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The End of US Aid to Afghanistan: What will it mean for families, services and the economy?

May 9, 2025

Kate Clark • AAN Team

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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The full weight of the United States’ cuts to aid to Afghanistan has finally become clear. Almost all the aid that was promised – at least USD 1.8 billion – will now not be given, according to the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The United Nations has announced a reprioritisation of the humanitarian effort: out of the more than 22 million Afghans deemed in need, it said efforts would now focus, not on 16.8 million people but 12.5 million. The UN relief chief, Tom Fletcher, visiting Afghanistan at the end of April, said the cuts will “directly result in deaths.” The stated reason for the US stopping aid is corruption in the sector by the Islamic Emirate, something it has denied. However, the Emirate’s decision to focus government spending on the security services has left many basic social services, especially health, vulnerable to aid cuts. Kate Clark and the AAN team have been looking at the impact on the lives of Afghans and the national economy of the termination of aid from what had been Afghanistan’s largest donor. 

Timeline of cuts in US aid under President Trump

20 January 2025 – President Donald Trump signs an executive order for all US-funded aid programmes to stop work, pending a 90-day review after which only programmes that make America safer, stronger or more prosperous will be retained.

28 January – Secretary of State Marco Rubio announces a temporary waiver for existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programmes.

10 March – Rubio announces that 83 per cent of programmes delivered by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have been terminated.

24 March – USAID reports to Congress that it has terminated 4,443 awards globally and retained 898. Nine of these, worth USD 223 million, are in Afghanistan, meaning just under two-thirds of the USAID’s Afghan programme is intact.

8 April – The State Department announces that the US has cut all aid to the World Food Programme (WFP) in Afghanistan, amounting to USD 567 million; it transpires that this is not just WFP, funding  but that the US has cut all humanitarian assistance.

23 April – OCHA announces that it is reprioritising its 2025 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan in response to the cuts and will now be helping not 16.8 million Afghans, but 12.5 million.

30 April – SIGAR reports that all USAID programmes in Afghanistan, both humanitarian (USD 765 million) and for basic services (USD one billion) have been cut, with the exception of two small education programmes. It says the State Department has yet to give it a comprehensive list of cuts to its programmes. That information is still to come.

How US aid was cut

Any substantial cut to American aid to Afghanistan was going to hit the country hard because it has been such an outsized donor – providing more than 40 per cent of all aid in 2024. Already, when AAN first looked at the impact of President Trump’s ‘stop work’ order, on 10 February 2025, the signs were ominous that his hostility to USAID – he said it was run by “a bunch of radical lunatics” (NBC) – would have grave consequences for Afghanistan. Yet, there were also hopes that it would be spared the worst, either through a 90-day review of all programmes ordered by Trump or because of a waiver to “life-saving humanitarian activities” issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on 28 January, given that US aid to Afghanistan was already so strongly tilted toward humanitarian interventions.[1]

However, by 10 March, Rubio, who called the cuts to global USAID programmes an “overdue and historic reform,” tweeted that the administration had cancelled 83 per cent of USAID programmes, comprising 5,200 contracts on which the US had been spending “tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.” Later that month, on 24 March, according to SIGAR’s second quarterly report this year, when USAID reported on its 90-day review to Congress, out of 5,341 awards valued at USD 75.9 billion, only 898 programmes remained active globally.[2] That included nine in Afghanistan.

Researchers Ian Mitchell and Sam Hughes, drawing on the list of terminated and still active programmes that USAID had given to Congress, calculated that the absolute reduction in funding for Afghanistan was USD 223 million,[3] making it the tenth largest decrease globally. At that time, the proportion of USAID contracts that had been terminated was comparatively low: 36 per cent of the USAID programme in Afghanistan had been cut, compared to 56 per cent in Bangladesh; 69 per cent in Tajikistan, 85 percent in Pakistan; 94 per cent India; and 100 per cent in Nepal and Sri Lanka. However, because Afghanistan has a relatively small economy and civilian aid/USAID has played a critical role, the researchers estimated that the hit to the economy, relative to national income, was the second greatest in the world, equivalent to 1.29 per cent of its Gross National Income (GNI) and surpassed only by Liberia (2.59 per cent).[4]

Then, on 7 April, news leaked of more cuts. A newly established reporting and advocacy group, OneAid,[5] reported that Washington was cutting USD 1.3 billion from humanitarian aid globally and that Afghanistan was losing all its humanitarian assistance, amounting to USD 561.8 million. OneAid estimated this would affect “at least 15 per cent of the population” of Afghanistan.[6] The following day, the advocacy group said it had “received word that some terminations that occurred last week and over the weekend are being rapidly rescinded.” It turned out, however, that Afghanistan would not be among those countries to see its humanitarian assistance restored.

State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce confirmed this on the same day, 8 April 2025: “There were a few programs that were cut in other countries that were not meant to be cut that have been rolled back and put into place.” However, Afghanistan, along with Yemen, would no longer get any US aid, a decision based on what Bruce said were “credible and longstanding concerns that funding was benefitting terrorist groups, including the Houthis and the Taliban.”

Bruce cited a report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) from May 2024 that “at least $11 million” in US aid had been “siphoned or [had] enrich[ed] the Taliban.”[7] The reference was to USAID’s implementing partners paying at least USD 10.9 million in taxes and other fees to the Emirate, so not actually enriching individual Taliban, nor the movement. SIGAR did not recommend stopping aid, but increasing “oversight of foreign assistance funds by expanding foreign tax-reporting requirements to all U.S. award agreements and collecting foreign tax reports from implementing partners.”[8] During the Islamic Republic, aid diversion, including of US military spending going to the Taliban, was massive, dwarfing this sum. Referring to this is not to make light of Emirate interference in aid, but Bruce’s reference to the SIGAR report looks to be a flimsy cover for the decision to cut all aid to Afghanistan.[9]

Bruce said the funding was to have gone to the World Food Programme (WFP) in Afghanistan. However, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Afghanistan had a slightly different line, although it noted the same amount of funding had been lost. In a 23 April review of the impact of the US funding freeze, it spoke of “the 4 April decision that all remaining US aid to Afghanistan – totaling $562 million – would be suspended.”

SIGAR has now provided a comprehensive and far worse picture of the situation. It has spoken decisively, not of a ‘suspension’ of USAID funding to Afghanistan, but of its termination, and of cuts totalling USD 1.8 billion. USAID has been left with only two small programmes which support women’s or online higher education.[10]

All USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) awards, adding up to more than USD 765 million (a sum greater than that reported by either the State Department spokesperson or OCHA), have been terminated. As Figure 1 below shows, these awards deliver life-saving humanitarian support to millions of vulnerable Afghans, including: nutrition programmes to combat malnutrition in children and pregnant or nursing mothers; healthcare services to address urgent medical needs; water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programmes to ensure access to clean water and proper sanitation facilities; emergency shelter for disaster-affected and displaced populations; protection services for vulnerable individuals, particularly women, children, the disabled and the elderly; and food assistance to tackle food insecurity. BHA awards also supported humanitarian coordination efforts, including logistics and information management, which are essential for effectively delivering humanitarian aid to those in need.

Figure 1: Cuts to USAID Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) Programmes.
Source: SIGAR Q2 2025 Report to Congress, p10

Trump has also cut what are called ‘humanitarian plus’ or ‘basic needs’ funding. Figure 2 shows the programmes cut; they had supported healthcare, agriculture, infrastructure, women’s rights and human rights, civil society, the media, education and the private sector, in total, one billion dollars.

Figure 2: Terminated USAID programmes. Source: SIGAR Q2 report to Congress 2025, p9

Worth noting are the wider cuts in aid to Afghanistan. Figure 3 below shows that the trend has been relentlessly downward since 2022. Moreover, countries other than the US have, broadly speaking, been maintaining their purely humanitarian aid but cutting non-humanitarian aid, which supports many basic services. As needs in Afghanistan have not diminished, people working in the sector had already felt it was cut to the bone.

Figure 3: Foreign aid as a percentage of GDP. Source: World Bank, Afghanistan Development Update, 23 April 2025, p14

The Trump administration’s policies towards two other major institutions may also affect what happens on the ground in Afghanistan. The United Nations as a whole is under pressure from the US government. Along with China, reported The Economist, the US is pushing the UN to the brink of collapse because of late payment of fees. It is already three billion dollars in arrears:

At least China does pay, even if belatedly. Few are sure that America will settle its $2.3bn annual bill. President Donald Trump has wielded an axe to parts of the international system. After taking office he froze funding for international bodies and has sought to abolish America’s aid agency, USAID. He also ordered officials to review America’s participation in all international organisations, including the UN. The results of the review are due in the middle of July. Speculation is rife among UN diplomats over whether Mr Trump will choose savage cuts or, as some recent reports suggest, refuse to pay at all.

In another move, however, Trump has chosen to ask Congress to approve USD 3.2 billion to the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA), which provides low or zero-interest loans to the world’s poorest countries. “International finance experts,” reported Reuters on 2 April, “hailed the sum, to be paid over three years, as a welcome surprise, given recent worries that Trump could skip making any contribution to IDA.”

The Emirate’s reactions to the US aid cuts 

The Emirate has dismissed the allegation from SIGAR and then the State Department that it is diverting aid as baseless. Deputy Minister of Economy Abdul Latif Nazari insisted that it merely facilitates international aid efforts and does not interfere in the distribution of humanitarian assistance. (Afghanistan International) It plays “no role in the aid process and “has not benefited from U.S. aid,” he said.” (Kabul News) The government’s main message, though, repeated at each turn, is that it is wrong to politicise humanitarian aid. For example, Ministry of Economy spokesperson Abdul Rahman Habib, in response to SIGAR’s recent report, said:

Humanitarian assistance, based on global laws and respect for international principles, is vital. In emergencies, disasters, economic crises, and for vulnerable individuals, such aid plays a key role in providing food, water, and access to services. This aid must not be used by some countries as tools of political pressure. (TOLOnews)

Apart from words, there has been no sign that the Emirate is taking any concrete steps to address the impact of the cuts.

The impact of funding cuts

From the tables published by SIGAR (above), it is clear just how many sectors were supported by US funding. Responses and reactions have been coming in from UN agencies, NGOs and aid workers as to how these cuts will affect their work.

The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Thomas Fletcher, told UN News during a five-day visit to Afghanistan at the end of April/start of May that the humanitarian sector was set to shrink by one-third. In its Impact of US Funding Suspension on the Humanitarian Response, published on 23 April, OCHA said the Humanitarian Country Team had been forced to reprioritise the 2025 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (original here). The focus would now shift to “145 of Afghanistan’s 401 districts with the highest severity of needs as well as the most urgent life-saving activities and protection-related activities.” Of the more than 22 million Afghans in need, it said it would now be helping not 16.8 million people but 12.5 million, with the funding requested reduced significantly – from USD 2.4 billion to USD 1.62 billion. OCHA has provided the following summary of the cuts made to what had been requested and an explanation of the methodology.

Figure 4: OCHA, Urgently Prioritised Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan, Afghanistan

Some sectors have published more details than others. The Health Cluster, the only one to consistently report on the effect of the US funding cuts, has said that, as of 29 April, 409 health facilities had closed or suspended their activities, with the southeastern region (Paktia, Paktika, Khost and Ghazni) the hardest hit (72 closed or suspended). The Health Cluster gives no figure for the facilities still open, so the magnitude of the closures is impossible to assess, but it said the closed facilities were serving an estimated three million people.

OCHA has said the cuts would affect the provision of emergency shelter and non-food items to returnees and those affected by disasters such as flooding. Around 20 per cent of the Education in Emergencies Programmes, providing schooling to 166,000 children, has been suspended. The suspension in funding has also had an impact, it said, on multiple projects that were nearing completion – 44 water infrastructure projects, 30 latrine facilities, 29 water supply networks and 22 well constructions. Earlier, on 26 February, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, reported that it had been informed that most of its US grants had been cut. For Afghanistan, that meant “more than 9 million women will not receive maternal health and wider services.” This sector was specifically excluded even from the January waiver.

The Nutrition Cluster, with data from 19 March, reported that 396 nutrition sites had closed, affecting 80,000 women and children under five. Reporting by The New Arab/AFP heard from staff at one such centre run by Action Contre la Faim in Kabul that had, at any one time, been feeding 65 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition: the director said it was “painful” for the staff, finishing their last days of work, having to turn parents away, knowing the acutely hungry children faced death.

Some of the major international NGOs have also been reporting on the drastic cuts to the support they give. The International Rescue Committee (IRC), working with Afghans since the 1980s, said on 25 April 2025 that it had been forced to close its community-based education programme for 300,000 children who live in areas without schools. It had also been forced to suspend “critical programs that provide health care, vaccination, malnutrition treatment, clean water and protection services. As a result, over 700,000 people, including refugees and displaced families, will lose access to essential humanitarian services from IRC programming alone.”

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has said it was having to make cuts to its support for “the most vulnerable Afghans, displaced from their home area by conflict, drought, and poverty.” Its programmes support those living in makeshift settlements and returnees by providing vital services, “assisting returning and internally displaced Afghans by providing support with housing, food, legal aid and referrals to healthcare providers within [their] communities.”

Losses in gathering and sharing information

Getting information about the cuts these last three months has been difficult, with data, both globally and when it came to Afghanistan, patchy. Information-sharing platforms and mechanisms have been compromised by the cuts, while orders from Washington to cut or maintain programmes were often made, but then rescinded or reinstated, sometimes several times.[11] Many organisations looking to find other donors to fill some of the gaps left by the cuts in US aid have also held off making announcements. While the overall picture is now clearer, significant information gaps persistand will extend into the future. Several organisations that have been crucial for providing data or context are no longer operating.

The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) has been dismantled, its staff terminated and its building (the construction and maintenance of which had been partly funded by private donations)[12] taken over by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with the help of the police. Called in by USIP to protect it from the DOGE agents who had arrived without a warrant, the police broke the locks and allowed the agents to forcibly enter the premises. (Guardian) USIP was set up under Congressional legislation signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, and was funded by Congress with an aim to “promote international peace and the resolution of conflicts among the nations and peoples of the world without recourse to violence.” Its takeover by DOGE under presidential orders is being contested in the courts, given that USIP came under Congressional oversight.

USIP was very active in Afghanistan, but all its many insightful reports have disappeared from its now blacked-out website, a huge loss to researchers and policymakers.[13] Its work in Afghanistan, begun in 2002, significantly expanded after 2009 when it established an office and field team in Kabul. That included research and programmes to support the rule of law, promote human rights, prevent and resolve local conflicts (especially land disputes), prevent electoral violence, develop peace education curricula and support dialogue and peace efforts.[14] USIP closed its Kabul office in August 2021, but its range of programmes and research maintained a focus on informing the public and policymakers on the rights of women and girls, humanitarian and development issues, inclusive peace processes, and the regional and international threats posed by violent jihadist groups based in Afghanistan and Pakistan (see, for example, the 2024 launch of a the Senior Study Group’s report that highlighted those risks).

DOGE mocked and belittled USIP after the takeover, tweeting about several allegedly egregious contracts, two of them relating to Afghanistan. As these look like either deliberate or wilfully ignorant claims, we wanted to put some more reliable information into the public sphere. DOGE referred to USIP using private aviation services (these were not perks for USIP staff, but the flights that evacuated staff and family members from Kabul in August 2021) and employing “ex-Taliban member” Muhammad Qasem Halimi. DOGE’s Elon Musk and his (all-male) employees were also filmed by Fox News boasting about their work to other (unidentified) men around a large polished table in a panelled committee room (location unspecified). They mocked USIP and Halimi, alleging there was “no clear description of what services [he was contracted to provide],” describing the money as “going to the Taleban,” and wondering if it had been spent on arms or opium.

