Facing sustained international condemnation over its treatment of women and girls, Afghanistan’s Islamic Emirate government has spent five years under diplomatic, financial, and political pressure since Taliban forces entered Kabul on 15 August 2021 following the flight of former Western-backed President Ashraf Ghani.
The former government relied on international assistance throughout 20 years of US/NATO occupation from 2001 to 2021, including for 75% of its public expenditure in 2019. When the Taliban-led government returned to power, billions of dollars of the nation’s Central Bank reserves were immediately frozen and rendered inaccessible by the US and UK. Top leadership were placed under financial and travel restrictions and foreign aid was quickly slashed as nations cleared out their embassies.
One of the key stated intentions of these cutbacks and limitations was to pressure a government that keeps girls and women out of official schools and universities beyond the sixth grade, bars women from most government jobs, and is frequently accused of detaining activists and media workers on often unclear charges.
But the experience of the past five years shows that the consequences of these measures have fallen heavily on ordinary Afghans, while the Taliban’s own policies have compounded the damage. The United Nations says at least 22 million Afghans, including 10.7 million women and girls, now need humanitarian assistance.
Even amid sustained international pressure, the Taliban government has made some notable gains in reconstruction and stabilising the nation’s currency, while continuing to face widespread criticism from rights groups for its treatment of women and girls.
Diplomatically, the Islamic Emirate has also made progress. Russia is still the only country to formally recognise the government, but Iran, Uzbekistan, India, the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and China have all developed closer ties with Kabul. These fall short of formal recognition but are increasingly seen by analysts as evidence of the Taliban’s growing de facto acceptance.
These ties have led to bilateral pacts, investment agreements, and diplomatic visits, but have yet to ease the bureaucratic difficulties faced by millions of Afghans looking to travel, study, and work abroad.
Anwar Mangal, an Afghan-American who moved to Oman in 2023, used the sultanate as an example of how non-recognition, even in friendly countries, can make the simplest of tasks more difficult.
Oman transferred control of Afghanistan’s embassy in Muscat to representatives appointed by the Islamic Emirate in 2024, but Afghans still have a hard time procuring even visitor visas.
“When I approached several universities to explore scholarship options for my cousins, I was told plainly that there are no bilateral education agreements in place” between Kabul and Muscat, and that any Afghan students studying in Oman were there as part of a “special USAID arrangement”, Mangal told The New Humanitarian.
That arrangement, he said, was a female-only programme that allowed dozens of Afghan women to study in Oman, but the Women’s Scholarship Endowment, as it was known, saw its funding terminated after the 2025 USAID cuts. “No one really knows what became of those [women],” Mangal said.
It’s not just Oman though. In the summer of 2026, a private business hung banners across Kabul advertising Turkish visas for $1,000 despite the fact that Ankara has hosted Taliban diplomats since 2023. Even New Delhi and Moscow, both of which have emerged as close partners of the Islamic Emirate, have yet to make good on promises of expanded visa programmes.
Frozen assets and bank wariness
The Islamic Emirate’s greatest diplomatic challenges lie in courting the Western countries that bankrolled the previous Islamic Republic government – which consistently ranked among the most corrupt governments in the world – as well as neighbouring Pakistan, which faced accusations of playing a “double game” between the Western-backed government and the Taliban during the US-led occupation.
In 2022, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order blocking roughly $7 billion in Afghan Central Bank reserves held in the United States and directing that $3.5 billion be set aside for the benefit of the Afghan people, while the other half remained subject to legal claims by families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. A New York federal judge ruled in February 2023 that the victims could not seize the $3.5 billion, a decision subsequently upheld by a US appeals court in 2025.
The assets remain outside the control of Afghanistan’s Central Bank, with the $3.5 billion allocated to the Switzerland-based Afghan Fund, where they are held and managed independently of the Islamic Emirate.
Meanwhile, financial restrictions and the disruption of Afghanistan’s banking links with the international financial system continue to complicate access to finance for businesses and investors.
US officials insist that a series of general licences allow investors and international aid groups to operate in Afghanistan without violating US sanctions. Business leaders say what happens in practice is very different: Banks remain wary of Afghanistan-related transactions, fearing the legal and compliance risks of inadvertently breaching sanctions.
A former USAID worker who advises a woman-run business in Kabul told The New Humanitarian she continues to face major issues with something as simple as transferring funds to pay workers in Afghanistan.
“I would say every other transaction still gets flagged by the banks,” she said, preferring not to publish her name. “That means that each time $25,000 just disappears into the banking system for at least two months and we have no way of tracing or tracking it.”
She said the business in Kabul may only employ a few dozen men and women, but made the point that one person in Afghanistan is often responsible for the financial well-being of an entire family, so a delayed payment can have an outsized impact on the lives of potentially hundreds of people.
“It leads to a lot of suspicions from the workers,” she said. “All they know is their wages get held up every few months.”
The impact of aid cuts
The decline in Western development assistance also remains a major constraint on Afghanistan’s economy. Donor governments have cited the need for greater coordination with Islamic Emirate authorities, as well as concerns over governance and women’s rights, in limiting their willingness to fund conventional development projects. The result is a growing gap between humanitarian assistance and the longer-term investment needed to modernise agriculture, healthcare, water management and other essential infrastructure.
