unidentified individuals in relation to their work with the UN mission and other UN agencies, funds and programs. This required us to implement interim measures to protect the safety of our colleagues.”

Meanwhile, some women once again call on the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to provide them with opportunities for education and work.

Masouda Hematzai, a mother of four who worked in a government institution under the Republic, has now, four years after the return of the Islamic Emirate to power, replaced her office desk with a small corner of her home, making handmade wall art as her only source of income.

She said: “I was working as an instructor in the training department of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. After the Islamic Emirate came to power, I lost my job. As the head of my household with three sons and one daughter, it was hard for me to stay unemployed and homebound.”

On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Islamic Emirate’s rule, women’s rights activists say Afghan women need educational and job opportunities, and that “silence” in the face of this trend means accepting the elimination of half of society.

Mumtaz Yousufzai, a women’s rights activist, said: “My request, as a woman and a human being, from the Islamic Emirate is to take more measures in the field of women’s work and rights. Four years is a very long time we have endured. During this period, many matters have improved, but in terms of women’s rights, no concrete action or proposal has been considered.”

Tafsir Siahpoosh, another women’s rights activist, added: “Our request from the Islamic Emirate is to pay attention to women’s demands, because we witness increasing restrictions against women every day. Our request from the international community is also to respond to women’s voices and listen to them.”

This comes as earlier, the Executive Director of UN Women, as well as the representatives of the UK and France, had criticized the continuation of restrictions on women and girls in Afghanistan during a UN Security Council meeting.

Afghanistan’s Tourism Boom Boosts Economy, Promotes Culture

August 12, 2025 Current News Articles

TOLOnews

TV Network

11 August 2025

Tourism is also an opportunity to present Afghanistan’s culture and history to the world.

The significant increase in tourists visiting Afghanistan in recent years has created a new opportunity to boost the economy and promote the country’s culture.

According to the Ministry of Information and Culture, in the past four years, about 24,000 tourists from different countries have entered Afghanistan to visit historical sites, natural landscapes, and experience Afghan culture.

Khabib Ghufran, spokesperson for the Ministry of Information and Culture, said: “These tourists came from different countries of the world to Afghanistan and visited various provinces based on their personal interests, tastes, and travel goals. We have cultural and historical tourists, and tourists who come to see natural attractions and sightseeing areas. There are also mountaineering and other types of tourists. In total, we have nine types of tourism in Afghanistan.”

Relative improvement in security, restoration of some cultural sites, and Afghanistan’s abundant natural resources are considered important factors behind the country’s tourism growth.

According to economic and cultural experts, the growth of the tourism industry can provide a source of income for Afghanistan, promote historical and cultural attractions, and create job opportunities in the country.

Abdul Zahir Modabber, an economic affairs expert, said: “Fortunately, Afghanistan has a very good base for tourism; it has many natural places and landscapes. By mechanizing this process, we can earn more income, meaning we should provide facilities, good security, a suitable environment, and proper hygiene.”

Wali Shah Bahra, a cultural affairs expert, also said: “These visits certainly have an impact on the development and promotion of our culture, and they greatly influence the growth of our industry, especially in the fields of art and crafts.”

Tourism is also an opportunity to present Afghanistan’s culture and history to the world.

Cultural activists have always emphasized that direct interaction between tourists and locals can provide a more realistic image of the country and create more positive perceptions of Afghanistan internationally.

Iran Criticized for Expelling Migrants Holding Legal Residency Documents

August 10, 2025 Current News Articles

By Fidel Rahmati

Khaama Press

August 9, 2025

Iran’s social workers say authorities deport Afghan migrants without verifying legal status, citing cases of mistaken identity, family separation, and alleged abuse during mass expulsions.

The head of Iran’s Association of Social Workers, Hassan Mousavi Chelik, says officials have failed to distinguish between “legal” and “illegal” Afghan migrants during recent mass deportations.

He cited the case of an Iranian child mistakenly deported as an Afghan, whose identity was confirmed only after fingerprinting at the Iranian consulate, leading to his return.

Mousavi said some families were expelled because one member lacked residency papers, and in other cases, fathers were deported while their children remained in Iran.

Tehran governor Mohammad Sadeq Motamedian said that in the past 100 days, more than one million Afghans have been deported, including 400,000 from Tehran province.

Reports suggest some deportations involved violence, including a July case where an Afghan family alleged that Baqer Rezaei died under torture by Iranian officials at a Zabol detention camp.

Rights advocates warn that such practices risk separating families, violating human rights, and further straining relations between Iran and Afghanistan.

International monitoring has been urged to ensure deportations are conducted lawfully and humanely, with safeguards for vulnerable groups, especially children.