Halimi did indeed work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the first Emirate, more than two decades ago, but also went on to be a highly effective and courageous member of the Supreme Court under President Hamed Karzai. As the Inspector-General, he tried to clean up the judiciary, catching dozens of judges on camera seeking bribes, with the aim of getting them sacked. Without political backing, however, and facing death threats, he was forced to resign (author interview 2010, referred to here). He also had a number of government positions under President Ashraf Ghani, among them, Deputy Minister of Justice and Minister of Hajj and Awqaf. (biography) Halimi was a legal and conflict advisor at The Asia Foundation and worked on national reconciliation for many years during the Republic. He also has strong Islamic credentials as a graduate from Cairo’s al-Azhar University.

Halimi had worked with USIP since 2023 on its Religion and Inclusive Societies programme, advocating for women’s rights, as embedded in Islam, and peace through Islam, work which, given his background, was focused on Afghanistan. That involved research and outreach, holding training sessions, organising conferences and gathering support for Afghan women’s rights from ulema in Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, Iraq and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and persuading them to take up the issue with the Emirate, as he told AAN: “How they could talk to the Taliban about women’s rights – to education and work – and how we could get to peace in Afghanistan, without fighting, both through Islam. I was always working on both tracks.” USIP’s behind-the-scenes advocacy had results, as we alluded to in an October 2024 report when the OIC said publicly that women did have the right to education and to speak and be seen.[15]

Halimi is also well-known on social media, writing largely in Pashto and with the clear aim of reaching out especially to young Afghans. His Facebook page promotes non-violence and a vision of Islam markedly different from the Islamic Emirate’s. One Afghan colleague described him as offering “knowledge and tools based on cultural norms and Islamic principles of equality, peace and justice” as a counter to Taliban ideology and the Emirate’s claim to be enforcing policies grounded in tradition and sharia.

On 14 May, a Washington DC court is due to rule on the legality of the USIP takeover. Lawyers for USIP assert that its status as an independent agency means the president and DOGE lacked the power to dissolve it. Even if the court does declare the takeover illegal, it will not be easy to rebuild an institution decades in the making given the destruction wrought by DOGE in a matter of weeks

USIP has been a significant element in the ecosystem of nuanced and in-depth reporting on Afghanistan, as was a very different organisation, iMMAP, which has also ceased to function. An international nonprofit that provided humanitarians, development organisations and governments with evidence-based information management services to help emergency preparedness and humanitarian responses. Some of its work on Afghanistan can still be seen on its website, for example, its mapping of earthquakes. iMMAP is looking for alternative funding, in the hope of resuming its work.

There is better news for the USAID’s global Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), which monitors agroclimatic and hydrological conditions and hazards and provides early warning of droughts and food crises in vulnerable regions. It was set up in 1985 to prevent a repeat of the famines in East and West Africa and has been critical for supporting governments and humanitarian agencies, including in Afghanistan, to make decisions and respond effectively.

When AAN last reported on the cuts to USAID in February, FEWS NET was offline. However, some reports have now been posted by the US Geological Survey. They include the all-important seasonal monitors for Afghanistan (most recent on 29 April 2025) which report/forecast rain and snowfall, temperatures, harvests, flooding etc. The Geological Survey is a member of FEWS NET’s science team, a “multiagency, multidisciplinary collaboration dedicated to the monitoring of agroclimatic and hydrological conditions using satellite data, on the ground observations, advanced analytical tools, and expert knowledge.”

What aid workers are saying

AAN also heard from people who work for NGOs and UN agencies, all but one Afghan, about their experiences on the ground. A senior manager with an international medical NGO said they had been receiving most of their funding – USD 35 million – from USAID. Losing that support, he said, has had a “direct and drastic impact on our organisation.” In March, he said USAID had told them it would be “providing the money for live-saving projects … and we should continue our work. Then, in April, they told us they would not be providing any funding at all.” The NGO has had to lay off 60 per cent of its staff, ie 600 people in 15 provinces. It has closed some clinics and is considering pulling out of some provinces altogether. The manager was still working and hoping for an overturning of the US ban on aid to Afghanistan, but admitted the situation was taking its toll:

When you work in an office for several years, you build your career and capacity, so this cut-off of aid has a psychological impact, especially on the young people, because there are no other job opportunities in Afghanistan. There simply are no job opportunities in other offices, except for NGOs, and cutting off aid creates the fear that we might all lose our jobs.

A senior manager with another NGO that works mainly in Nangrahar province in health, education, community development and social response, also said they had been hard hit: “With the cut of a large portion of funds,” [our work in] almost all of these sectors have been affected. … Without funds, you cannot implement any project.” Even the work that was still going on, supported by other donors or for which they had had advance funds, was affected because “the entire organisation is shaken by the cuts in American funds,” he said.

Everyone [in the organisation] is frustrated and thinks their job can be terminated at any time. The workload has increased because so many employees are leaving, and things are just not normal. It feels like it did during the August 2021 Taliban takeover: nothing is clear and everyone is wondering whether their job will be terminated or their salary cut.

For him personally, there were also consequences. After hearing by email that he should stay at home until further notice, his salary was stopped.

It’s been difficult for me and my family because, living in Kabul with no other source of income, we relied on that salary. It’s like blood in the veins. So, when that stops, life stops. From the very beginning, I understood that depending on a salary had these problems. One of my sons does work in the government, and we now rely on his salary and my savings. To be honest, it’s changed many things in practice. We’ve moved to a cheaper house – the rent is lower and so is the standard. I’ve also moved my younger sons and daughters from one private school to another with lower fees.

An international aid worker at one of the major NGOs described the mood as sombre, with organisations, employees and people in the communities they served all grappling with the uncertainty. “It’s very hard for organisations to see a shrinkage in their capacity to respond at a time when so many Afghans are returning [from Pakistan and Iran]. And the timing! Such a sharp increase in need and such a sharp decrease in our ability to adequately respond to everyone’s needs.”

Two people supported by USAID via an aid contractor also spoke to AAN. One, the owner of a carpet-weaving business, had benefitted from a project which aimed to modernise the industry. The project provided technical and financial help, modern looms, apprenticeships and training at every stage, including to herders who provide the wool, dyers, weavers as well as help with marketing and export. She told us the end to support had meant job losses and she was worried about the wider impact, predicting greater unemployment and more poverty.

A man working for the contractor on an agricultural support project said that of 160 people, only two were still working. As a senior person in human resources, he had overseen the lay-offs, but was now due to lose his own job at the end of May. He described his sadness and worry about the difficulties he would have covering rent and household expenses and lamented that he would no longer be able to send money to his little brother studying in Russia.

We also spoke to someone in a specialised technical role for a UN agency that had been providing WASH and health services and emergency support. He said their operations would be closing in most of Afghanistan, given that US funding had made up half their entire budget. In their agency, he said, around 30 to 40 per cent of colleagues had lost their jobs and salaries had been halved for those who remained.

80 per cent of employees had been laid off at the Kunduz office of a major international NGOs that has provided healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene, education and agricultural support, said one of its managers, who was still working because his salary was not dependent on USAID. His laid-off colleagues were in a very bad economic situation, he said, but it was worse for their beneficiaries, who were now missing out on schooling and water, sanitation and hygiene programmes.

We hope to hear from beneficiaries in a future report, to better understand how the cuts are manifested on the ground.

How will the cuts impact the wider economy and public services?

These snapshots of people working in NGOs or private business or UN agencies give a glimpse of what the cuts will mean on the ground. They will directly affect millions of Afghans, both beneficiaries and workers. The impact will ripple out, seen in incomes lost, money not spent and goods not bought, on out to businesses with no direct connection to aid losing customers, and to the government losing revenue, in the form of lower tax and customs receipts.

The latest World Bank Afghanistan Development Update was published on 23 April 2025, ie before the SIGAR report revealed the full extent of the US funding cuts and does not specifically mention those cuts, but references “aid disruptions” and a “sharp decline in aid.” Yet, indirectly, it does highlight the magnitude of the loss of US aid.

It reported a decline in aid in 2024 of 42.8 billion afghanis (USD 600 million or 4.23 per cent of GDP) to 204 billion afghanis (USD 2.9 billion, or 14 per cent of GDP). The cut in aid in 2025, will be far higher. In the light of ‘disruptions to aid’, the Bank had already lowered its growth forecast for this year, to around 2.2 per cent (less than population growth, so a fall in per capita GDP). It had based this calculation on a forecast of a cut in aid this year of about 600 million USD. Now that SIGAR has published its report, it is evident that the actual cut will be far higher and the impact on growth much greater.

Afghanistan is a country that was flooded with unearned foreign income for twenty years, not only civilian aid, but also military support and spending by foreign armies. The sudden loss of most of that, overnight, in August 2021 – with some restored as emergency humanitarian aid that winter – led to a 25 per cent contraction of the economy. Since then, aid has been steadily declining (see figure 3 above). The new loss from the United States this year is not on the same scale as August 2021, but it is also sudden and will still make a substantial dent in the economy. Aid funding helps pay for the trade imbalance – Afghanistan imports more than it exports, and many of those imports are essentials – food, fuel and medicine. The aid is largely in the form of cash dollars, necessarily flown in because of sanctions-related problems with making international banking transactions, and that helps with liquidity.

There will also be knock-on effects because of what the aid paid for – which the Emirate has chosen not to fund. In its October 2023 Development Update, the World Bank summarised the priorities of Emirate government expenditure as “utilizing available resources largely to pay for security, teachers’ salaries, and core civil and administrative functions while leaving donors to finance healthcare, food security, broader education needs, and the agri-food system.” The figures have been stark: in 2022, the Emirate spent 60 per cent of its operating expenditure (which takes up almost all of the budget) on the security services – army, police and intelligence – and only 1 per cent on health, a choice which it has not pulled back from.[16] The Emirate’s choice of priorities left the health sector vulnerable to cuts in aid and, indeed, with the sudden stop to US funding, hundreds of clinics have already closed. Already, in relation to the much smaller decline in aid seen in 2024, the World Bank’s latest Development Update had concluded that the reduction posed “a serious risk to the continuity of essential service delivery programs, particularly those implemented through the UN and funded via humanitarian channels.” It explained:

Key sectors such as healthcare, education, and social protection which have historically relied on international aid, may face severe disruptions, disproportionately affecting marginalized populations, including women, children, and displaced communities. The contraction in aid may also limit emergency response capabilities, further straining public services and slowing economic recovery efforts.

We are now seeing that risk realised. In the short term, a humanitarian crisis looks likely, especially given that the mass deportation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan is only sharpening needs. As the UN’s Tom Fletcher has said: “There will be deaths.” In the medium-to-long term, the damage to health and education will also have an economic cost by reducing the country’s ‘human capital’. This is in addition to the economic harm done by the Emirate’s restrictions on girls’ education and women working and travelling, not just to individuals and their families but also the country’s prospects for development.

Apart from calling on the US not to politicise aid, there have been few comments from the Emirate, nor any sense that ministers are taking action to try to mitigate the damage to public services. The Emirate’s priorities in earlier years – expanding the workforce (tashkil), especially that of the security services and the Ministries for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, and Education – have left it with little room for manoeuvre. Or at least, changes to its spending priorities would likely be politically more difficult than letting health clinics close.[17] The Emirate is also already preoccupied with making swingeing cuts to the public sector, cutting a fifth of both civilian and military jobs (we hope to report on this soon).

In its April 2025 Development Update, the World Bank described foreign aid as “once a key driver [of the economy which] has declined significantly since the Interim Taliban Administration took power.” Yet, the massive unearned income (aid, military support and spending by the foreign armies) that flowed into Afghanistan under the Republic drove growth that proved to be a chimaera, a bubble economy that burst when the money went. The vast quantities of on-budget aid also facilitated flourishing corruption in government and an administration unresponsive to the people, yet still able to runpublic services. While the sums now coming to Afghanistan are far smaller and there is scarcely any on-budget aid, the funding has still enabled the Emirate to deploy government revenues (taxes, customs and other receipts) to build up the coercive powers of the state, while underfunding basic services. That has meant, as well, that when and if aid did decline, those services were vulnerable.

The cuts to US and other aid, and the cuts to public sector jobs, will be a double blow to millions of Afghan families. As to how to respond, households have already used up available strategies or those strategies are no longer available. They have drawn down savings, borrowed where they can and found marginal income, for example, pulling older boys out of school to work or women doing piece work at home. As for the ‘traditional’ tactic when times are hard, of sending men to other countries for work, Pakistan and Iran are forcibly returning Afghans. For the economy as a whole, the obstacles that followed the Taliban capture of power in 2021 – frozen assets and UN and US sanctions (despite waivers, international banking is still deeply problematic) – are all still in place. Just to increase the potential misery this year, FEWS-NET has forecast that the wheat harvest may be reduced because of below-average precipitation and below-average soil moisture. All in all, 2025 is looking to be a difficult year for Afghanistan and its people.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

References

References
↑1 The waiver was to allow “existing lifesaving humanitarian assistance programs,” so long as the resumption was temporary and no new contracts were signed. It applied to “core lifesaving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance,” but specifically not family planning. However, there were few staff to deal with requests for waivers after almost all staff were put on administrative leave and overseas staff ordered to come home on 7 February. See the announcement here, the only message left on the USAID website.
↑2 The figures are from page 64 of SIGAR’s second quarter report toCongress this year, published on 30 April 2025.
↑3 See Ian Mitchell and Sam Hughes, USAID Cuts: New Estimates at the Country Level, Center for Global Development, 28 March 2025.
↑4 GNI comprises the total annual market value of all the final goods and services produced in a country, plus a number of other types of overseas income, but not foreign aid, or remittances. See this explanation by the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
↑5 OneAid describes itself a “nonpartisan group of humanitarian assistance, international development, and national security professionals, partners, and others … [who] have come together to advocate for continued foreign assistance and the preservation of our democracy.” It said the information had come from former and current USAID experts and partners and the list was based on first-hand confirmation (NPR also subsequently confirmed the figures with its own sources). Other countries affected included: Syria USD 237.3 m; Somalia USD 169.8 m; Lebanon USD 148.2 m; Yemen USD 106.5 m; Jordan USD 58 m; Gaza USD 12.3 m; Niger USD 8.7 m.
↑6 On 18 March, the man who had been in charge of USAID, Pete Marocco – it was his signature as Director of Foreign Assistance at the State Department and USAID Deputy Administrator, reported NPR, that “appeared on many of the administration’s directives, including orders to cancel 5,200 of USAID’s anti-poverty and health-care programs and to shrink the agency’s workforce to a couple of hundred people” – sent an email to a number of colleagues that USAID was now “under control, accountable and stable.” That day, he also handed over control of what remained of the agency to a 28-year-old Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee, Jeremy Lewin, who, reported both Rolling Stone and The Guardian, has serious criminal allegations against him. Lewin also subsequently took over Marocco’s main job as director of Foreign Assistance at the State Department after Marocco left government for reasons unknown, a move reported on 13 April (Guardian, AP).
↑7 SIGAR’s report, U.S. Funds Benefitting the Taliban-Controlled Government: Implementing Partners Paid at Least $10.9 Million and Were Pressured to Assistance, was based on interviews with implementing partners who spoke about paying taxes, utilities, customs and fees since August 2021. It reported that: 

A quarter of respondents had experienced direct pressure from the Taliban, including involvement in and approval of program design and implementation; access to facilities or use of resources or vehicles; recruiting or hiring of certain Taliban-approved individuals; or diverting food and other aid to populations chosen by the Taliban. In addition to direct pressure on implementing partners, some respondents stated that the Taliban have regularly inquired about ways to obtain donor funding, including through the establishment of Afghan NGOs.”

