August 19, 2026

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Five Years After the Fall of Kabul, Afghanistan Remains a Failed State

(AP Photo/Nava Jamshidi)

This week marks the five-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul to Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The swift Taliban takeover was in the immediate wake of U.S. military withdrawal, closing a nearly-twenty-year period of American military presence in the country. The rapid withdrawal process and Taliban victory marked the start of a new chapter in a more isolated, dynamic Afghanistan. This new period has been characterized by reduced international visibility and access to developments on the ground, due to major cuts to foreign aid, international sanctions, and disengagement, which have obscured the worsening state of Afghanistan’s economy, treatment of women, and security landscape.

Since the Taliban’s takeover, Afghanistan has remained in a relatively isolated state, with its economy in rapid decline. The departure of the U.S. and the consolidation of power under the Taliban, a widely sanctioned Islamist fundamentalist group that had provided sanctuary to al-Qaeda, led much of the international community to withdraw aid flows, financial assistance to the government, and freeze central bank reserves. While Taliban rule has survived these last five years, Afghan society has borne the brunt of the economic shocks. The UN has reported that 80 percent of Afghan households experience debt, with over half of the population — an estimated 28 million — living under the poverty line. The country faced a $11.3 billion trade deficit last year, which was 60 percent of its dwindling GDP, along with falling employment and affordability levels across its provinces.

These economic pressures have been exacerbated by a growing population, with a 6.5 percent increase year-on-year from 2025 to 2026. Changes in Afghanistan’s climate have also added pressure points on Afghanistan’s population and economy. Recurring droughts have plagued Afghanistan’s agricultural sector, increasing the risk of infectious diseases and food insecurity, while also severely restricting access to safe drinking water. The Afghanistan Drought Risk Management Strategy has predicted that by 2050, 90 percent of Afghanistan will have experienced drought that hampers crop yields and causes water shortages.

The reduced role of women in Afghan society has also hindered the country’s economic growth, removing a major portion of the population from participating in the economy. However, the Taliban’s approach towards women is an intentional, key pillar of their governance style and strategy. Under Taliban rule, the government has intentionally sought to limit women’s visibility not only in educational and professional spaces, but in public life itself. Experts like Belquis Ahmadi have characterized the subordination of Afghan women as a central instrument of the Taliban’s state policy. Young girls have been banned from attending school beyond sixth grade, halting education at approximately 12 years old. Women are no longer allowed in secondary and higher education, closing the door on professional opportunities and the ability to participate in the Afghan economy. The government has prevented women from engaging in paid work, placing restrictions on women joining government agencies, universities and schools, non-governmental organizations, and even UN agencies. Women are required to be accompanied by a male guardian, what has been known as a mahram mandate, while appearing in public or traveling. They have been banned from entering public parks and marketplaces and have been required to conceal their voice in public in addition to wearing a chador, a full-body covering, as required under the Taliban’s morality laws. Even services and gathering spaces that traditionally cater to women, such as beauty salons and all-women gyms, have been shuttered, severely restricting opportunities for women to appear and engage in public. UN Women characterized this as the ‘erasure' of women from public life.

These restrictions on women have also carried grave consequences for both female health and safety. The Taliban’s approach to restricting female rights has significantly impacted Afghanistan’s health sector, where both access and resources for female medical services and care have declined drastically. There have been reports of severe cuts and reductions in training for fields and services such as nursing, midwifery, and medical services for women, significantly raising the risk of healthcare emergencies and negligence for long-term health conditions. There have been several reports that the mahram mandate has raised the risk of female mortality, causing several clinics to refuse services to women without a male escort and healthcare workers from foreign humanitarian agencies receiving death threats for their work to deliver life-saving care. UN Women reported that these cuts and restrictions to female healthcare services would raise maternal mortality rates by 50 percent by 2026, with their spokesman stating: “The results are devastating. Women are living shorter, less healthy lives.”

Women in Afghanistan under Taliban rule have also experienced heightened risks for their physical safety, as the government has removed most of the country’s legal infrastructure against gender-based violence and assault. As of June of this year, 166 out of 264 decrees — nearly 63 percent — issued by the Taliban that relate to human rights have been directed at women and girls. The responsibility to enforce the constellation of Taliban-issued restrictions on women's dress, behavior, and conduct has been largely transferred to husbands, brothers, fathers, and other male relatives. This has coincided with reports of women experiencing domestic violence and assault, along with the proliferation of coerced and child marriages. UN Women reported in June 2025 that 35 percent of Afghan women experienced domestic violence from their partners in the last year alone, almost three times higher than the global average. While the Taliban has intentionally avoided collecting data related to gender-based violence, there have been 231 cases documented by journalists and experts where women have died as a result of domestic violence in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s takeover in 2021. Several victim family members reported that attempts to intervene and issue complaints to authorities were met with intimidation, even retribution, from the Taliban. This likely means that 231 cases of gender-based violence-related deaths only represent the tip of the iceberg amongst Afghan women living under the Taliban.

Not only have women and girls suffered under Taliban rule, but Afghanistan as a whole remains a failed state that serves as a sanctuary for transnational terrorist groups and a range of violent extremists. Al-Qaeda, the same group that the Taliban sheltered after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is still in Afghanistan, along with groups like Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban. There are credible reports that al-Qaeda fighters, who are known to maintain training camps throughout Afghanistan, have been providing training to TTP militants. Al-Qaeda's media arm, as-Sahab Media Foundation, released a statement in support of their hosts, the Afghan Taliban, as well as supporting TTP cross-border attacks into neighboring Pakistan. Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) also remains active in Afghanistan, despite apparent counterterrorism pressure applied by the Taliban government. There have also been reports, as documented in the most recent UN Monitoring Team report from early August, about foreign fighters relocating from Syria to Afghanistan. The only country to formally recognize the Taliban’s government is Russia, itself a sponsor of several rogue and malign actors, as the Kremlin continues to indiscriminately kill Ukrainian civilians on a regular basis.

Despite the Taliban’s ban on drug production throughout the country, Afghanistan remains a key feature of international illicit narcotics flows. There have been several reports of a “balloon effect” of drug producers and criminal enterprises overflowing from Afghanistan into neighboring countries, following the Taliban’s introduction of a blanket ban on poppy and ephedra cultivation, designed to cripple the country’s status as a heroin and methamphetamine hub. While satellite imagery does indicate that the ban has had a negative effect on heroin and methamphetamine production in Afghanistan, it has incentivized Afghan farmers, chemists, and criminal operatives to move beyond the Durand Line, into Pakistan’s Balochistan and Iran, where they engage in production, trafficking, and competition with local armed actors and landowners. This encroachment creates compounded security problems along Afghanistan’s borderlands and neighboring states, as competing criminal groups creep in.

While Afghanistan appears to be more isolated than ever, its evolving internal dynamics prove that it is a site of worsening economic, security, and human rights conditions that demand both attention and continued monitoring. As economic decline and crackdowns imposed by the Taliban-controlled government continue, conditions ripe for civil conflict, radicalization, criminal activity, competition, and terrorist alignment will continue to grow steadily.