Mujahid: We Asked US to Hand Over Afghan Embassy to Islamic Emirate

August 10, 2025 Current News Articles

TOLOnews

TV Network

10 August 2025

In an interview with National Television, he called for the handover of Afghanistan’s embassy in Washington to the caretaker government.

On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Islamic Emirate’s return to power in the country, Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesperson for the caretaker government, spoke about direct talks with the United States.

Afghanistan’s Taliban have ‘weaponized’ the judicial system to oppress women, UN expert says

August 9, 2025 Current News Articles

By EDITH M. LEDERER

Associated Press

August 6, 2025

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have “weaponized” the legal and judicial system to oppress women and girls in what amounts to “crimes against humanity,” the independent U.N. investigator on human rights in the country said.

Richard Bennett said in a report to the U.N. General Assembly circulated Wednesday that after seizing power in 2021 the Taliban suspended the 2004 constitution and laws protecting the rights of women and girls. These include a landmark law that criminalized 22 forms of violence against women, including rape and child and forced marriage.

The Taliban dismissed all judges under the previous U.S.-backed government, including approximately 270 women, replacing them with men who share their extreme Islamic views, lack legal training and hand down decisions based on edicts issued by the Taliban, he said.

In addition, he noted that the Taliban have assumed full control over law enforcement and investigative agencies, systematically purging Afghans who worked for the previous government.

Bennett, who was appointed by the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council, focused on access to justice and protection for women and girls in his report. He said he held meetings, focus-group discussions and one-on-one interviews with more that 110 Afghans inside and outside the country. He did so remotely because the Taliban have refused to grant him a visa to travel to Afghanistan.

Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, their crackdown on women and girls has been widely reported and globally denounced.

Taliban leaders have barred education for women and girls beyond sixth grade, banned most employment, and prohibited women from many public spaces, including parks, gyms and hairdressers. New laws ban women’s voices and bare faces outside the home.

The Taliban remain isolated from the West because of their restrictions on women and girls and have only been recognized by Russia.

Bennett said the Taliban did not respond to an advance copy of the report and a request for information about their efforts to ensure access to justice and protection for women and girls.

The Taliban defend their approach to justice by claiming they are implementing Islamic sharia law, but Islamic scholars and others have said their interpretation is unparalleled in other Muslim-majority countries and does not adhere to Islamic teachings. They say protecting the legal rights of women is a priority.

Bennett said, however, that women have virtually no rights.

“Today, there are no women judges or prosecutors and no officially registered female lawyers, leaving women and girls with fewer safe channels to report abuse or seek redress,” he wrote. “Coupled with a lack of female officials in the police and other institutions, the result is widespread underreporting of violence and discrimination against women and girls.”

Bennett said access to justice for girls “is further undermined by the dismantling of key legal safeguards and institutions protecting the rights of children,” including juvenile courts and juvenile rehabilitation centers.

The Taliban requirement that a woman must be accompanied by a male relative also creates barriers to filing complaints and attending court proceedings, he said, and disproportionately affects widows, women who are the heads of their households, the displaced and disabled.

“Women who engage with the Taliban court system — whether as victims seeking redress, to resolve family issues, to obtain official documents or as alleged offenders — face a hostile environment,” Bennett said. “Courts often reject complaints made by women and are especially reluctant to accept cases relating to divorce, child custody and gender-based violence.”

Facing these obstacles, Bennett said, women increasingly turn to traditional and informal justice mechanisms, including formal jirgas and shuras — community councils of elders — and informal mediation by religious leaders, community elders or family. But these are all male-dominated and raise “serious concerns about the rights of women and girls,” he said.

He said international forums offer the best hope for justice. He pointed to the International Criminal Court’s request on Jan. 23 for arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders accused of crimes against humanity for persecution “on gender grounds.” And he urged all countries to support efforts to bring Afghanistan before the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s highest tribunal, for violating the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

IOM Warns of Crisis as 1.5 Million Afghans Deported in 2025

August 9, 2025 Current News Articles

By TOLOnews

TV Network

8 Aug 2025

Meanwhile, the UN Women stated in a report that women and girls make up nearly half of the migrants deported from neighboring countries.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has warned that Afghanistan is facing one of the largest waves of forced deportations of migrants from neighboring countries, with 1.5 million individuals deported and returned to the country in this calendar year alone.

The organization, referring to Pakistan’s decision to continue deporting Afghan migrants, added that without international support, Afghanistan will face a serious crisis.

Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said: “International Organization for Migration is urgently calling for international support as Afghanistan faces one of the largest return movements in recent history. Since September 2023, more than 4 million Afghans have returned from Iran and Pakistan, with over 1.5 million returning in 2025 alone.”