However, despite, “facing harassment by members of the Taliban security forces, the majority of implementing partners reported being able to successfully decline the requests.
↑8 SIGAR noted this in its second quarterly report to Congress in 2025, already cited in the main text, on page 7.
↑9 Ashley Jackson’s October 2023 report for AAN, Aid Diversion in Afghanistan: Is it time for a candid conversation?, looked into the allegations against the Taliban government and provided a nuanced and rounded account. For more on corruption under the Republic, see SIGAR’s 2016 investigation, Corruption in Conflict: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan.
↑10 They are: the Promote Scholarship Endowment, formerly Women’s Scholarship Endowment, which provides university scholarships for Afghan women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths, which, as of June 2024, was supporting 59 women to study in Qatar and Turkey (to be terminated early, on 30 June 2025, rather than 28 September 2028); and Supporting Student Success in Afghanistan, which funds online learning through the American University of Afghanistan, “with the goal of increasing access to higher education in Afghanistan.” As of autumn 2024, it was supporting 1,007 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programmes. It is scheduled to close on 30 December 2026.
↑11 Hana Kiros for The Atlantic, in Emergency Food for 3 Million Children Is Stuck in DOGE Limbo, has a cogent look at the chaos and lack of communication in the cancellation, reinstatement, and quiet re-cancellation of one programme, a US-made nutritional foodstuff that “Elon Musk said he would preserve,” but which “the Trump administration [then] quietly canceled.”
↑12 For a general breakdown of USIP’s funding sources, see this @ResilientEffort post on X.
↑13 For the patient, the USIP website can still be found on Wayback Machine. One hundred USIP reports about Afghanistan can also be found on Relief Web.
↑14 AAN worked with USIP on two series of ground-breaking reports (published 2018-21), ‘One Land, Two Rules’, which looked at service delivery in insurgency-affected districts, and ‘Living with the Taleban’, which explored local experiences of Taliban rule: all can be read in this dossier. It also funded an important report, published just before the Taliban takeover, which heard from women in rural areas about their hopes for peace and fears of war, and an investigation into the fate of Community Development Councils (CDCs), upon whom such hopes for development had rested, but which were abolished by the Emirate. 

We benefited from having USIP’s economist, Bill Byrd, as a guest author: his keen eye helped unravel the good and the bad from Republic-era budgets (for example, here). Reform of the public finances, which was begun under Finance Ministers Eklil Hakimi and Khalid Payenda, would have been foundational to getting the whole government running better and more cleanly and actually serving the public. This is a naturally dry topic, but we felt it was consequential and could be gripping in the hands of a good writer. USIP’s Scott Warden’s assertion in a guest piece, Why the West Should Care about Afghan Election Fraud, ahead of the 2010 parliamentary elections, was also important.
↑15 Halimi writes on his Facebook page that in response to Elon Musk’s and DOGE reporting a “baseless accusation” that he was involved in “suspicious activities,” he has filed a legal complaint, demanding the restoration of his reputation and integrity. “Let’s see what the justice and court system in the United States decides,” he writes.
↑16 For the 2022 figures on health and security, see the World Bank’s October 2023 Afghanistan Development Update. See also figure 13 of its December 2024 Afghanistan Development Update for the split between civilian and security spending over several years. Data on public finances from the Emirate is scarce, but occasional information suggests little has changed.
↑17 For reporting on this, see these earlier papers by AAN, Survival and Stagnation: The State of the Afghan economy, 7 November 2023 and What Do The Taleban Spend Afghanistan’s Money On? Government expenditure under the Islamic Emirate, 16 March 2023

The End of US Aid to Afghanistan: What will it mean for families, services and the economy?
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“The Doors to Separation Are Closed for Women”: Women and divorce under the Emirate

May 5, 2025

Letty Phillips • Rama Mirzada

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For Afghan women, getting a divorce has always been difficult, but since the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate, it has become almost impossible. Under the new authorities, sharia – specifically Sunni Hanafi jurisprudence – is the only law that applies and many of the legal provisions that allowed women to divorce no longer exist. AAN’s Rama Mirzada and guest author Letty Phillips* spoke to four women and five male lawyers about these changes, finding a troubling picture of their implications for women seeking to separate from their husbands under Emirate rule.

Nargis, a young woman from Kabul, spoke quietly as she recounted her experience of seeking a divorce in the Emirate’s legal system. “The court told me the doors to separation are closed for women, and why should women even ask for a divorce?” she said. She told AAN that her husband beat her, gambled and was unfaithful, and still when she went to court, the judges refused to grant her a divorce.

They didn’t listen to me – no one was paying attention to what I was saying. It was like I was talking to the air. The judges told me that divorce was a sin and I should keep living with him even if he’d said he’d divorced me. I told them I won’t live like this to keep up a good image for your government. They made me hate my life.

Nargis did eventually get a divorce, but only through perseverance and at great cost. She was one of four women interviewed for this report who had opened a divorce case under the Islamic Emirate government. All four faced similar battles, describing abuse they had experienced, difficulties raising their cases in court, and condemnation from friends and family when they spoke about their problems.

AAN’s interviewees had to contend not only with changes in the law under the Islamic Emirate that make it almost impossible for a woman to separate from her husband but also with age-old customs and social traditions that make such a thing unthinkable for many. “People believe that a woman should stay silent whatever others do to her,” Rahmat, a lawyer from Kabul, told AAN. For most Afghan households, getting their sons married is the most costly investment they will ever make. The groom’s family often pay a large bride-price (paid to the father of the bride), as well as paying or promising to pay the bride the sharia-mandated mahr, and also bear their share of the costs for lavish wedding ceremonies.[1] For both husband and wife, breaking up a marriage can be a source of extreme shame and in many communities, divorce is almost unheard of. The pressure to stay married is particularly strong for women. “During the divorce case, my husband’s family kept calling me on the phone,” said Yasmin, a young woman from Balkh. “They’d give me warnings. They’d threaten to take my life.”

Yet in Islam, marriage is a contract that can be broken. Sharia allows a man to do this without grounds and without even bringing a petition to court. In this case, known as talaq, he must simply inform his wife she is divorced and observe a three-month waiting period, after which the divorce is final. However, a woman must go before a judge and prove her right to separate on specific criteria. The interpretation of these criteria differs between the four major schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).[2] The Hanafi fiqh, followed by the majority of Afghans, is the most restrictive of the four on this matter; in the twentieth century, most states that derive their legal codes from Hanafi jurisprudence therefore introduced reforms aiming to make divorce easier for women and constraining a husband’s prerogative to unilateral divorce.[3] This typically involves adopting the Maliki fiqh, which is more permissive when it comes to a woman’s ability to apply for divorce.

Afghanistan is no exception. Legislation introduced in the 1970s allowed a woman to obtain a separation – known as tafriq – in a state court, if she was able to prove her case on specific grounds laid out by Maliki fiqh; in practice, this was exceptionally rare and any woman who did seek to do it was likely to find herself ostracised by her family and community. In line with the Quran’s injunction to achieve reconciliation through negotiation, the few women who came to the state to seek separation were advised to return to their communities and resolve their issues. Community mediation remained the most common recourse after 2001, but in Afghanistan’s cities, the number of women who did raise divorce cases in the state system did grow, as this report details below.

However, with the return of the Taliban, Republic-era legislation was suspended. The Emirate declared Hanafi fiqh to be the sole source of law and the Supreme Court explicitly revoked provisions allowing women to apply for tafriq separations. AAN spoke to Afghan lawyers in five provinces to explore these changes in the legal system and interviewed four women involved in divorce cases to understand how these changes have affected them.

For Afghan women, there was no ‘golden age’ when ending violent or loveless marriages was easy or shame-free. However, over the last two hundred years, rulers have made occasional attempts to make it easier for women to get divorced. In parallel with these legal changes, social norms around women’s rights also evolved, incrementally and patchily. This report begins by tracing these developments to set the scene for the experiences of women under Emirate rule, showing how the little progress that was made has now been lost.

Women, divorce and the law 1881-1977

In common with most family matters, divorce and marital disputes in Afghanistan have traditionally been settled outside the state legal system, either through community dispute resolution or religious authorities. The state has tried to insert itself into family matters to varying degrees since the nineteenth century, beginning with modest reforms under Amir Abdul Rahman Khan (r1880-1901) in an effort to change what he referred to as “the old ridiculous ways” that were “entirely opposed to Muhammad’s teachings.”[4]The Amir outlawed the custom of compelling a widow to marry her husband’s brother and prohibited forced marriage; he also decreed that a woman could sue for divorce or alimony on the grounds of cruelty or lack of financial support. Finally, he introduced a requirement to register marriages, which he hoped would provide evidence for married women who wished to raise cases in court.

Historians say these reforms had little effect in practice.[5] Divorce generally remained outside the remit of the state, since divorce instigated by men required no judicial involvement and it was exceptionally rare for a woman to raise a case in court. Records show only a few cases of women petitioning sharia courts for separation; in the eastern province of Kunar in 1886, a woman demanded a separation on the grounds that her husband was impotent and after a mandatory one-year period the separation was granted.[6] In practice the state had no ability to systematically register marriages and no capacity to enforce this requirement.

In the 1920s, King Amanullah made further efforts to regulate family matters by statutory law with a set of controversial reforms known as the Nizamnama, which included an administrative code transferring jurisdiction for all family matters from sharia courts to civil courts. He also passed the Marriage Laws of 1921 and 1926, mandating the abolition of child marriage, limits on polygamy and an end to forced marriage. But Amanullah’s decrees included no specific provisions on divorce for women and in any case, they were roundly rejected by the ulema as un-Islamic and a violation of sharia, forcing him to reverse some of their provisions, which were discontinued entirely after the political crisis of 1929.[7]

The hostile response to these reforms meant that Afghanistan’s subsequent rulers and legislators made little effort to reform family law until the 1970s. Legislation on marriage and other family matters remained piecemeal and almost entirely based on Hanafi fiqh. This gave a woman two options if she wanted to separate from her husband. Firstly, Hanafi fiqh allows her to request a khul, or negotiated settlement, which would dissolve the marriage. In a khul, both husband and wife must agree to separate, and the wife usually pays back any mahr she has received or renounces any claim to mahr she has not yet received. Secondly, a woman may request a judicial separation. Hanafi fiqh decrees that a woman can apply for separation only on two grounds. If her husband abandons her, she may request a separation once he is presumed to have died, either 90 or 120 years since the date of his birth; she may also apply if her husband is incurably ill, but the illnesses that count as grounds are contested.[8]

For women in the mid-twentieth century, therefore, divorce was extremely difficult to initiate and they had almost no legal protection if their husbands decided to divorce them. The case of Alamtab vs Muhammad Shah, recorded in a Kabul primary court in 1967, illustrates this problem. Alamtab filed a case alleging that her husband Muhammad Shah had divorced her but he denied this and continued to come to her father’s house and demand marital relations with her. The primary court said it would not consider the case, so Alamtab raised the case with the provincial court, which ruled against her because it decreed she had no valid witnesses to her claim that her husband had divorced her. Alamtab then appealed at the Court of Cassation, which overturned the provincial court’s decision and referred her case to the Parwan provincial court. Finally, in 1971, the Parwan court rejected Muhammad Shah’s claims and he agreed to divorce her, but only on condition that she renounced her mahr. She had spent four years neither married nor divorced, being harassed by her husband whilst fighting the case, and was left with no financial security and her reputation irrevocably damaged.[9]

This began to change in the 1970s, when top-down efforts at social reform began to accelerate. The first statutory provisions on divorce came as part of the 1971 Marriage Law, which explicitly noted that divorce should be dealt with under Hanafi fiqh. Modernists criticised the law on these grounds, saying that it was unconstitutional due to the principle of equality enshrined in the 1964 Constitution; the magazine of the Afghan Women’s Institute, Mermon, described it as “showing a general disregard of the human dignity of women in this country.”[10] Courts across the country continued to rule by Hanafi fiqh, as in the case of Musa vs Shaista, raised in Farah province in 1970. Twelve years after Musa abandoned his wife Shaista she remarried; her second husband was then accused of abduction and both were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment by a primary court in Farah. Appealing to the provincial court, Shaista found herself sentenced to an additional two years’ imprisonment because the court cited the Hanafi requirement for her to wait until her husband’s 120th birthday before the marriage could be dissolved. A single judge from the provincial court dissented, writing in an Afghan legal periodical, Message of Conscience, that “the periods of time referred to impose a life-long torture and are intolerably excessive.”[11] Unsurprisingly, few women raised a case in court, according to an opinion piece in the Kabul Times covering the Marriage Law. “Recent reforms in the marriage law have been ignored,” it said. “The age-old traditions are holding their own.”[12]

Court records reinforce this, with only 94 cases of divorce registered at the Kabul provincial court between March 1972 and February 1973.[13]

In 1973, the Supreme Court finally took action to address the modernists’ concerns, prompted by the case of a woman named Aziza. She had requested a judicial separation from her husband, Ghawth, on the grounds that he was insane and could not be cured. The primary court had rejected her petition because it believed that Hanafi fiqh did not allow insanity as one of the illnesses that permitted separation. “Several qualified doctors,” read Aziza’s petition, “consistently confirm that Ghawth’s madness is of a permanent nature … marital life with Ghawth has become intolerable for me and cohabitation with him involves physical danger to my life.”[14]

In response, the Supreme Court established a committee to prepare recommendations on divorce legislation focusing on the problems the existing law caused for women. In 1974, the Ministry of Justice published the committee’s report, which recommended a set of provisions derived from the more permissive Maliki fiqh as the source for state legislation on divorce; finally, in 1977, the Civil Code was published, drawing its legislation on divorce from Maliki fiqh. This allowed women to apply for tafriq on the grounds of harm, abandonment, failure to pay maintenance and a broader range of illnesses. They could also apply for a khul, or negotiated settlement, if they could get their husbands to agree and if they could afford to pay, though this did not have to be done in court.

Now, at last, women had greater legal protection if they wanted a separation, although the social stigma against divorce remained prohibitive for most women. Even the concept of the state’s intervention in family matters was still unacceptable for many. Nancy Dupree, in a piece on the family in Afghanistan, wrote that “any infringement on the institution of the family is regarded as repugnant… when separations occur, wives are sent back to their fathers’ homes, which is the cause of much shame.”[15] The anthropologist Inger Boesen found that state law had little relevance to women’s lives outside Kabul. “Women’s emancipation is confined to the upper classes in the most important cities, probably comprising approximately 2 per cent of the women of Afghanistan,” she wrote.[16] In the Pashtun communities of late 1970s Kunar, she reported, women did not have the right to choose a husband, to receive mahr in line with sharia, or to separate from their husbands.

Women and divorce under the Islamic Republic, 2001-21

With the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, the 1977 Civil Code – which had been suspended – returned. Women could therefore obtain tafriq divorces from the state’s courts, as mandated by the Code. They could also use the court or non-state mediators to agree a khul with their husbands. But although women could, in theory, initiate divorce legally, in practice the situation was more complex.

Comprehensive statistics on the number of court-issued divorces for women are not available, but all the evidence suggests they were rare. Research conducted by TLO in 2011 found no cases of divorce at all registered at courts in Paktia province, while in urban Jalalabad – which at the time had a population of some 200,000 – only 40 family law cases were registered in 2010-11.[17] However, divorce rates had increased by the later years of the Republic era. Supreme Court statistics showed that 6,370 divorces were finalised in 2015, compared to 1,049 between 2006 and 2009; between 2015 and 2017, courts granted 6,648 claims of tafriq and 4,012 cases of divorce initiated by husbands.[18]

Lawyers told AAN that women were able to raise cases of tafriq in court and that these could be resolved. They also agreed that tafriq cases were increasing towards the end of the Republic era. “There were more chances for women then,” said Hekmatullah, a lawyer in Kandahar. “The most common grounds for women’s divorce was harm, when their husbands beat them. Then there were also cases where a husband failed to provide for his wife, or when he abandoned her.” Qudrat, a lawyer who had previously worked with NGOs to solve women’s cases in Herat, agreed:

Harm was the most common reason for tafriq. Around 60 per cent of cases were due to harm. Maybe 10 or 15 per cent were due to abandonment. The court would summon a husband to appear in court, announcing it in the papers and giving him a specific deadline to appear. If he didn’t come, then the court would ask the Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor who’d deal with the case, and it would eventually result in tafriq.