Maisam Shafiey, advocacy and communications manager at the Norwegian Refugee Council, told The New Humanitarian the policy has left “vulnerable people of Afghanistan” to “pay the price” as systems and infrastructure continue to deteriorate.
He cited water management as a primary example of where development assistance can have a meaningful impact.
Kabul is predicted to become the first modern capital to run out of water, by 2030, but Shafiey said NGOs can’t just “keep delivering water with trucks” and hope to have a lasting effect.
Rather than abandoning development aid, Shafiey urged Western countries to pursue “pragmatic engagement” with the Islamic Emirate, working through relevant ministries and providing the technical assistance needed to plan and implement long-term projects.
Dejan Panic, Afghan country director for Emergency – an international medical NGO based in Milan, Italy – said a focus on humanitarian assistance above all has led to “a paradox”.
“Humanitarian funding,” he explained, “helped preserve essential services, but it could not fully replace the longer-term financing mechanisms that had supported the health system,” particularly in a country facing high levels of poverty, displacement, and malnutrition, alongside significant maternal and child health needs, chronic disease, disability, and limited access to specialised care.
The arrival of the second Trump administration and its drastic cuts to USAID funding further worsened an already precarious situation.
Shafiey told The New Humanitarian that the cuts had become a primary driver of the “deterioration of the humanitarian situation” in Afghanistan. He said his organisation “can only help 10% of the people in need” at present.
Panic said contractions in international funding had meant far more than simply scaling back humanitarian projects. Using the healthcare system as an example, he said aid cuts “can affect the ability of the health system to retain staff, maintain facilities, procure medicines and sustain referral networks.”
These are major blows to a health system that Panic said “had already become structurally dependent on international assistance” long before 2021, and where underfunded hospitals can be forced to treat hundreds of patients at a time following natural disasters.
Conflict with Pakistan, and the Iran war
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have deteriorated sharply over the past year, with longstanding disputes over militant activity escalating into Islamabad declaring “open war” on its neighbour. Repeated clashes and Pakistani airstrikes have killed civilians, disrupted trade, and turned a historically important Taliban interlocutor into one of Kabul’s most serious security challenges.
Pakistan’s military killed or wounded more than 1,180 people, including women and children, in air and missile strikes across nine provinces between December 2024 and June 2026, displacing more than 29,000 families, according to Afghan human rights organisation Rawadari. The group also accuses Islamabad of damaging hundreds of homes, schools, health centres, mosques, and other public facilities.
Pakistan, meanwhile, maintains that its strikes target armed groups operating from safe havens on Afghan territory, rather than civilians. Islamabad has repeatedly accused Kabul of harbouring militants responsible for attacks inside Pakistan – a grievance that predates the Taliban’s return to power and was also directed at the former Western-backed government.
For Elsa Chandio, a researcher at the Islamabad-based Center for Research and Security Studies, the deterioration of the relationship comes down to a single issue, security. She told The New Humanitarian that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) group has adopted an “increasingly emboldened posture” since the Islamic Emirate’s return, which explains why “Islamabad’s concerns are legitimate”.
A report from a Pakistani think tank described 2025 as the country’s deadliest year in a decade, with 3,413 people killed in violence across the country. Pakistani officials have blamed much of the violence on the TTP, which they accuse of operating from and receiving support in Afghanistan. Kabul has repeatedly denied the allegations. The Islamic Emirate says Pakistan should address its own domestic problems, including longstanding grievances among its Pashtun and Baloch populations, rather than blaming Afghanistan. Speaking at a press conference in early August, Islamic Emirate spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Afghanistan “did not initiate any such actions” and did not want relations between the two countries to deteriorate.
Since October 2023, when Islamabad enacted a mass deportation drive of Afghans, more than 2.5 million Afghans have returned from Pakistan, a figure that rises to almost six million if you include returns from Iran. Both the NRC and Emergency cited mass returns from both Pakistan and Iran as the primary humanitarian challenge for Afghanistan going forward.
The US-Israeli war with Iran has further complicated the situation. Iran, which has repeatedly offered to mediate between its two neighbours, is now embroiled in a conflict of its own, while the Gulf states and Türkiye, which previously hosted negotiations between the two sides, are grappling with the wider fallout.
That war has also added to the challenges facing Afghans.
Millions of Afghans living in Iran can no longer reliably send remittances – averaging about $129 a month – home to some of Afghanistan’s poorest communities.
The conflict is also driving up agricultural costs. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says rising fertiliser prices will leave Afghanistan needing $38.3 million in additional funding to help up to 600,000 households procure fertiliser and certified wheat seed ahead of the winter planting season. Richard Trenchard, the FAO representative in Afghanistan, described the situation as “not a supply crisis” but “an affordability crisis” at a critical point in the agricultural calendar.
It is another example of how events beyond Afghanistan’s borders are having direct consequences for Afghans already struggling with poverty and hunger.
This article is republished from The New Humanitarian under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