Meanwhile, the UN Women stated in a report that women and girls make up nearly half of the migrants deported from neighboring countries.

The UN agency added that deported women and girls face threats such as poverty, early marriage, violence, and unprecedented restrictions upon their return to Afghanistan.

The UN Deputy Spokesperson added: “Women and girls represent 1/3 of returnees from Iran so far in 2025 and about half of all returnees from Pakistan. The report voiced that, like all women and girls in Afghanistan, returnee women and girls face increased risks of poverty, early marriage, violence, exploitation and unprecedented restrictions on their rights, movements and freedoms.”

In response to the UN’s concerns about the situation of deported women, the caretaker government said that all the rights of these and other women in Afghanistan are being protected and dismissed the concerns as unfounded.

Hamdullah Fitrat, Deputy Spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate, said: “The Islamic Emirate has prevented any form of forced marriage and Bad Dadan (“giving away a daughter,” which typically involves settling a dispute between families or tribes by marrying off a girl from one family to a man from the other.), Women are given inheritance rights, their voices are heard, their cases are processed in courts, and especially the complaints section of the Ministry of Vice and Virtue has addressed thousands of women’s complaints.”

Tafsir Siyahposh, a women’s rights activist, said: “Today we all witness that unfortunately, the opportunities that were available to women returning from abroad are not available in Afghanistan. But we are still trying to persuade the Islamic Emirate government to consider the rights and freedoms of women.”

Concerns over the consequences of mass deportation of Afghan migrants from neighboring countries come at a time when forced deportations from Iran and Pakistan continue intensively.

The issue of women’s education and employment, which has been a major point of criticism from the international community, remains unresolved.

The Guardian view on the other Afghan scandal: countries are forcing refugees back to Taliban rule

August 1, 2025 Analytical articles

Editorial

The Guardian

Thu 31 Jul 2025

The British public discovered only very belatedly that an enormous accidental data breach by an official three years ago put up to 100,000 Afghans at risk of torture and death. Some of them had worked with British forces in Afghanistan. The result was that thousands were secretly relocated to the UK. A superinjunction covered up the story for almost two years.

But the shocking security lapse is far from the only example of Afghans being failed since Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021. Many more are now at risk because the countries to which they fled are pushing them out. The mirage of a more moderate Taliban was soon shattered by their imposition of gender apartheid and the brutality faced by minorities. Three-quarters of the population struggle to meet their daily needs. Women are particularly vulnerable. Humanitarian support is being slashed. A drought and now the loss of overseas remittances are deepening the crisis.

Yet almost 2 million Afghan refugees and migrants in neighbouring countries have returned or been forced to return home this year alone – thousands of them unaccompanied children, according to UN experts. More than 1.5 million Afghans have returned from Iran in 2025, with Iran accelerating expulsions after the war with Israel, which fed suspicion towards migrants.

Pakistan began deporting unregistered Afghans in late 2023, after attacks by militants in border areas, but has widened its campaign to those who hold documents. More than two-thirds have never lived in Afghanistan, according to the International Crisis Group; their families fled conflict decades ago. In some cases, security forces are forcibly repatriating Afghans. In others, threats, harassment or intimidation have chased them out.

The Trump administration has announced the removal of temporary protected status from almost 12,000 Afghans in the US, though an appeals court has for now blocked it from doing so. The US said that conditions in Afghanistan no longer merited the status. Tajikistan has also ordered Afghans to leave.

UN experts have warned that former officials, including judges and lawyers, human rights defenders and journalists and other critics of the Taliban, along with religious and ethnic minorities, are at particular risk if they are returned. Women and girls are being deported to a country where they can no longer attend secondary school or university and are prohibited from letting their voices be heard outside the house, and where the EU has estimated that basic health services are available to just 10% of women. By driving women out of jobs and severely restricting their movements, the Taliban have ensured that female-headed households face destitution. The prospect of return is particularly frightening for women’s rights activists who face imprisonment or death for their work.

Pakistan and Iran should not force Afghans home – endangering lives and ending education for girls. But other governments too bear responsibility for this crisis. Poorer nations have been left to shoulder the strain of a high number of refugees, some of whom are in limbo due to Germany’s closure of a humanitarian admission programme, and the bureaucracy surrounding a similiar programme in Australia. This has been a triple failure: a failure to welcome Afghans with a strong case for resettlement; to support them in countries which have accepted them; and to help those who are returning to Afghanistan. Western countries must live up to their promises to the Afghan people.

A new book by the veteran correspondent Jon Lee Anderson captures a long war’s noble goals and crippling missteps.

The report says the Taliban told the UN mission that their cadres were not responsible for the threats, and an Interior Ministry investigation is under way.

ICC targets Taliban for persecution of women

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