Khairullah, a lawyer from Bamyan, added that in many cases women would petition for tafriq on the grounds of harm because their husbands were using drugs. “The number of cases raised for harm was high, because the number of drug addicts was increasing. This problem and violence by their husbands, were the main reasons women wanted divorces.”

Once in court, however, women’s cases were not always resolved in line with the 1977 Civil Code. Judges often bypassed statutory law on family matters either because they preferred customary law or uncodified Hanafi law over the Civil Code, or because they were simply unsure which type of law they should apply; in a 2005 survey of actors in the Afghan legal system by the Max Planck Institute, cited in this 2012 report, almost all 200 respondents reported Islamic law and customary law as the main sources of law, rather than state law. This revealed a deeper, more structural issue: judges struggled to balance the statutory processes and other sources of law because they reflected different normative orders. Whereas the Republic’s leadership insisted on the superiority of codified law, the study found that conservative prosecutors tended to argue that codified law was just one part of the legal framework and insisted on the primacy of sharia – which, in their opinion, meant the application of Hanafi fiqh’s constraints on divorce. It was also very common for courts to simply refuse to deal with a divorce case, instead referring it to community shuras or jirgas for resolution.[19]

One of the most troubling possibilities for women who left abusive husbands and then sought divorce was that they would be imprisoned on charges of ‘running away’ or ‘moral crimes.’ Running away was not a crime under the Republic-era Penal Code, but in 2010 the Supreme Court issued a directive to courts that they should prosecute women who fled to ‘strangers’ in such a scenario because this could cause “crimes like adultery and prostitution and is contrary to sharia principles.” Human Rights Watch reported in 2012 on many such cases, including that of Parwana, a 19-year-old woman who had fled her abusive husband and gone to the police to ask for help in getting a divorce. Instead she was imprisoned for six months on charges of running away. Roqia, who had been married at the age of 12, asked her husband for a divorce because he was a drug addict and frequently disappeared. Eventually she remarried, to help support her children. Her first husband reported her to the police and she and her second husband were convicted to five years’ imprisonment by a court.

Women were also deterred from going to court by the high bar of evidence required to prove that their husband had committed harm against them. If they raised a case based on allegations that their husband had harmed them, most judges would demand evidence that they had been hurt, which was difficult to get; the court could ask for forensic reports, evidence of physical abuse, or witnesses, so women might have to file a criminal case against their husbands in order to present acceptable evidence to a judge.[20] Khairullah, in Bamyan, said this was absurd:

One woman was beaten by her husband at ten o’clock at night, but when she complained, the judge told her to bring witnesses that her husband had beaten her at ten o’clock. At ten o’clock people are going to bed – how can a woman bring such a witness?

Other services intended to support women were poor. The police offered little help to women who approached them for help in separating from their husbands. Even Family Response Units (FRUs), which began to be established in police stations from 2006 to support women who were in dangerous situations, often encouraged women to return home and resolve their issues because of the stigma attached to divorce. “If these women try to get a divorce, they know there will be nothing left of them,” said a former head of a Kabul FRU to author Julie Billaud in 2010.[21] Some provincial departments of women’s affairs, set up after the creation of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in December 2001, were proactive in referring the cases of women who asked for help, according to women interviewed by Billaud. Others were not.

Unsurprisingly, going to court for a divorce was usually a last resort. Most separations were adjudicated by community mediators, either because women would approach them directly or because it was very common for the courts or police to refer a case that did reach them back to the community. TLO found that formal authorities in Nangrahar’s Batikot and Momand Dara districts heard seven cases in 2010, while village shuras heard 71 and ulema shuras heard a further 80. In all but the most extreme cases of abuse, they often prioritised the ‘collective good’ of the community in their decision-making, which meant ensuring stability and maintaining peace. This tendency, combined with deep-rooted social stigma surrounding divorce, meant that it was rare for women to obtain an equitable separation in this way. Typically the community shura would rule that the couple should reconcile, or it would negotiate a khul separation that required women to pay off their husbands. Hekmatullah, the Kandahari lawyer, explained this to AAN:

Most divorce cases were resolved through shura. In our office, one of our responsibilities was to give advice to women who wanted to divorce. Mostly getting tafriq at the court took too much time and therefore we were advising women to divorce through those community councils so it would be more efficient. Those councils were always making khul instead of tafriq for women and so women had to pay their husbands.

In the most conservative areas or those controlled by the Taliban, it was even rarer for women to ask either community bodies or the state system for help in getting divorced. “Women in areas under the control of the Taliban couldn’t come to the government courts,” Hekmatullah added, speaking about parts of Kandahar. “They had to go to the Taliban’s [shadow] courts, where separation was so restricted and on grounds that are so hard to prove.” According to TLO, jirgas across Paktia province reported hearing only seven family cases in 2010. Rahmat, a lawyer in Kabul, described the situation:

Separation was easier in the big cities because they had different cultures, and women were aware of how to raise a case. But in the places that were not under the control of the former government or where other types of dispute resolution systems had a more prominent role, it was thought to be shameful for women to raise their problems and to say that they wanted to separate from their husbands.

Getting a lawyer was also a struggle for women because the cases needed so much administrative work and the clients had to have national identity cards. This was a big obstacle for women living in remote areas who had no one to guide them, no education and no support from their families. In the areas where free legal services were available women could get support including free lawyers.

In Bamyan, generally considered more liberal, Khairullah said things were the same. “The biggest challenges women faced in separating from their husbands were old cultural traditions. Women didn’t open cases because it would give their families a bad name.”

By the end of the Republic, in 2021, seeking divorce was still a difficult decision for a woman to make. Cultural and social prohibitions which held sway both in communities and in Afghan courts made the risks attached to divorce high; state bodies that should have helped women often did the opposite, while violence against women who did try to end their marriages was common. Many still resented the state’s intrusions into family matters, and the statutory legal system remained a distant second choice for those seeking help; many of the legal reforms designed to ensure women’s rights were meaningless because the state itself had so little legitimacy. The difficulty of living alone and providing for a family without a reliable income also deterred many women from seeking divorce.

Even in the face of these issues, however, the number of women seeking divorces did grow during the Republic era. Torunn Wimpelmann and Masooma Sadat reported in a 2022 paper that the Supreme Court recorded 1,049 divorce cases between 2006 and 2009, which increased to 6,370 cases in 2015 and 4,390 in 2016; the majority of these cases were initiated by women since men did not typically need to go to court to obtain a divorce.

Women and divorce under the Emirate, post-2021

On the Taliban’s return, they stated that Hanafi fiqh represented the sole source of law applicable in Afghanistan. It was initially unclear how this would be enforced or what its implications would be for the existing laws of the Republic era. In September 2021, the Taliban announced that the 2004 Constitution was suspended pending review of the existing laws, which meant that the 1977 Civil Code was also suspended.[22] Therefore, the Code’s provisions derived from Maliki fiqh which allowed women to demand a separation on the grounds of harm, abandonment, failure to provide, and illness no longer applied. Confusion swirled over whether decisions made under the Republic’s legal system would be revoked. Some divorced women feared that their divorces might be revoked because they were not valid according to Hanafi fiqh; others, wanting to divorce, worried that the Emirate’s suspension of the Civil Code would prevent them from even applying for a separation because of Hanafi fiqh’s severe restrictions.[23]

The Supreme Court soon confirmed the validity of these concerns, though it did not decree that all former divorces would be revoked. Firstly, it made clear that previously settled divorce cases could, in theory, be reopened. Circular Number 15, issued on 23 May 2022,[24] gave guidelines to Afghan courts on how to deal with Republic-era legal decisions on all matters, including divorce. The Circular decreed that any Republic-era decision could be reviewed by a tribunal of Taliban judges and a committee of ulema. Article 10 of the guidelines stated that if the legal decision was made in line with Hanafi fiqh, it should not be overturned and then added: “If the decision was made according to another jurisprudence school… the decision should be referred to Amir al-Muminin [IEA Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada] or a higher judiciary authority.” Technically, therefore, any divorce issued in line with the Civil Code could be reopened if the husband raised a case.This caused great concern among observers, and there were reports of some husbands taking advantage of the change in regime to relitigate old cases. The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, reporting in 2023, said they had been told of men using this ruling, petitioning courts to claim that their wives had divorced them illegally. The media detailed several cases where divorces were overturned either by judges or Taliban commanders; for example, a court in Uruzgan revoked a divorce granted to a woman in 2018; she had asked for a separation on the grounds that she had been married as a 7-year-old child against her will – in what was actually an illegal marriage according to Emirate decrees.[25] A Supreme Court spokesman told BBC Persian the revoking of the divorce was correct: “The former government’s decision to annul the marriage was against sharia law … because [the husband] was not present at the time of the court decision.” In another case, reported by AFP, the divorce was overturned not by a court, but by a Taliban commander, who insisted the woman, ‘Marwa’, return to her former husband; he had beaten her so badly he broke her teeth.

However, the five lawyers that AAN spoke to had not heard of cases where divorces had been overturned. Media reports provided anecdotal evidence of cases where divorces had been revoked, but do not give a sense of scale, while the UN Special Rapporteur’s report noted that it had heard of 50 reopened divorce cases in one district but could not substantiate this claim. There seems to be no systematic attempt to overturn cases, but this represents little comfort for divorced Afghan women; regardless of the figures, the possibility that the law could be used to force a woman to return to an abusive husband is undoubtedly a terrifying prospect.

Confusion over the enforcement of non-Hanafi judgements on divorce was not alleviated by IEA Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada’s Circular Number 19, issued in September 2022, setting out his position on divorce. It dealt with two questions: what should courts do in the case of divorces issued for women in the Republic era and how should they deal with new cases of divorce? On the first question, the Court offered no resolution. It simply ordered that courts should delay making any decisions because the issue was “under discussion.”

On the second question, the Court was clear: Hanafi fiqh would be the sole source of legislation on divorce in the Emirate. The Circular ordered: “If the wife is now requesting her separation, the reasons for separation and the evidence for each reason should be given according to Hanafi law. Then it should be shared with the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Emirate.”

Finally, in January 2024, the Amir issued Circular Number 30. This responded to the question raised in Circular 19 on what to do regarding judicial decisions on separation made by the former government: should they be enforced or not? Separations issued under the Republic, Circular 30 said, would stand if they had been issued in accordance with any of the four schools of Sunni fiqh: “In case a ruling on separation has been issued in a matter according to one of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence by a judge of the previous regime, the verdict on separation… is to be enforced.” If the judge’s decision did not comply with any of the fiqh, the Amir continued, it would not be valid. That represented good news for the women issued with divorces under the Republic, but did leave open the possibility that ex-husbands could appeal if they could show that the divorce had not been issued in line with any of the other schools of fiqh, or on procedural grounds, as in the case of the woman in Uruzgan married at seven, reported by the BBC and cited above.

The Emirate’s position in practice

In practice, it appears that the Emirate permits divorce based only on Hanafi fiqh. AAN reviewed a letter confirming this, sent from the Supreme Court to the Khost provincial court on 7 April 2024, stating that “tafriq is suspended until further notice based on Circular Number 19.” That leaves three types of divorce open for a woman. She can agree a khul (negotiated financial settlement) with her husband; she can apply for a divorce if her husband abandons her once it has been 120 years since his birth and he is therefore presumed to have died; or she can apply for divorce on the grounds that he is incurably ill, which includes impotence.

The lawyers AAN spoke to for this research unanimously agreed that it has become much more difficult for women to separate from their husbands since the Taliban returned to power. No lawyer reported that they had successfully raised a case of tafriq in court since the takeover and all said that they believed it was now prohibited. Qudrat, in Herat, said he had turned away many women asking for tafriq:

Over the past three years, there were so many women asking for tafriq but they were helpless. Since tafriq is impossible through the courts, we are unable to help … in all provinces I know there’s women who want to make tafriq but they don’t go to court because they know their cases will not be processed.

Rahmat, in Kabul, agreed:

I believe violence against women has increased under the Emirate because women’s cases are not addressed under this government. Under the Republic women’s family cases were addressed more easily because there were laws allowing this. In the past month I received three cases of violence against women who wanted divorces and we’ve only been able to resolve one. The other two women decided to remain married after we explained that we could not find a way to get them divorced and arranged mediation with their husbands.

Under the Emirate, khul separations appear to be the most common method of divorce. Of the women AAN spoke to, the two who had managed to separate from their husbands had done so through khul separations. Lawyers, too, said that the only cases they had resolved since the return of the Taliban ended in khul agreements, which require a wife to pay off her husband. Khairullah, in Bamyan, said he had taken about ten cases of divorce since the return of the Taliban and referred the majority of these to muslihin (reconcilers) or hakam (court-appointed negotiators); they had all ended with a khul involving the wife renouncing her mahr and some with additional payments from the wife to her husband. Qudrat also reported some cases of khul. Rahmat, a lawyer, said he had worked on 12 cases in total since 2021, of which four had gone to court and eight were resolved through mediation in the community, with one leading to a khul and seven cases ending with an agreement between the husband and wife to remain married.

Nargis, the Kabuli woman mentioned at the beginning of this report, described her own case of khul. She sought a separation from her husband because life with him had become intolerable:

My husband had a horrible character. He was doing things I didn’t like… he was gambling, he was cheating on me with another woman and even with men. I hated it. When I tried to stop him he told me it was none of my business and I had no authority to stop him. He said he didn’t need me. He hit me. He told me we were divorced and I went back to my parents’ home, so then he filed a case at court claiming we were still married, I’d stolen money from him and run away.

Nargis could not produce witnesses to reinforce her claim that her husband had divorced her. He swore he had not and so the court ordered her to return to his home. She begged the judge to rule that they were separated, but as she had not been abandoned and her husband was not unwell the judge decreed that she had no case.

The court told Nargis that her only option under Hanafi fiqh was a khul. So she hired a lawyer to work with community mediators, through which her husband and their families to agree a khul. At first her husband’s family demanded 1,000,000 afghanis (13,700 USD) in compensation for the divorce. Finally, they agreed that she would return the gold jewellery she had been given, her mobile phone and the entirety of her mahr. Nargis had no choice but to concede:

What about my losses? He punished me, he made me ill, and I should pay compensation? In the last session of the court I told them, ‘You violated my rights and I will ask Allah to take revenge for what you’ve done to me.’

Yasmin, who lives in Balkh, also received a khul. In common with many Afghan women she had first tried to resolve her case in the community where she lived but failed, which forced her to go to the city court in Mazar-e Sharif:

My husband and I never got on and his family was in control of everything we did, especially his sister. He went to Iran without telling me, he didn’t come back when I asked him to, and I was unhappy. I told him I wanted a divorce, then I went to the community for mediation with the elders and mullahs, but my husband’s family didn’t accept it and they said we had to separate according to sharia. That was so they could demand money from me. They said that if my family paid them, they’d let us separate, otherwise not. So we went to court.

At the court, the judge told Yasmin that she should stay married: “He was telling me to keep trying, maybe you’ll find happiness,” Yasmin said.

No way. I refused. My father and mother got me a lawyer, and finally it was agreed. I didn’t keep my mahr, I didn’t take even one sock from that house, and they’ve demanded we pay them 50,000 afghanis (680 USD) as well. My brother agreed to pay it.

Both women who told AAN about their khuls had renounced their mahr as part of the negotiations. If the only way to legally separate from a husband under the Taliban is to negotiate a khul, this will exclude Afghan women without resources from doing so. Women who are poor, or who have no family support, will not be able to pay off their husbands’ families; renouncing the mahr and any valuable gifts received during the marriage also makes a woman vulnerable, since she will be leaving her husband’s home with nothing. In a khul a husband also has to agree to the separation and so it is often necessary to hire a lawyer to mediate, representing an additional expense. Nargis told AAN about the cost of her legal fees:

My family hired a lawyer to resolve this through negotiation. He arranged meetings with the Taliban and the mullahs at the mosque but my husband’s family refused to attend, then my father-in-law started asking the lawyer to go to his house and work for him. We paid that lawyer 18,000 afghanis (248 USD) and we got nothing. Then we hired another lawyer who managed to resolve the case… the second lawyer cost far less but was much better.

