How has Afghanistan changed since the US left?

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This is the script for my video posted on July 8, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Afghanistan has changed a lot in the five years since the US pulled out and the Taliban returned to power, but there’s a good chance you’ve barely heard anything about it. In many ways, Afghanistan has actually stabilized, but it faces some serious humanitarian issues that should be on everyone’s radar. So how is Afghanistan different than it was under US control?

In 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11, the US led a coalition to invade Afghanistan and expel the Taliban, the ruling Islamic militant movement that had seized power in 1996 amid the civil war that followed the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime. The Taliban had been hosting al-Qaeda forces under Osama bin Laden who were responsible for the attacks, and to root out those forces, the US conducted military operations across the country for 20 years. They were unsuccessful in taking full control in partnership with the secular government, and ultimately they pulled out in disgrace, allowing the Taliban to resume its oppressive rule of Afghanistan.

When I say oppressive, I want you to understand what I mean. The Taliban oppresses its own people through a systematic campaign of severe human rights violations, violent crackdowns on dissent, and the total erasure of women from public life. They operate under strict fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law, and they enforce total obedience through a combination of institutionalized discrimination, disrespect for human dignity, and physical terror. The women’s rights crisis in Afghanistan is considered by Human Rights Watch to be the worst in the world. There have been up to 157 edicts and decrees specifically targeting the rights of women and girls, to the point that the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for the Taliban supreme leader and chief justice for gender persecution as a crime against humanity.

When the Taliban retook power, they faced a very different environment from the one they had 20 years earlier, with a full government bureaucracy that needed to be reshaped to suit their purposes. Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada took power, and he rules from Kandahar with ultimate authority under the Taliban’s system of clerics, not from Kabul.

But there is an internal fault line between the Kandahar-based clerical faction and the more pragmatic organization known as the Haqqani network, a Sunni militant organization and semi-autonomous faction within the Taliban ruled by the descendants of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a mujahideen commander who gained prominence fighting Soviet forces. The Haqqani network is far more pragmatic, favoring engagement with the outside world rather than isolation, though we should be clear that they remain a US-designated terrorist organization, and their leader carries a 10m dollar FBI bounty. But Akhundzada has stripped a lot of power from his own subordinates to keep it to himself, and some Haqqanis have fully left Afghanistan because they disagree with things like the ban on education for girls. In response, Akhundzada has moved Kandahari loyalists into key positions in Kabul in the last couple of years.

The Taliban’s ideology and its economic goals are diametrically opposed to one another. Afghanistan’s economy contracted nearly about 20% in 2021 after the Taliban regained power, and despite very modest growth in more recent years, the per-capita GDP is falling because population growth and inflows of Afghan nationals from abroad outpace their economic growth. The afghani was briefly the world’s best-performing currency in Q3 of 2023, rising 9% against the dollar due to a ban on foreign currency use in domestic Afghan transactions, strict caps on cash taken abroad, remittances, and UN cash shipments, but those have leveled off. The UN has actually flown in more than 2.9b USD in physical cash since December 2021 in 80 separate shipments, deposited into a private bank rather than the Taliban-controlled central bank, but these have been declining due to aid cuts.

Afghanistan also lost access to about 9b USD in central bank reserves, including 7b frozen at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and 2b more in Europe. In 2022, the US split that 7b, half set aside for 9/11 victim lawsuits, half moved to a Swiss-based trust fund meant to benefit the Afghan people, though the fund still hasn’t disbursed any money. Talks to return the money to Afghanistan’s central bank broke down when the US learned that al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri was living in Kabul. Meanwhile, the country’s opium production, which was once a massive source of revenue nationally, has plummeted 95% since they banned poppy cultivation in 2022 on religious grounds and to project an image of responsible government to the international community. This ultimately gutted much of the global supply of heroin, something 20 years of US counter-narcotic operations failed to do. This has had crippling economic consequences, particularly on farmers, and methamphetamine production is reportedly rising as a substitute.

Roughly half of the Afghan population lives below the poverty line, about half rely on humanitarian aid, and by UN estimates nearly three in four can’t meet their basic needs. Acute food insecurity and malnutrition are serious issues, and while the US provided nearly half of the country’s humanitarian funding in 2024, the current US administration has deliberately cut off food aid to Afghanistan, and at least 422 health facilities in the country closed in 2025 due to funding shortfalls. Meanwhile, deadly earthquakes continue to affect the country, whose infrastructure is not built to withstand them, and thousands of people have died from them just in the last several years. Still, violence fell dramatically after the Taliban takeover. Even attacks from ISIS-K, the branch of ISIS in the historical Khorasan region spanning parts of Afghanistan and its neighbors, dropped significantly within the country even though they remain a transnational threat.

In 2025, Russia became the first country to formally recognize the Taliban government, a movement born partly from the very mujahideen the Soviet Union fought and lost to in the 1980s, and though they remain the only country to do so, several other countries like China, Pakistan, Iran, and the UAE engage with the Taliban diplomatically. The Taliban has courted foreign companies for deals on oil and copper production, but they keep stalling or collapsing.

Afghanistan’s relationship with Pakistan, which historically was a key benefactor, have largely collapsed because the Taliban harbor the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, a militant group ideologically aligned with the Afghan Taliban that’s responsible for terrorist attacks in the regions along the Afghan-Pakistani border and across Pakistan. The Pakistani military has carried out airstrikes on Afghan territory in response to TTP attacks on Pakistani border posts and other sites, and though a ceasefire was reached in October 2025, Pakistan’s central demand for the Taliban to crack down on the TTP, has not been reached, and fighting reignited in early 2026.

The fact of the matter is, UN monitors report that the Taliban allow al-Qaeda training camps, madrasas, and safe houses to remain in place across Afghanistan, with senior commanders sheltering in Kabul — even as the Taliban work to keep that relationship out of view, and even as US intelligence insists al-Qaeda there is at its weakest point in decades. The Taliban are friendly with other internationally designated terrorist groups as well. But countries like China and Russia still view Afghanistan as a connectivity node for regional transit, and they see an opportunity to fill the vacuum the US left behind and benefit themselves.

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