Afghanistan's Agony

Allies have abandoned Afghans to Taliban tyranny

(An Afghan family, deported from Pakistan, in Jalalabad in 2024. Kiana Hayeri)

Since the Taliban takeover in mid-August 2021, Afghanistan has fallen back into a state of comprehensive oppression. Afghans face tyranny, persecution, exploitation, deprivation and abuse on an epic scale, in every aspect of life.

Women cannot work. Girls cannot go to school. No female can leave home without a male mahram, or close relative. Malnourishment and starvation stalk the land. Officials of the previous regime are hunted.

A 13-year-old boy hid in the rear wheel well of the landing gear of a Delhi-bound flight. He survived, and was returned to Kabul on the same aircraft.

The Taliban threaten to disconnect the country from the internet — to cut off all communication and information. They have blacklisted 679 titles by female authors; outlawed teaching of eighteen subjects, including human rights and sexual harassment; and vowed to ban “images of living things.”

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump, who signed the disgraceful 2020 US-Taliban deal that brought this tyranny back, muses about retaking Bagram airbase — for twenty years, a centre of US military power in the country. The Taliban refuse.

Afghanistan faces poverty, isolation, abnegation of rights. The Taliban stand for institutionalized obscurantism — deliberate prevention of knowledge.

Afghans are in agony. Afghan women and girls are in a living hell.

Since the Taliban takeover in 2021, it has been hard to talk or write about Afghanistan. There is no good news, no plan, no strategy, little hope.

In the two decades without the Taliban, there were reports, statistics, journalists, images, scrutiny. Now there is only blurred darkness, a country suffering in silence.

Did Carney, Macron or Starmer mention Afghanistan in their speeches to the UN this year? No, they did not. It fell to Zelenskyy to denounce the Taliban for “dragging a whole country back to the dark ages.” Even Erdogan, no pluralist, called on the Taliban to respect human rights and values.

The truth is that the world has abandoned Afghans — brutally and completely. Donors and UN agencies, knee-capped by Trump’s cuts, take limited humanitarian action. A trickle of aid from China, Turkey and others makes little difference.

Debate about Afghanistan – to the extent there is any – has an unreal quality. Former US special envoy Zalmai Khalilzad, architect of Trump’s disastrous 2020 pact, recently scorned old jihadi Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as “the butcher of Kabul” while praising Taliban thug Abdul Ghani Baradar, now running the country into the ground.

Today’s Afghanistan is as a military colony of Pakistan – a dusty, malnourished totalitarian, theocratic Republic of Gilead centred on the Hindu Kush.

Pakistan’s generals complain publicly about the Islamic State of Khorasan, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other terrorists that attack Pakistan.

In secret the same generals cultivate and patronize these groups, including the Taliban and Haqqani Network, to train terrorists from all over.

Amid Israeli attacks on Iran in June, Pakistan tensions with India in May, Trump’s public praise of Pakistan in April, and a new IMF programme for Pakistan announced in March, Trump held a meeting on June 18^th with current Director General (DG) of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lieutenant General Muhammad Asim Malik, who assumed the role on September 30, 2024 and is also Pakistan’s National Security Adviser (NSA). He was joined by Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, Pakistan’s de facto ruler.

Since the fall of Afghanistan’s legitimate government in August 2021, the US has funded the Taliban regime, spending about $21 billion by 2024. This improbable arrangement cements Pakistan’s hold on Afghanistan.

Along the way to Trump’s White House lunch with Pakistan’s COAS and DG ISI, Zachary Witkoff, co-founder of crypto venture World Liberty Financial (WLF) and son of Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, led a U.S. delegation to Pakistan that signed a letter of intent on April 26^th, 2025 with the newly-formed Pakistan Crypto Council. (Trump family members reportedly own 60 percent of WLF.)

Pakistan is waging all-out war to destroy Pashtun and Baluch nationalism — a post-independence obsession that drove the ISI-led policy of Strategic Depth since the early 1970s, whereby Pakistan aims to dominate Afghanistan and, with ‘iron brother’ China, constrain and encircle Indian influence.

Some Pashtun and Baluch leaders are in jail, others in hiding. Their communities continue to protest, often massively, but receive little coverage from the muzzled Pakistani press or international media, whose access is brutally restricted.

Afghans, Baluch and Pakistani Pashtuns are virtual prisoners of this proxy war. The information blackout means the worst horrors go undocumented; Pakistan’s impunity is all but unchecked. With no serious plan to remove the Taliban, the country is a laboratory for new forms of suffering and regressive control.

What can be done? Scale up the myriad of grassroots initiatives helping Afghans since 2021. Empower Afghan voices. Speak about Afghanistan. Break the isolation. Tell the story of what is really happening. Help the Afghan diaspora unite.

In Atwood’s novels, Gilead collapses. We owe it to Afghans to reverse the shameful abandonment of the last four years — and end the agony.