Rahmat confirmed that the cost of a khul was prohibitive for many:

Women who have access to legal advice, usually if they’re supported by their birth family, can overcome challenges. I’ve been working on four cases because their families are wealthy, so they can afford a lawyer. Women whose birth families can’t help them would struggle to get their cases resolved.

Under the Emirate, all the lawyers AAN spoke to agreed that judges also permit a woman to separate from her husband if he is impotent, in accordance with Hanafi fiqh. “When husbands are unable to have sexual relations with their wives, in my experience judges will give a divorce,” said Qudrat. “But the judges will assess the man’s health to make sure the woman is telling the truth.” This can be difficult for a woman to prove and husbands often refuse to accept such a case. Judges typically also allow a man a period of time to prove that he is not impotent before mandating a separation on these grounds. “If a woman has to live a whole year with him after dragging it all out in court, it’s dangerous,” said Hekmatullah. “He could kill her. It’s endangering women’s lives.”

An entry in a drawing competition that highlighted the harm of violence against women. The slogans from right to left read: We don’t want to be constrained by anyone, we want to live free; A woman rocks the world with one hand and moves the world with the other; We don’t want tyranny and violence against ourselves and other women. Photo: Shamsuddin Hamedi/UNAMA, 27 January 2015

Farzana, a young woman from Takhar, told AAN about her experience:

I was 19 when I got married, and he was 60. I’m his second wife. I didn’t want to marry this old guy but my parents gave me to him. It’s been six years and I can’t get pregnant, I told him to get treated but he said he has problems and can’t have children.

So I went back to my parents’ house last year. I told my father, ‘You wed me to this man by force, I wasn’t happy, I don’t want this man any more. He’s so old he can’t have a baby, I can’t live with him.’ I went to the court and opened a case, with a lawyer.

My husband at first was trying to make me get a khul, so he’d get money. I secretly recorded him and played that at the court and the judge said my husband was guilty. He gave him one year to get treatment in Pakistan or India, and if it works I’m supposed to live with him, if it doesn’t then he’ll have to say that we’re divorced and that’ll be it.

Farzana must still wait three months until her husband’s one year period ends, and meanwhile he and his first wife continue to harass her. “The first problem is that he can’t father a child, and the second thing is I don’t like him – whenever I look at him I start hating the world. I’ve tolerated him and suffered for six years,” she said.

If none of these conditions can be met, women sometimes employ more creative ways to leave a marriage. The easiest way, according to lawyers, is to subvert the prohibition on tafriq by forcing a husband to pronounce that he divorces his wife – which he is entitled to do without cause under Hanafi fiqh. Hekmatullah explained more.

For instance, if a woman is forced to leave her husband’s house or he assaults her, we’ll help her open a case in court. Then the court summons the husband and after that the husband will pronounce a divorce. I had two cases where this happened – in the first one, the husband just came to the court after the summons and said she wasn’t his wife anymore and he divorced her. Then she was free.

I had a second case where a woman wanted to divorce her husband because he was aggressive and unkind. First we raised a case on the grounds that he couldn’t give her a child but the court checked him and found he wasn’t impotent, and said they must spend a year together to see if she could get pregnant. We were concerned that her life was in danger but there wasn’t much we could do. A few months later, her brother came to my office and told me that he’d been imprisoned for two months because he’d gone and beaten up her husband to force him to divorce her. It worked.

Aisha, a woman living in Bamyan, told AAN about her own case:

Three months ago I found out my husband had another wife who he’d been seeing before me. We have been married for five years and he married this other woman three years ago. She’s horrible and he never says anything against her, she’s pressured him to get rid of me. I didn’t want to live with him anymore, I wanted to separate. He told me to divorce him but I knew it would be better if I asked him to divorce me. And because I was behaving very kindly to him, he agreed. He wanted to divorce me just with the help of community mediators or mullahs. I refused and said we had to go to court. The judge summoned him to appear.

At the court the judge asked what was happening and he said he wanted to divorce me. That’s how things ended in my favour.

This allowed Aisha to keep her mahr of 40,000 afghanis (560 USD) rather than having to pay for a khul. But the court did not rule on who should keep the gold Aisha received as part of her wedding gifts, worth 150,000 afghanis (2,100 USD), or the other assets she was promised. “He promised he was going to buy me a bit of land in Kabul using the gold,” she told AAN. “But then the second wife told me he’d actually sold the gold and used it to pay her father 150,000 afghanis (2,100 USD) as a bride-price.”

Conclusion: “People’s opinions don’t change when governments change”

In the end, any of the methods of divorce available under the Emirate require women to overcome significant hurdles. Firstly, most Afghan women are unfamiliar with Hanafi provisions on divorce, with their own rights, and with the courts’ application of the law. “Uneducated women think this is their fate and they have to tolerate violence,” said Khairullah. “They don’t know about their rights.”

None of the women AAN interviewed said that they fully understood what had happened to them. This was most clear for Yasmin. She had renounced her mahr after settling her case through a khul, but in fact her husband was impotent, which meant she was actually eligible for a separation that allowed her to keep her mahr.

My husband wasn’t like a man. In that way he was weak. To be frank, I didn’t understand the divorce process and I didn’t even know that I was able to ask for a divorce because of [his impotence]. I knew about khul because my brother and my dad explained it to me, and my dad said he’d pay for me if the court made khul.

Nargis also said she had not understood the law:

I didn’t know about the process. When my husband beat me and I ran away to my father’s house I didn’t know that he could open a case at court stating that I’d left him. I had no idea what would happen, I didn’t know the meaning of a khul or tafriq or any of the processes. I still don’t know, despite my case ending with a khul.

Farzana, from Takhar, did not know how much she was entitled to in mahr, because she had never been told what was agreed between her parents and her husband before their marriage; she also thought she was not entitled to claim her mahr from her husband because they had no children.

Lawyers said that this issue is worsening because the services and support available for women under the Republic-era governments – patchy and insufficient as they were – have been stripped away. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs and its provincial departments have been dissolved, while many of the NGOs previously offering legal support are no longer able to do so. “I don’t think people have changed since the Taliban returned,” said Khairullah. “The only change is that under the previous government, departments of women’s affairs and the human rights bodies were making women aware of their legal rights and of sharia rights. Women were supported, lawyers were appointed for them, they could even relocate to shelters.” Imran, a lawyer in Ghor, said the same: “People’s opinions were against it, but there were cases of separation because there were agencies supporting and raising awareness like the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.”

But regardless of the law, their finances, or the support available, all AAN’s interviewees agreed that the extreme shame and stigma attached to seeking a divorce are – as they have always been – the biggest barrier for women who want to leave their marriages. Rahmat, in Kabul, expressed his frustration at this:

The people’s customs are leading to violations of women’s rights. Husbands, families, and women have unthinkingly adopted these harmful traditions. They believe that a woman should stay silent whatever others do to her. I’ve studied the legal systems of many different Islamic countries – Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Türkiye. Only in Afghanistan are there restrictions based on such retrogressive customs.

Yasmin, in Balkh, described her family’s attitude to her divorce:

The first time I told my mother I wanted to divorce she didn’t agree. All my family were all saying even if I was unhappy I should live with him. I kept saying I can’t, I just can’t, and finally they all accepted it. Honestly, none of them wanted to help me, they were all against it. You know, Afghanistan has norms. My family were saying they’d be given a bad name.

Some of Farzana’s relatives also felt ashamed when she went to court and asked her to stay married:

My uncles were telling me not to get divorced. I just replied that they weren’t living my life and couldn’t understand how I was suffering. My husband’s relatives were so embarrassed that they told him they’d pay for his medical treatment to prevent him from just agreeing to divorce me straight away.

My father and my friends were supportive though. They all know how I suffered. My family said I should do what I want and they won’t tell me not to, because they had already destroyed my life once and they don’t want to do it a second time.

“People’s opinions don’t change when governments change,” said Qudrat, making the point that this was nothing new. “It’s because of our customs and traditions that people have negative opinions on women who want to divorce.”

Even so, in the Republic era, the growing number of women applying for divorce suggested that they felt more able to challenge traditions than in the past. The Emirate’s law now conspires with Afghan custom to reverse this shift. The combination of both means that Afghan women in violent or unhappy marriages have few options for escape. The institutions intended to protect them have dissolved, while the internationally funded aid projects intended to support them have dried up. The four women AAN interviewed were very different, but they all shared two traits: courage and determination. Under the Emirate, any woman who seeks a divorce will need both.

* Letty Phillips is a researcher and analyst who worked in Afghanistan from 2021 to 2024.

Edited by Kate Clark and Rachel Reid

References

References
↑1 Bride price, known as walwar in Pashto-speaking areas and toyana and sherbaha in Dari-speaking areas, has no foundation in Islamic law and is paid to the father of the bride. Mahr is a Islamically-mandated payment made by the groom to the bride, or a pledge to pay it. It is intended to provide security for her and her children in case the husband dies or requests a divorce. For more on bride-prices and marriage, see AAN’s 2016 piece: The Bride Price: The Afghan tradition of paying for wives.
↑2 The four fiqh are Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafi’i.
↑3 For details of family law reform efforts in other Muslim-majority states, see Kristen Stilt, Salma Waheedi and Swathi Ghandhavadi Griffin, ‘The ambitions of Muslim family law reform’, Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 41, 2018, pp301-341; and Nihan Altinbas, ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Late Ottoman Empire: Social upheaval, women’s rights, and the need for new family law’, Journal of Family History 39/2, 2004, pp114–125.
↑4 Abdul Rahman Khan, The Life of Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan, vol 1, Mir Munshi (ed), London, John Murray, 1900, available as PDF online.
↑5 Asta Olesen, Islam and Politics in Afghanistan, Routledge, Oxford, 1995; and Faiz Ahmed, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft Between the Ottoman and British Empires, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2017.
↑6 Ashraf Ghani, Disputes in a court of Sharia: Kunar Valley, 1885-1890, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 15/3, 1983, pp353-367.
↑7 For more on Amanullah’s attempts at reform and the violent reaction they inspired, see AAN’s 2024 report, The Khost Rebellion of 1924: The centenary of an overlooked but significant episode in Afghan history.
↑8 For more on Hanafi fiqh’s rules on divorce, see Chapter 7 of Mohammad Kamali, Law in Afghanistan: A Study of the Constitutions, Matrimonial Law and the Judiciary, 1985, Leiden, Brill; see also Lynne Welchman, Women and Muslim Family Law in Arab States: A Comparative Overview of Textual Development and Advocacy, 2007, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press. On the question of how many years after a husband’s birth need to have passed before a court can grant a separation to his wife on the grounds of abandonment, there is some disagreement between Hanafi jurists. Some stipulate that 120 years must elapse, while some say 90 years is sufficient.
↑9 For a summary of Alamtab’s case, see Mohammad Kamali, ‘Matrimonial Problems of Islamic Law in Contemporary Afghanistan’, PhD diss, SOAS, 1975 (accessible here: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/33827/1/11010617.pdf).
↑10 Raziqi, ‘A Look at the Marriage Law’, Mermon, issue 10, 1971. On file with the author.
↑11 Judge Bahis, ‘On Musa vs Shaista’, Message of Conscience, 30, 1979. On file with the author.
↑12 Afghan Lawyer Discusses Marriage Law’, Kabul Times, 13 November 1971 (available here).
↑13 Najib Rahiq, ‘Vital statistics for last Afghan year compiled’, Kabul Times, 6 February 1973 (available here).
↑14 For a summary of Aziza’s case, see Mohammad Kamali, ‘Matrimonial Problems of Islamic Law in Contemporary Afghanistan’.
↑15 Nancy Dupree, The Family During Crisis in Afghanistan, Journal of Contemporary Family Studies 35/2, 2004, pp311-331, p314.
↑16 Inger Bosen, Women, Honour, and Love: Some aspects of the Pashtun woman’s life in eastern Afghanistan, Folk vol 21-22, 1980, pp228-239, p228.
↑17 The Liaison Office, ‘Linkages between state and non-state justice systems in Eastern Afghanistan: evidence from Jalalabad, Nangarhar and Ahmad Aba, Paktia’, Kabul, 2009. On file with the author: TLO’s research was conducted with the currently shuttered United States Institute of Peace and the report is no longer accessible online.
↑18 Torunn Wimpelmann and Masooma Sadat, ‘There is no compulsion in marriage’: Divorce and gendered change in Afghanistan during the Islamic Republic, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 1–19, 2024, pp1-19, p7.
↑19 Julie Billaud, Kabul Carnival: Gender politics in post-war Afghanistan, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, p112.
↑20 For examples of failures in the legal system related to women’s rights, see this 2016 AAN report on Ghor province.
↑21 Billaud, Kabul Carnival, p54.
↑22 For more on the legal position of the Taliban see ‘The situation in Afghanistan and its implications for international peace and security: report of the Secretary-General’, 28 January 2022.
↑23 Author interviews, see also Susannah George, Afghan women who were divorced under prior government fear for their status, Washington Post, 7 March 2023.
↑24 The Supreme Court has issued two circulars numbered 15; the other, from October 2024, is not relevant here. For copies of all circulars mentioned here, please search the online Afghanistan Rule of Law Observatory (ARLO) repository of legal documents.
↑25 According to the decree on women’s rights issued by IEA Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada in December 2021, this marriage should actually have been declared void because the Emirate prohibits the custom of giving a girl in compensation to settle a dispute (baad). The decree can be found in full in AAN’s compendium of decrees and orders, available here.

“The Doors to Separation Are Closed for Women”: Women and divorce under the Emirate
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Losing His Immunity: Former Afghan MP Haji Zaher extradited to US on drug charges

April 28, 2025

Rachel Reid

Kenya is extraditing the Afghan commander and politician, Haji Abdul Zaher Qadir, to the United States, after arresting him at a hotel in Nairobi. The US has charged Haji Zaher with drug and weapons trafficking. He was a prominent police commander and then MP and deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament, and was accused, multiple times, throughout the Islamic Republic era of drug smuggling, running private militias and land-grabbing. Under the Republic, he was shielded from the rapacious US Drug Enforcement Agency, which had picked up numerous Afghans before him, often involving controversial sting operations. As Rachel Reid reports, Zaher’s arrest may signal that past political constraints on the DEA have been lifted. 

Haji Zaher with members of his local militia, which at the time was slated to be incorporated into the Territorial Army. Photo: Haji Qadir Zaher via Facebook, 12 February 2016
Until now, Haji Zaher Qadir had enjoyed an apparent immunity from prosecution, despite – or perhaps because – his political career was always intertwined with opium riches. He was described in 2014 by the HuffPost as the “most well-known and powerful drug lord in Afghanistan.” On 14 April 2025, his immunity finally evaporated. He was arrested at a hotel in Nairobi by Kenyan police soon after arriving in the country (Khaama). The Nairobi court which considered the extradition request heard that he was wanted by a court in the Southern District of New York after a criminal complaint was filed by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for offences of “narcotics importation conspiracy” and “being in possession of machine guns” (Nairobi Times).
Throughout the Republic era, Haji Zaher Qadir maintained a façade of respectability, alongside the notoriety of an illicit income. He had inherited both from his father, Haji Abdul Qadir, who was a member of the influential Arsala clan that had held positions in government for 150 years. Haji Qadir was a key commander with the mujahedin faction, Hezb-e Islami Khales, in the war against the Soviets and became governor of Nangrahar after the mujahedin captured Kabul in 1992. Later, after they lost power, he became one of the few senior Pashtun commanders to join the anti-Taliban United Islamic Front/Northern Alliance. After 2001, he helped shore up support among Pashtun representatives at the June 2002 loya jirga and was appointed by President Hamed Karzai as one of his five vice-presidents in the transitional administration. A month later, in July 2002, he was assassinated (Guardian). Qadir was also known for having amassed a fortune in the 1990s by taxing the booming opium trade and the transit trade in goods smuggled, customs-free, from Dubai to Pakistan via Afghanistan (RFE/RL).[1]

The son, Haji Zaher Qadir, commonly known as Haji Zaher, inherited a large share of his father’s dominion over Nangrahar, as well as its rivalries and dirtier politics. He was a prominent militia leader in the province from the early years of the new Islamic Republic onwards, described in a Human Rights Watch report from 2004 as operating “criminal enterprises and continue to engage in numerous human rights abuses, including the seizure of land and other property, kidnapping civilians for ransom, and extorting money.”

