Despite their promises of peace and stability, the country is on its knees, and its people are desperate
Maryam* is near the top of her sixth grade class in Kabul, which underBut the 10-year-old, whose name we have changed to protect her identity, has a strategy to stay in school for another year, and her eyes dance with satisfaction as she explains her plan. “I will make sure I don’t answer too many questions right. I have decided to fail, so I can study sixth grade again.”in a lightning advance, moving so fast to take Kabul they surprised even their own leadership.
Women face harsher restrictions here than anywhere else in the world, barred from secondary education and most work outside healthcare and education. They are forced to be accompanied by a male guardian for all but short journeys and required to cover their faces in public. He is frustrated but also baffled by the authorities’ short-term approach. His businesses sit idle although the new regime knows from experience how lucrative they can be. “I had paid them over $3m in forced ‘taxes’,” before they took over, he said. “So many businesses have already collapsed, and if things continue, more will go.”
At times the country’s new leadership has been stunningly callous about this suffering, telling Afghans they should trust in God to feed them, not their government. But they are also aware the crisis is eroding any trust they may have. “They are traditional rural forces, they have come to cities, but instead of integrating themselves, they want the cities to be integrated to them, they want us to look like them, have beliefs and hobbies like them.”
A flag painted with a rose, a tulip and a drone releasing bombs flutters flutters over a small cluster of graves in the village of Ismail Khel.Between the apple groves of Ismail Khel village, barely an hour’s drive southwest of Kabul, a flag painted with a rose, a tulip and a drone releasing bombs flutters over a small cluster of graves.
“We have four graveyards in this village. Twenty years ago we had just one,” said Ainullah, 53. “A charity came to the village recently, looking for kids who had lost a parent, to help them with food. They could hardly find a house in the village without at least one.” “When people heard the choppers at night they would do their ablutions, so at least they would die clean, and get dressed so their corpses would be decent.”
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