The country the world forgot by Avani Devi

Afghanistan has acquired the terrible quality of a place that can disappear from international attention without actually disappearing from suffering. Five years after the Taliban marched back into Kabul, the country is poorer, more repressive and now increasingly entangled in a dangerous confrontation with Pakistan. There is no shortage of catastrophe. What is missing is the sense that anyone expects an ending.

The numbers are grim enough to make even catastrophe sound bureaucratic. Roughly three quarters of Afghans were unable to meet basic needs in 2025. Millions require humanitarian assistance. Aid has been cut precisely when drought, economic stagnation and the return of millions of Afghans from neighbouring countries are placing additional pressure on communities that already have very little left to give.

But poverty is only one part of Afghanistan's tragedy. The Taliban have constructed something more ambitious than an authoritarian government: a society in which half the population has been progressively removed from public life. Girls cannot proceed beyond basic schooling. Women face restrictions on education, employment, movement and public participation. A country cannot amputate half its intellectual and economic capacity and then seriously wonder why it remains poor.

The Taliban nevertheless present themselves as the guardians of order. And, to be fair, Afghanistan is less consumed by the nationwide warfare that defined much of the previous two decades. But there is a peculiar authoritarian arithmetic at work here: fewer battles do not necessarily mean more freedom, prosperity or hope. A prison is also a relatively quiet place.

Now Pakistan has become another source of danger. The old relationship between Islamabad and the Taliban has deteriorated into something resembling an armed family quarrel conducted with artillery. Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of sheltering militants who attack Pakistan; the Taliban deny the charges and have retaliated militarily. Civilians, naturally, have been invited to absorb the consequences. Hundreds have been killed and more than a thousand wounded in the fighting documented over recent months.

This is particularly grotesque because Afghanistan scarcely possesses the economic strength to repair a broken road, let alone sustain another war. Yet history has never required countries to be sensible before they become entangled in wars.

Pakistan, meanwhile, appears to be discovering the classic problem of trying to solve a security nightmare by creating a larger one. Bombing Afghanistan may satisfy immediate military calculations, but it cannot manufacture a stable neighbour. It can instead strengthen precisely the forces whose existence Pakistan fears.

And somewhere beneath all this geopolitical theatre is the Afghan citizen: the shopkeeper counting coins, the farmer watching the sky for rain, the mother calculating whether there will be enough food tomorrow, the girl learning secretly because the state has decided that her education is a political offence.

The international community has no magic solution. Military intervention is neither credible nor desirable. Recognition of the Taliban without meaningful conditions risks rewarding repression. Abandonment, however, is not a policy; it is merely neglect with better public relations.

Afghanistan needs sustained humanitarian assistance, pressure for women's rights, support for education and diplomacy capable of preventing the Pakistan conflict from becoming another permanent war. Above all, Afghans need the world to remember that their country is not a finished story.

The most dangerous thing about Afghanistan today is not that there is no hope. It is that the rest of the world is becoming accustomed to the absence of it. That is how forgotten countries become permanent tragedies.