He also got a lucrative job – a perfect fit for his family business interests – Commander of the Frontier Brigade of the Eastern Region (see this 2005 UNDP report about him handing in mortars, heavy calibre weapon rounds and landmines as part of the Disarmament of Illegal Groups (DIAG) programme) and later Commander of the 8th Border Battalion based in Takhar Province. Both positions straddled important narcotics smuggling routes. According to a 2007 State Department report, he was asked to leave his post in June 2006 “due to allegations of corruption, but he refused to do so.” Even when his salary was stopped, he “continued to operate, reportedly using his own funds to pay officers’ salaries and funded more than 1,000 additional officers, essentially forming a private militia.”

He was finally forced out in 2007 after his cousin and assistant, Bilal, and four other border police were caught in Takhar province in a car loaded with heroin, described in a 2008 report by the State Department:

Five Afghan Border Police officers were arrested while transporting 123.5 kg of heroin from Nangarhar to Takhar Province. The heroin was seized outside Kabul. At the time, the officers were transporting the heroin in a Border Police truck. The officers worked for Border Police Commander Haji Zahir, also alleged to be a drug trafficker. Defendants in the case included his personal body guard and his nephew, who acts as his personal secretary.

This (and no doubt some US pressure) was enough to stymie his border police gig, but he himself managed to evade arrest (NYT, Globe and Mail). However, he and his uncle, Haji Din Muhammad, did manage to get Bilal sprung from jail in 2009 in the run-up to the presidential election: President Hamed Karzai was courting Din Muhammad and Zaher for support and the price was a pardon for Bilal – Karzai was to pardon many others when politics demanded (Boston News/Associated Press, Telegraph).[2]

Meanwhile, Zaher’s career changed track. Like many former commanders who lost posts due to allegations of criminality or abuse, he managed to get himself comfortably elected in the 2010 parliamentary elections and then went on to become a deputy speaker in 2012 (Pajhwok). The impunity Zaher enjoyed for his illicit activities, like so many of his power broker peers, was wired into the twisted Afghan state.

His notoriety did trigger some direct confrontations, however: in 2011 he was accused by the Attorney General of drug smuggling, charges he dismissed as trumped up by his enemies (AAN). In 2013, Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal (who was at the time himself under threat of impeachment) accused him in parliament of smuggling thousands of trucks of flour worth “$269 million” (RFE/RL). Zaher’s ‘defence’ was that he sat on such a huge fortune – USD 365 million – that he had no need to evade customs duties (prompting disgust from some Afghans quoted in this Tolo story).

In 2017, AAN reported on Haji Zaher having forces in the so-called ‘uprising’ militias, as well as the Afghan Local Police and Afghan National Border Police in Achin, Nazyan and Kot districts in Nangrahar that were involved in the fight against the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP). “Locals,” we reported, “have alleged that Zaher benefits from smuggling and illegal checkpoints and these ‘business interests’ have been hurt by the growth of ISKP and the Taleban, reducing the territory in Nangrahar under his influence.” The report also noted that forces loyal to Zaher had beheaded a number of alleged ISKP fighters and displayed their heads on the main road – an action which Zaher defended. Despite this, his ability to raise militias and anti-ISKP stance raised his value to the US government. At the time, Zaher did not take a known hostile position against the Taliban. In fact, AAN was told there were channels between the two parties.

America as self-appointed drug police to the world

Zaher is far from the first Afghan to be picked up by the long arm of American law, which respects almost no territorial boundary in its ‘war on drugs’, any more than in its ‘war-on-terror’.[3] It was President Richard Nixon who first declared a ‘war on drugs’ in 1971 (Time), described by the US social justice charity, the Vera Institute, as a “wrongheaded, racist policy decision,” given the subsequent decades of discriminatory practices towards minority communities in the US. The international reach of the Drug Enforcement Administration was initially focused on South and Central America, the effects of which are still felt today (Harvard International Review, Guardian). But it was the 9/11 attacks that made Afghanistan the epicentre of the DEA’s drugs war and what it called narcoterrorism.

Despite scant evidence that Osama bin Laden himself was directly connected to the Afghan drug trade, George W Bush declared that the al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan was linked to heroin trafficking (CBS News). The DEA got a massive spike in funding, a new Counter-Narco-Terrorism Operations Center and an office in Kabul (ProPublica). But the DEA soon wanted – and got – wider powers. Most of the Afghan opiate trade was heading for Europe and Russia, putting some traffickers beyond the DEA’s reach. So in 2006, Bush signed into law a new statute that allowed the DEA to pursue drug trafficking anywhere in the world, whether or not it had a domestic US nexus, as long as it was connected to terrorism (ProPublica). One former DEA agent joked to reporter Ginger Thompson in a 2015 story for ProPublica that “The law was so wide open you could indict a bologna sandwich.”

Afghans targeted by the DEA 

The DEA had successfully prosecuted Afghans prior to receiving their expanded authority, but the pace picked up after 2006. The first Afghan to be extradited to the US from Afghanistan was Baz Muhammad – which took place with the consent of President Karzai in October 2005 (Department of Justice). The DEA claimed that Baz Muhammad had been funnelling heroin profits to support the Taliban from 1994 to 2000 (Justice Department), with the head of the DEA at the time claiming that “This drug kingpin bragged that he waged jihad against Americans by poisoning them with his heroin” (Reuters).

In a number of instances, Afghans have claimed that they were informants or allies of the United States – as Zaher once was – before they found themselves picked up by the DEA. Haji Bashir Nurzai, for example, described by US officials as “the Pablo Escobar of heroin trafficking in Asia,” was (and is) closely connected to the Taliban, but also had ties to the United States before his arrest (FRE/RL). At his trial in 2008, he was sentenced to life imprisonment despite claiming a history of cooperation with Americans in the 1990s and after 2001. Nurzai was released in September 2022 in exchange for an American, Mark Frerich, who had been held by the Taliban since 2020 (Al Jazeera), which rather undermined his US ‘Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation’. The prisoner swap also revealed how important Bashir Nurzai was to the newly re-established Islamic Emirate, as did the hero’s welcome he was reported as having received from officials at Kabul airport on his return (Kabul Now).

Haji Juma Khan’s story is also of an ally or informant turned DEA target. When he was extradited to the US from Indonesia in 2008, he was also proclaimed a drugs kingpin and sentenced to two life sentences (Justice Department). That may have been true, but he was also reputedly a CIA and DEA informant (New York Times). Presumably, he was a useful one since he was quietly released in April 2018 (The Intercept). [4] Despite his release, the ‘Hajji Juma Khan Organisation’ remains listed and subject to sanctions, according to the US Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Act (see also this US treasury organogram of the ‘New Ansari Network’ that Juma Khan is placed atop).

The DEA has often been criticised for its reliance on sting operations, often luring targets into committing crimes, which several Afghans may have fallen foul of. Such tactics are used in both domestic and international cases, which the agency defends as allowing for a controlled means of arrest and evidence gathering. In this NYT piece about the DEA, a defence lawyer protests that for his client, “There were no drug dealers or drugs. There were not even any guns until the government, through repeated entreaties and enticements, convinced the defendants to obtain and bring them.”

Afghans picked up for ‘narcoterrorism’ who may have been trapped by similar tactics include Khan Muhammad, who in 2008 received two life sentences for attempting to distribute heroin in the United States, as well as using the proceeds to support the Taliban (Justice Department). The story revealed in this Department of Justice press release suggests a sting. The DEA investigation began after a tip-off via Afghan security forces from an Afghan farmer who said he had been approached by some Taliban to fire a rocket at Jalalabad Airfield. The farmer mentioned that he knew that one of the Talibs, Khan Muhammad, “had previously been involved in opium and heroin trafficking.” The DEA persuaded the farmer (presumably, paid him) to meet the Talib again, wearing a wire, through which he recorded further conversations about rocket attacks. It is over a series of conversations with the DEA informant “that Muhammed agreed to act as a broker for the purchase of opium,” which begs the question as to whether Khan Muhammad returned to the opium trade because the DEA invited him to, thus enabling them to arrest him.

The case of Haji Bagcho, too, revealed what appears to have been a stretch by the DEA. In 2012, Bagcho, dubbed a “heroin godfather” by a DEA agent (CNN), was convicted in a US court for conspiracy, distribution of heroin for importation into the United States and narcoterrorism. The DEA cited a ledger of Bagcho’s showing heroin transactions worth USD 250 million in 2006 alone, adding:

Based on heroin production statistics compiled by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime for 2006, the defendant’s trafficking accounted for approximately 20 percent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide that year.

However, while the DEA appeared to have ample evidence for his role in trafficking, the evidence of his connection to the Taliban, according to court records, was based only on a DEA informant, who the DEA later admitted was “not credible.” In 2015, Bagcho’s lawyers successfully argued for a new trial (see court record), resulting in the narcoterrorism charge being dropped, though the two drug convictions remained.

The DEA operation against Haji Abdul Satar Abdul Manaf also relied on undercover DEA agents. In August 2024, Manaf was sentenced to thirty years imprisonment for trying to import heroin into the US, as well as terror-related charges. A US Department of Justice official said: “Haji Abdul Satar Abdul Manaf used heroin as a weapon of war, funding the Taliban and Haqqani Network to spread terror and death.” Manaf had been sanctioned by the US in 2012, then arrested and extradited from Estonia in 2019 for “storing or moving money for the Taliban” through his business, the Haji Khairullah Haji Sattar Money Exchange (US Dept of Justice).

DEA agents had themselves enticed Manaf to supply to the United States, as made clear in this Department of Justice press release:

MANAF participated in in-person meetings, recorded telephone calls, and electronic communications with five individuals whom MANAF understood to be affiliated with an international drug trafficking organization. During those meetings, MANAF helped arrange to import large quantities of heroin into the U.S. with the assistance of—and recognizing that some of the proceeds of that narcotics trafficking would be provided to—the Taliban and the Haqqani Network. Four of these individuals were, in fact, DEA confidential sources. The fifth was an undercover DEA agent (the “UC”).

This proclivity for sting operations was the subject of a 2015 investigative report by ProPublica, which found a “disturbing number” of incidents where DEA undercover agents were themselves presented as evidence in “staged narcoterrorism conspiracies.” Another example reported included another Afghan, Taza Gul Alizai, who sold heroin to an undercover DEA agent who had been posing as a member of the Taliban (State Department). His lawyer said he had been lured to the Maldives with the promise of dental treatment, where he was arrested (ProPublica).

The DEA finally moves on Haji Zaher 

Haji Zaher stayed in Afghanistan after the fall of the Republic, seemingly continuing some of his business activities. As noted above, prior to their return to power, the Taliban had reportedly reached a degree of accommodation with him, perhaps united by a shared enemy, the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, which Zaher had directed his militias against (New Lines Institute). According to one source who follows illicit economies and armed groups in Afghanistan, his business had continued, “in harmony with the Taliban.”

Haji Zaher meets with the deputy head of the Tehreek-e-Islam Peace Caravan, Mawlawi Ahmad Shah on 10 September 2021.  Photo: Haji Qadir Zaher via Instagram

As to what those businesses might be, the Islamic Emirate banned opium cultivation, processing and trade in 2022. However, the sharp drop in opium cultivation did trigger a surge in opium prices, making the substantial stockpiles highly lucrative. It may not be surprising then that, according to a March 2025 report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, “drug trafficking in Afghanistan remains a highly profitable illicit trade.” Possibly Haji Zaher is still involved in his old trade.

The Nairobi court heard that there were also charges involving machine guns against Zaher: the Afghan trade in weapons, long intertwined with drug trafficking, is also going strong. In 2023, the UN Sanctions Monitoring team reported failings in IEA attempts to centralise weapons control, and reported that allowing local commanders to keep “20 per cent of weaponry captured” and the “gifting of weapons” were both widely practised. The February 2025 report by the same UN team found that al-Qaeda-affiliated groups “continued to have access to weapons seized from the former Afghan National Army, transferred to them by the de facto authorities/Taliban or purchased from the black market.” Research by the Small Arms Survey published in March 2025 found that arms trafficking continues, “likely with at least the tacit approval of low-level Taliban officials.”

US President Donald Trump made the Afghan weapons trade a priority. Trump reportedly told his first cabinet meeting in February 2025, “Afghanistan is one of the biggest sellers of military equipment in the world, you know why? They’re selling the equipment that we left. … but we want our military equipment back” (BBC). In the same month, Emirate spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid seemed to respond to Trump’s threat, saying: “We will use these weapons to repel invaders who dare to seize them” (VOA). A 2022 estimate by the US Department of Defence said that US-funded equipment worth USD 7.12 billion had been left in the hands of the Republic, most of which was seized by the Taliban.

For the DEA, this presidential enthusiasm for action at a time when political interest in Afghanistan is otherwise so low may have spurred it on. It has had an interest in Zaher well back into the Republic era – it is possible that much of the evidence they had against him predates whatever business dealings he has had under the IEA. The internal State Department reporting noted above suggests there was some US political pressure for his removal from his border police role in 2006-07. The source mentioned earlier that follows illicit economies and armed groups in Afghanistan told AAN that he was also aware of DEA requests to move Zaher on, much later, from 2014 to 2018, which were stymied by “high level” political opposition from within the US administration. This protection could have come from those in the US government who were focused on peace deals with the Taliban, since he had demonstrated some ability to reach an accommodation with them, or simply because the US military valued his forces – brutal, but effective – against ISKP in the east. That the DEA could move against him now, the source said, “is a Trumpian effect,” with the agency unfettered by competing State Department or national security priorities.

As for Zaher’s presence in Nairobi, Afghan smugglers may be less common in West Africa than, say, Turkey, but their trade has long had a global reach. A 2015 UN Office on Drugs and Crime report found that while trafficking of Afghan heroin in Africa had existed at low levels from the 1980s, there was a marked increase in interdictions after around 2009. However, as the stories of previous arrests of Afghans show, when it comes to the DEA, the possibility of a sting operation against Zaher also seems highly plausible.

The end of immunity? 

If Haji Zaher appears in the Southern District of New York courtroom, he will have been many years and many miles from the parliamentary privileges and presidential protection that he once enjoyed. The DEA should finally get to put its evidence against him in a time and place where he has no leverage.

There are plenty of reasons to question the American ‘war on drugs’, both for its aggressive claim to universal jurisdiction as well as its selective application. Zaher himself was protected by the United States under the Republic, but not under the Emirate. Bashir Nurzai was a priority drugs ‘kingpin’ until he was a useful trade in a prisoner exchange: he is now back in Afghanistan and presumably enjoys some leeway to pick up his business dealings where he left off. The DEA and other US agencies have probably contributed to the enrichment of more Afghan drug traffickers than they have convicted, from informants to undercover agents to counter-terrorism security entrepreneurs.

At the same time, many will be glad to see Haji Zaher fall from grace. He was one of a generation of political figures who abused his successive positions of power to enrich himself, strike at rivals and grab land, helping to keep millions of Afghans trapped in poverty and the Republic mired in corruption. Other Republic-era profiteers may be revising their travel plans for fear that the DEA has more targets in its sights. There is a fairly extensive list of Afghans who once enjoyed covert US protection, who may now, finally, be vulnerable, at least on trafficking charges.

Edited by Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 Barnett Rubin described in 2000 how the Arsala clan had become rich:

The Arsala clan (Haji Abdul Qadir and his brothers) was at the center of the commercial development of Jalalabad, profiting from Nangarhar province’s skyrocketing opium production and using the Jalalabad airport as a center for the import of goods from Dubai for smuggling into Pakistan in alliance with Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun truckers and the local administration of the NWFP [North-West Frontier Province].

The Political Economy of War and Peace in Afghanistan, Institute for Afghan Studies, June 1999.

Vanda Felbab-Brown also wrote about how the Arsala clan benefitted from Nangrahar’s position as the second largest provincial source of opium in Afghanistan, although she said he had done a deal with the United States to reduce opium production in exchange for development assistance. See ‘Shooting Up: The Impact of Illicit Economies on Military Conflict,’ PHD thesis, 1999, p398 (available as a PDF from MIT). This 2003 RFE/RL article also quotes Qadir as having criticised the dishonesty of internationals for not delivering on their promises to support farmers in exchange for them stopping growing poppy.
↑2 Kate Clark and Stephen Carter’s 2010 report, No Shortcut to Stability Justice, Politics and Insurgency in Afghanistan, p33, details Karzai’s pardoning of rapists, a kidnapper of United Nations staff and drug smugglers. They reported Amnesty International’s Sam Zarifi’s estimate that Karzai was issuing 800-1,000 pardons annually and that, ahead of the presidential elections, the numbers had gone up, with most being granted to people associated with powerful families. Also, coincidentally on p33 of that report, then Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commissioner, Nader Nadery uses a discussion with a judge in Nangrahar to illustrate the impossibility of getting justice in Afghanistan. The judge named Haji Zaher and Din Muhammad as putting pressure to get the verdicts they wanted and asks: “’Why wouldn’t this happen, when I go on my bicycle to buy potatoes and they all have bodyguards and armoured cars?’”
↑3 For an academic article which compares the two, see Wadie E Said, Limitless Discretion in the Wars on Drugs and Terror, University of Colorado Law Review, vol 89, 2018, Issue 1. See also, Emma Björnehed, Narco-Terrorism: The Merger of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, Global Crime, vol 6, 2004, pp305-324.
↑4 Vice interviewed the former head of the DEA in Afghanistan who had been Juma Khan’s ‘handler’; he expressed both admiration for Juma Khan as well as shame for betraying him.

 

Losing His Immunity: Former Afghan MP Haji Zaher extradited to US on drug charges
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U.S. aid cuts are impacting millions of Afghans

April 26, 2025

International Rescue Committee

April 25, 2025

Families in Afghanistan continue to face food insecurity, disease and ongoing instability. For 23 million Afghans, U.S. aid funding has been a critical lifeline—but that support is now in jeopardy. Funding cuts are already having devastating impacts on the country’s most vulnerable communities, especially women and children.

Since the 1980s, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has been delivering critical assistance to Afghans. Today, these programs—and the hope they provide—are at risk.

Due to cuts in U.S. aid funding, the IRC has been forced to suspend some of our life-saving services in Afghanistan. We remain committed to supporting the people of Afghanistan—but we need your support. Meet the Afghans whose lives have been transformed by IRC programs and find out how you can make a difference.

U.S. aid cuts are threatening the delivery of lifesaving services. Your donation will help the IRC deliver aid to communities in Afghanistan and crisis zones around the world.

Crisis in Afghanistan: What are people facing?

Afghanistan is facing a severe humanitarian crisis, with over 22.9 million people in urgent need of aid. Decades of conflict, a prolonged economic crisis, and environmental disasters have pushed millions into poverty and left more than one in three Afghans food insecure.

The situation is especially dire for vulnerable groups, including over 3 million children and 1.2 million pregnant or nursing mothers suffering from acute malnutrition.

Restrictions on women’s access to work have left many women-led households without an income, increasing their risk of hunger and malnutrition. At the same time, girls are barred from attending school past sixth grade, depriving them of education and future opportunities.

How are U.S. aid cuts impacting Afghanistan?

For years, U.S. funding has provided a lifeline for millions of Afghans facing ongoing crisis.

However, recent aid cuts have forced the IRC to suspend critical programs that provide health care, vaccination, malnutrition treatment, clean water and protection services. As a result, over 700,000 people, including refugees and displaced families, will lose access to essential humanitarian services from IRC programming alone. Life-saving treatment for more than 15,000 young children suffering from malnutrition has been disrupted.

Across the country, more than 14 million people have limited or no access to health care. Communities are losing access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation services, creating a higher risk of disease outbreaks that could potentially spread across international borders. At the same time, vital programs that provided income and support for families are coming to a standstill, leaving many without the resources they need to survive.

Without renewed funding, countless families risk falling deeper into hunger, illness and poverty. Urgent support is needed to help the people of Afghanistan survive, recover and rebuild their lives.

The impact of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan

Humanitarian aid saves lives. In Afghanistan, it’s a lifeline providing health care, education and stability. These are the real stories of IRC clients and staff in Afghanistan:

Delivering medical care to the Ali family in rural Afghanistan

In a remote village of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, Muhammad and Hawa Ali raise their children amidst drought and food shortages.

When their children, Mahnaz and Murtaza, became sick, the family couldn’t afford to travel to the nearest hospital for treatment. “We cannot take the one who is sick anywhere for treatment because we can’t afford to pay the car fare,” explains Muhammad.

The IRC’s mobile medical teams arrived just in time. These teams travel across Afghanistan, delivering essential healthcare to families who would otherwise have no access to medical services. Once a month, they visit the Ali family’s village, offering life saving medicine for the children and treating Muhammad’s injured leg.

“I had pain in my leg, so I visited the doctor. My child was sick, she was coughing a lot, they gave us medicine… It is very good for us that the doctors come here and give medicine for the children.”

Muhammad dreams of a better life for his children: “I hope that they get educated in order to have a prosperous future.”

U.S. funding cuts have already forced several IRC mobile medical teams to shut down—leaving thousands of families like the Alis without accessible health care. Your donation can help keep these services running.

Hajera and Mursal: Empowering girls to learn

Restrictions on women and girls in Afghanistan are taking a devastating toll on families and the country’s future. In areas without schools, the IRC ran community based education programs until cuts to U.S. funding forced their closure in February 2025, leaving nearly 300,000 children without access to education. These programs were equipped with IRC teachers, learning materials, psychosocial support services and basic water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) supplies to sustain children’s education and well-being.

Teachers like Mursal and Hajera were two of the 120,000 IRC teachers that worked tirelessly to create a better future for all Afghan children.

At just 19 years old, Mursal dedicated six days a week to teaching Pashto, Dari and math. Beyond the classroom, she visited families to inspire them to send their daughters to school, emphasizing that education is the key to a brighter future. “All human beings must get an education,” she says, “Especially young girls. They must educate themselves and teach illiterate women and girls.”

Hajera hosted classes in her home in the rural Logar province. With her education cut short at grade 10, she remains deeply committed to creating opportunities for other girls that she never had herself.

“When my students study and work hard, it makes me hopeful about their future,” she says. “When they call me ‘teacher,’ it makes me proud.”

Teachers like Hajera and Mursal were the heart of community education in Afghanistan. Until aid cuts shuttered these programs, their unwavering determination paved the way for Afghan girls to keep learning, growing and dreaming of a brighter future.

Mursal and Hajera are eager to teach again. But without renewed funding, thousands of girls are left no access to learning opportunities. Now is the time to stand up for Afghan children.

Helping Azim rebuild after an intense flood

When flash floods devastated Afghanistan’s Laghman Province in spring 2024, Azim and his family lost everything. Days of relentless rain caused their home to collapse, reducing their belongings to nothing and leaving them without shelter, food or access to clean water. “Everything we owned was buried under the mud and rubble. I was lost, I didn’t know what to do next,” recounts Azim.

With eight children depending on him, Azim was overwhelmed, forced to sleep with his family among the ruins of their home, exposed to the elements and facing an uncertain future.

Azim met with IRC staff shortly after the disaster. Our staff assessed the family’s situation, verified their urgent needs and quickly enrolled them in IRC’s emergency cash assistance program—a flexible and cost-effective form of humanitarian aid. With this support, Azim purchased basic necessities like food, clothing and hygiene items, allowing him to provide for his family with dignity and autonomy.

Reflecting on the disaster’s impact, Azim shares, “The world needs to come together and to help people struck by tragedy. We need to help each other through this crisis.”

Like thousands of Afghans reeling from economic collapse, displacement and climate disasters, Azim is working tirelessly to rebuild. But needs remain immense.

Current U.S. funding cuts have already ended cash assistance and protection services for thousands of Afghans. Sustained funding is needed to maintain support for families like Azim’s.

Azim and his family eat lunch together in the ruins of their home which was destroyed by severe flooding.
Azim and his children have lunch in the ruins of their home in Afghanistan’s Laghman province, which was destroyed by intense flooding. The family received cash assistance from the IRC, empowering them to meet their basic needs.

How can I help the people of Afghanistan?

As U.S. humanitarian aid funding is cut, families across Afghanistan are being pushed deeper into crisis. But with your support, we can continue to provide lifesaving assistance to the communities that need it most.

Your donation empowers the IRC’s lifesaving work, from delivering medical services, cash assistance, education programs and so much more. Sustained funding is essential to helping families survive, recover and rebuild their lives.

We consistently earn top marks by charity watchdog groups for our efficient use of donor contributions and the effectiveness of our work.

 

U.S. aid cuts are impacting millions of Afghans
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A Force for Good, or Source of Coercion? An Islamic scholar reflects on the Emirate’s morality law

April 21, 2025

John Butt

October 2024
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
The full translation of the law can be read here.

This report aims to place the Emirate’s August 2024 Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Law within a broader Islamic context. John Butt argues that the two basic concepts – amr bil-maruf and nahi an il-munkar – are simple: encourage people to do good and discourage them from wrongdoing. To clarify these concepts, he says, one can make them even simpler: Stand up for good; Take a stand against wrong. Seen in this bare and basic light, amr bil-maruf, he believes, is an upstanding and admirable principle and practice of Islam.

Yet, from this, has emerged a colossal document. The Emirate’s law, in essence a decree by its Supreme Leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, stands somewhere in the region of 45,000 words when translated into English. Its copious footnotes are used to back up the Emirate’s decisions on what to ban, what to make obligatory and how to determine the powers and responsibilities of those enforcing the law. The authority of the enforcer is wide-ranging and includes the ability to order extra-judicial punishments. Many of the sources cited in the footnotes are in Arabic, a language understood by relatively few Afghans, or non-Arab foreigners, which is one reason why we thought it important to translate the whole law to better understand the thinking behind it.

Butt looks at the meaning and practice of the Emirate’s amr bil-maruf law, first in the context of fundamental Islamic principles, including the obligation of Muslims to present a positive image of their faith to the outside world, and second, as amr bil-maruf has been interpreted at crucial stages of Islamic history. He focuses on the reigns of two caliphs cited in the footnotes of the IEA law, before considering a nineteenth-century Pashtun project to encourage amr bil-maruf. He also hones in on how it affects two groups that see the full weight of the Amir’s decree – women and, to a lesser extent, the media.

Butt’s report clarifies how the Emirate’s version of propagating virtue and preventing vice fits into the wider Islamic and Afghan historical context, asking questions such as: Have those who framed the law referenced a wide range of sources and done so objectively, or have they been selective? Is the establishment of a dedicated ministry, such as the one set up by the IEA, the normal way to conduct amr bil-maruf? And how does the law measure on the scales of the crucial Islamic balance that seeks to steer a course between harshness and leniency?

* John Butt is a graduate of the Darul Uloom Deoband in India. This is the key seminary informing the Islamic thought of most Afghan Sunni clerics, including the Taliban. Butt went on to have a career in journalism and broadcasting – including reporting for the BBC from Kandahar in the early 1990s on the men who would go on to form the Taliban movement – and setting up radio serial dramas. He published an autobiography, A Talib’s Tale: The Life and Times of a Pashtoon Englishman, in 2021 and a previous AAN report, A Taleban Theory of State: A review of the Chief Justice’s book of jurisprudence, was a review of Emirate Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani’s book, The Islamic Emirate and Its System of Governance, which is the fullest and most authoritative account yet of what the Taliban believe an Islamic state should be like.

Edited by Kate Clark and Roxanna Shapour 

You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.

The full translation of the law can be read here.

Virtue and vice review FINALDownload
A Force for Good, or Source of Coercion? An Islamic scholar reflects on the Emirate’s morality law
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A ‘strange dance’: media mogul Saad Mohseni on making TV under the Taliban

April 21, 2025

Chief reporter
The Guardian
21 April 2025

Once dubbed the ‘Afghan Rupert Murdoch’, Mohseni’s media business was founded after the fall of the Taliban and is now navigating their return

“If a woman menstruates, [the showing of an uncovered female face] is haram [forbidden], right?” Mohseni said. “But as soon as they go through, you know, menopause, then you can have them uncovered. It’s ridiculous, it’s so offensive. So now we try to negotiate with [the Taliban] to do a soap opera that’s going to have these women over the age of 50. We have to try.”

Mohseni, 58, described as Afghanistan’s first media mogul or the ‘Afghan Rupert Murdoch’ is the chief executive of Moby Group.

Founded by Mohseni and his siblings – Afghan emigres who returned to their childhood home from Australia after the removal of the Taliban in 2001 – Moby was the country’s largest media conglomerate until the Taliban returned to Kabul nearly four years ago.

What has been established since 2021 is a hardline Islamic emirate shunned by much of the world. Political and media freedoms have deteriorated sharply but, most glaringly, the rights of women have been swept away. Women have been erased from nearly every aspect of public life: schools, universities and most workplaces.

Yet the company remains, not just hanging on, but a dominant player in the Afghan market, producing TV and radio entertainment shows and a 24-hour news channel that employs about 400 people.

The result is an odd co-existence with the Taliban – a “strange dance”, as Mohseni put it – that offers an insight into the complicated politics in the country.

Mohseni was on a trip out of the country at the time of the chaotic and sudden withdrawal of the US in summer 2021, an event about which he says he had given the former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani repeated warnings. “I was very angry, and I’m still very angry about his arrogance,” he said of the president, who fled Kabul as his administration collapsed.

Mohseni has not been back to Afghanistan since, partly because he does not want to be seen to be endorsing the new regime. “The other [reason] is that there’s always the risk of them saying, ‘You can’t leave, you know, you’ve got important media assets, you’ll be our guest’”, Mohseni said.

Instead, he oversees affairs from his homes in Dubai and London. It was not clear at first whether he would have any affairs in Afghanistan to look after.

He wrote a memoir, Radio Free Afghanistan, after being locked out of his country, believing the empire he had built was dead in the water. But Moby has survived – albeit within tight confines.

The current rules are there is to be no criticism of the Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, he says.

Men and women cannot share the same space. A curtain separates the two sexes in Moby’s offices. A split screen is used to facilitate conversation during a show on his Tolo TV network. Female news presenters must have their hair and faces covered.

The first show to be canceled was Afghan Star, the popular music reality show based on American Idol and the X Factor, which was taken off air in 2021 following the Taliban’s ban on music.

“You know, women performing on stage and people voting for them … They are the enemies of fun, right?” Mohseni said. “It was understood that we would not be able to continue with that. With the [ending of] soap operas and so forth it was gradual.”

There has been more latitude given to Moby’s news operation.

“I’m not saying they have an appreciation for free press, but I think there’s an understanding of how important media is,” he said. “I think they need to have their announcements or whatever amplified, echoed. People need to understand. They need to be able to sell their narrative to the public.”

Mohseni’s journalists have been able to push to a degree, at one point confronting ministers over the extra judicial killings of opposition figures.

The male presenters also wore masks in solidarity with their female colleagues for a week and even persuaded a minister to try it out, before he complained that it was too difficult to breathe. “Afterwards, he threatened to lock my guy up,” Mohseni said.

There is, nevertheless, just enough space for the journalists to do their work to make it worthwhile, he said.

The news channel has heavily covered criticism of the Taliban’s ban of secondary education for girls. The regime had initially said the move was a temporary pause to allow it to reorganise the system.

As a result, Unesco reported about 1.4 million girls over the age of 12 have been deliberately deprived of schooling, with that number exceeding 2.5 million when taking into account those already kept out of education by their families.

“In 2024, we counted, we’ve done like two and a half or three thousand stories on girls education: town hall meetings, discussion, current affairs, programs, individual news stories,” Mohseni said. “It’s not just about like [former US secretary of state] Anthony Blinken says, ‘Girls need to go to school’. More importantly it was about Afghan voices and amplifying those voices, Taliban voices, religious voices, saying we need to allow our girls to go back to school.”

They also run educational programs on its Tolo TV network, supported by Unicef, that provides help to boys attending classes and the girls at home with mathematics, physics, biology and chemistry.

“Not even the Taliban will reinvent mathematics,” Mohseni said of the programmes which follow the national curriculum.

“It’s not an alternative to real education,” he added. “It’s sort of a band aid solution between when schools are banned and when they reopen. Whenever that may be, it’s a bridge. It may be a long bridge, but it’s a bridge.”

He is under no illusion the small freedoms could disappear, and that “on this trajectory, eventually, the country is going to become more conservative, more radical”. But there is still time to try to engage with the more reform-minded within the Taliban, he said.

“The movement itself is not monolithic,” Mohseni said. “You have different characters who view things, you know, sometimes more moderately or more pragmatically. And they all have ambitions.”

The country is nevertheless gripped by what Naheed Farid, a former member of the parliament of Afghanistan, has described as a system of “gender apartheid”. Mohseni worries that the lack of international engagement will only exacerbate a trend towards ever greater repression. “You ignore Afghanistan at your peril,” he said.

A ‘strange dance’: media mogul Saad Mohseni on making TV under the Taliban
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Delusions of Paradise by Maiwand Banayee review – a compelling rejection of fundamentalism

April 21, 2025

Born in Kabul, Maiwand Banayee aspired to become a Talib when he was 16. In 1994, living in a Pakistan refugee camp, there was little to do except sleep, eat, pray and dream of the afterlife: “Islam dominated every aspect of life in Shamshatoo. Even during the volleyball and cricket games the spectators were prevented from clapping because it was seen as un-Islamic.” Banayee joined the camp’s madrasa when he was 14 in an attempt “to fit in”. The only educational opportunity open to Afghans at that time, the religious school offered structure and purpose, although “instead of teaching us to live, they were teaching us to die”.

In this illuminating book, Banayee, now resident in England, describes the circumstances that led to his indoctrination, and what eventually saved him. Brutalised by conflict, his Pashtun family lived through the Soviet-Afghan war, followed by the period of bitter infighting between warlords. As a child, Banayee saw his neighbourhood torn apart and corpses rotting in the street: “By the winter of 1994, Kabul had turned into a deserted place, as if hit by Armageddon – a place of daily bombardments, looting and arbitrary arrests. The savagery and violence had no limits.” Banayee, his siblings and brother’s family eventually sought refuge in Pakistan, while his parents remained in Kabul with his disabled sister, Gul, fearing she would not survive the journey.

In the refugee camp, Banayee came to see the west as “a world stripped of miracle and wonder” as opposed to one where “ordinary people could obtain miracles directly from God”. Within a year his greatest desire was to take part in jihad. In 1996, following the Taliban takeover of Kabul, Banayee witnessed a “gruesome and medieval” execution ceremony. This experience of intolerance, his growing realisation that Taliban ideology is utterly “tied to seventh-century Saudi Arabia”, and an opportune period of study in a secular institution, changed Banayee. He feels that impressionable boys in camps were “the victims of bad ideas and indoctrination… In a culture riddled with poverty… abstinence and crazed religious fervour, they turned to [radical] Islam for solace.”

Describing the conflict that followed in the wake of September 11 as one where “boots fought sandals, helmets fought turbans and reality fought myth”, Banayee found himself caught between the two warring sides. Despite having renounced his “infatuation with the Taliban”, he writes how he “was on record as having argued with enough people to leave the impression that I was some fanatical Talib”. Fearing for his safety, Banayee managed to escape to Europe, landed in England, and found refuge in Ireland.

The final third of Delusions of Paradise follows a more familiar refugee narrative about the struggle for acceptance and the relentless threat of deportation while waiting to be granted status. Banayee taught himself to read and write in English in order to tell his story and his eye-opening observations about the lure of jihadism and unflinching descriptions of his own experiences of radicalisation make compelling reading.

  • Delusions of Paradise: Escaping the Life of a Taliban Fighter by Maiwand Banayee is published by Icon (£20).

Delusions of Paradise by Maiwand Banayee review – a compelling rejection of fundamentalism
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Afghan refugees need to stay in America

April 17, 2025

Opinion

The Washington Post
April 17, 2025

Kristi Noem is wrong to assert that conditions in Afghanistan have improved.

Four men accused of murder were executed by gunfire last Friday in crowded sports stadiums across Afghanistan. The Taliban leader defended these public killings as necessary under sharia law.

That night, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem announced that the Trump administration would revoke temporary protected status (TPS) for Afghans who evacuated to the United States after their country fell to the Taliban in 2021. This sets the stage for more than 9,000 people to be deported, beginning May 20. A DHS spokeswoman says Noem made this decision based on a “review of the conditions in Afghanistan.”

To claim the situation has improved enough for Afghans to safely return is to turn a blind eye to the Taliban’s draconian rule, which is especially barbaric for women and girls. The government does not allow girls to receive education beyond sixth grade. In December, seeking to close what it saw as a loophole, the Taliban banned women from studying to become midwives or nurses. Some provinces bar male doctors from treating female patients, which means denying women any medical care. No wonder Afghanistan has the world’s highest rate of maternal mortality outside Africa.

Many women in Afghanistan don’t leave home because they fear the morality police, who enforce strict gender segregation and require that they wear hijabs. Women are not to look at men other than their husbands or relatives. Last year, the Taliban restricted women from even raising their voices in public.

In 2023, Alejandro Mayorkas, Noem’s predecessor as DHS secretary, extended TPS for Afghans for 18 months. The people needed protection, he said, because there was a “serious threat posed by ongoing armed conflict; lack of access to food, clean water and healthcare; and destroyed infrastructure, internal displacement and economic instability.” These conditions still exist.

Adding insult to injury, as DHS seeks to repatriate Afghans, the Trump administration has cut critical humanitarian assistance to the country. Last week, the White House reversed recent cutoffs in emergency food aid to Somalia, Syria and Iraq but maintained the cuts on Afghanistan. The U.N. World Food Program says this will mean the end of food assistance for 2 million Afghans, including more than 650,000 malnourished children, moms and pregnant women. The country’s total population is about 40 million.

Action Against Hunger, an aid agency, warns that the cuts threaten children’s lives. This week, the group is closing its therapeutic feeding unit in Kabul because of earlier cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development. “The children who came to the feeding unit often could not walk or even crawl,” the Associated Press reports. “Sometimes they were unable to eat because they didn’t have the energy.”

In pushing to expel Afghan refugees, the United States finds itself aligned with Pakistan and Iran. All three governments say they’re no longer willing to support large migrant populations. Pakistan wants to expel more than 3 million Afghans this year. Iran announced plans in September to send away 2 million.

Afghans who can prove that they directly assisted the U.S. war effort are still able to stay in America through the Special Immigrant Visa program. But advocacy groups say TPS has offered a layer of stability to people going through the arduous process of trying to secure the special status, which requires documentation that can be difficult to obtain. Applying for asylum is another option, but this system has a backlog of more than 2.6 million cases, and applicants must credibly demonstrate a specific personal risk if they’re sent home, rather than general fear or systemic oppression.

The Taliban craves international recognition. In the interest of “normalizing” ties, the group has freed four Americans from its custody since the start of the year. Last month, the U.S. government lifted bounties on three Taliban leaders, including the interior minister, who organized attacks against the U.S.-based government that fell in 2021.

Ideally, U.S. courts will step in before any Afghans are forced onto planes headed back to Kabul. On March 31, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen temporarily paused DHS’s attempt to revoke TPS status for Venezuelans, because letting it take effect could “inflict irreparable harm,” and said the Trump administration had failed to show “real countervailing harm” in letting the program continue.

The same is true in the case of Afghans. There is no harm in letting their TPS status continue — and no good that can come from sending them back, subjugating innocent women and children to Taliban abuse.

Afghan refugees need to stay in America
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The ‘Graveyard Of Empires’ Myth Distorts Afghanistan’s Story

April 16, 2025

By 

Eurasia Review

April 15, 2025

Afghanistan is often called the “graveyard of empires”—a romantic label used to suggest that no foreign power can conquer it, that the country has single-handedly humbled giants like Afghanistan is often called the “graveyard of empires”—a romantic label used to suggest that no foreign the Soviet Union and the United States. It’s a phrase etched into the rhetoric of resistance and frequently deployed to invoke Afghan valor and perseverance. But behind the slogan lies a dangerously simplified version of history—one that clouds the past and impedes a realistic understanding of Afghanistan’s present and future. 

The idea that Afghanistan defeated two superpowers alone is a myth, and one that does more harm than good.

A Russian soldier-internationalist guards roads during the Soviet-Afghan War. Photo Credit: RIA Novosti, Wikipedia Commons.

A Russian soldier-internationalist guards roads during the Soviet-Afghan War. Photo Credit: RIA Novosti, Wikipedia Commons.

Behind the Soviet Retreat: A Cold War Coalition

When Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, it was certainly a landmark moment in Afghan history. But it was not the result of isolated, indigenous resistance. The Mujahideen were backed by a coalition of countries with converging geopolitical interests—chiefly the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China.

Operation Cyclone, the CIA’s covert effort to fund and arm the anti-Soviet insurgency, was one of the most expensive covert operations in U.S. history. Billions of dollars in weapons and intelligence flowed into the country through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which served both as facilitator and gatekeeper. Saudi Arabia matched U.S. funding dollar-for-dollar and provided ideological backing. China, too, saw the opportunity to undermine Moscow through indirect involvement.

What unfolded in Afghanistan was not a lone insurgency, but a classic proxy war—one shaped, sustained, and ultimately resolved not by local fighters alone, but by the calculations of distant capitals.

The U.S. Withdrawal: Exit by Design, Not Defeat

The images of Taliban fighters entering Kabul in August 2021 gave fresh life to the “graveyard” narrative. But once again, the surface optics obscure the deeper truth.

The United States did not leave Afghanistan because it was militarily defeated. By 2020, U.S. combat deaths were in the single digits annually. The decision to withdraw was a political one, rooted in a sense of strategic fatigue and shifting global priorities. Successive administrations, starting with President Obama and continuing through Trump and Biden, grappled with an enduring question: What was America still doing in Afghanistan, and at what cost?

Washington’s exit was not precipitated by Taliban military dominance, but by a growing belief that a military solution was neither feasible nor affordable. The collapse of the Afghan Republic came not from a final Taliban offensive alone, but from within—a failure of political cohesion, institutional rot, and loss of public confidence.

Collapse from Within

This pattern isn’t new. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), the Soviet-backed regime, didn’t fall immediately when Soviet troops left. It held on until 1992, when the USSR’s collapse ended the flow of support and internal fissures became unmanageable. Similarly, the Western-backed Republic of Afghanistan had years of international support but was undone by factionalism, corruption, and elite disconnect from the broader population.

The fall of these regimes says more about internal fragility than about the strength of those who opposed them.

External Hands in Every Era

From the 19th century Anglo-Afghan Wars to the 21st-century global war on terror, foreign involvement in Afghan conflicts has been constant. During the British invasions of 1839, 1878, and 1919, Afghan rulers capitalized on great power rivalries, sought arms from competing empires, and engaged in complex diplomacy. Even Afghanistan’s eventual assertion of independence in 1919 came as Britain reeled from the exhaustion of World War I.

Afghan resistance has always been shaped by its ability to attract and exploit external support. Heroism alone didn’t win wars—strategy, geography, and foreign alliances did.

Mythmaking and Its Consequences

The mythology of Afghanistan defeating empires may offer a moment of national pride, but it comes at a cost. It obscures the enormous toll exacted on the country itself: millions dead or displaced, generations born into war, cities and institutions reduced to rubble. It feeds a self-image of righteous resistance while ignoring the hard truths of dependence, fragmentation, and lost opportunities.

More importantly, it undermines honest dialogue about what went wrong—and what comes next. A nation that believes it never needed help may not recognize when it needs cooperation. A people told they always win may not prepare for the hard work of building stable institutions and peaceful coexistence.

The future of Afghanistan does not lie in repeating myths, but in confronting realities: that no victory was ever achieved alone, and that no lasting peace can be forged without sober reflection and regional collaboration.

Advocate Mazhar Siddique Khan is a Lahore based High Court Lawyer. He can be contacted at mazharsiddiquekhan@gmail.com.

The ‘Graveyard Of Empires’ Myth Distorts Afghanistan’s Story
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A lifesaving midwife in Afghanistan: Noriko Hayashi’s best photograph

April 9, 2025
Interview by
The Guardian
Wed 9 Apr 2025

My home country, Japan, is one of the safest places in the world to give birth: it has one of the very lowest mortality rates in Asia. A few years ago I had the opportunity to work on a story about midwives in Japan, and I became very interested in their role. In November 2023 I travelled to Badakhshan province in the northeast of Afghanistan, the country with the highest maternal mortality rate in Asia. I wanted to meet midwives there and see how they support women.

The Badakhshan province is far from Kabul, with rugged terrain and poor transportation and medical infrastructure. In winter, heavy snowfall blocks roads for months. Women who are about to give birth are sometimes carried on donkeys escorted by family members or neighbours on multi-day trips to clinics. The literacy rate for women there is extremely low compared to other provinces – less than 10% – which is partly why there’s a serious shortage of midwives. This combination of geographic, social and cultural factors means there are often delays responding to emergencies, and deaths from complications like excessive bleeding or infection, which might otherwise have been preventable.

This picture was taken in a small village while I was following a mobile health team of six, organised by the United Nations Population Fund. The midwife, Anisa, was giving medical checkups to women who had recently delivered a baby at home. One of these mothers took us to another woman in the neighbourhood who was nine months pregnant but had never had a checkup. Anisa is listening to the baby’s heartbeat with a stethoscope in the picture, and telling the woman: “Your baby is growing well, and if you start having contractions, be sure to call me and I’ll come right away.” Ten days later, Anisa assisted the delivery at her home.

Midwives like Anisa are saving pregnant women in many ways – not only helping them give birth but also acting as unofficial therapists. Afghan women are often isolated and disconnected from society, but with the midwives they can share personal problems they would never be able to otherwise, such as struggles with mothers-in-law, or their marriages. Women who have been pregnant for years – some have 10 children – ask their midwives to help persuade their husbands to use birth control. It’s not easy, but they do succeed sometimes.

The UN team is in charge of 13 villages that don’t have any medical facilities. In conservative rural areas, it was customary for women to be accompanied by male relatives when travelling, even before the Taliban regained power in 2021. Since then, this rule is followed more stringently. This makes it difficult for women to travel to distant clinics.

After the Taliban took over, many international donors that had supported Afghanistan’s healthcare system withdrew, and hospitals and clinics have been forced to close amid concern that the maternal mortality rate will worsen. In December 2024, the Taliban banned the midwifery schools, having already banned women’s wider education. While those who had already graduated could still work, women who had not completed their studies could not.

Last month I found out that Anisa has not been able to work as a midwife since January. Since the withdrawal of international donors and US aid after Donald Trump’s suspension order to cut US foreign aid for 90 days, the mobile health team can no longer function. Anisa and her husband, who was a vaccinator on the mobile team, are both jobless for now.

 Noriko Hayashi is the winner of the Japan professional award at the Sony World photography awards 2025. The accompanying exhibition is at Somerset House, London, from 17 April to 5 May

A lifesaving midwife in Afghanistan: Noriko Hayashi’s best photograph
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