Five years after storming back to power, Afghanistan’s Taliban government wants the world to see a settled fact: a state that has outlasted predictions of collapse, kept its currency stronger than most of the region’s, and sat across the table, however unhappily, from neighbors who once swore they’d never deal with it. But sovereignty isn’t just the absence of civil war. It’s the ability to govern your own population, run an economy, and command the loyalty of your own clergy and security forces. Judged by that standard, the anniversary looks a lot less settled than Kabul would like anyone to believe.

A Health System Collapsing by Decree

The starkest failure here isn’t military — it’s medical. In December 2024, the Taliban banned Afghan women from studying medicine, nursing, and midwifery, shutting the last door women had into higher education and, with it, the pipeline meant to replace an aging female health workforce.

The starkest failure here isn’t military — it’s medical. In December 2024, the Taliban banned Afghan women from studying medicine, nursing, and midwifery, shutting the last door women had into higher education and, with it, the pipeline meant to replace an aging female health workforce.

Under Taliban rules, male doctors can’t treat women without a male relative present, and in many cases can’t even examine them. Cut off the supply of new female doctors and midwives, and a growing share of Afghan women simply have no legal way to get care.

The projected cost is now measured in numbers, not just outrage. UNICEF estimates Afghanistan could lose 20,000 to 25,000 female teachers and health workers by 2030 if the bans hold, at a cost of roughly $84 million a year in lost economic output. A UN human rights expert went further in February, warning that the ban on medical education “puts the entire health system in jeopardy” and, left in place, “could amount to femicide.” That’s not the language of diplomatic hedging. It’s a warning that a government’s policy is now, by design or not, killing people.

Education tells much the same story, just at a larger scale. UNESCO reported this August that 2.4 million Afghan girls are shut out of secondary school — 200,000 more than a year ago — with the figure projected to climb toward 4 million by 2030. Afghanistan is still the only country on earth to formally bar girls and women from secondary and higher education. Two decades of progress, which had pushed girls’ enrollment toward a million by 2021, has been wiped out by decree.

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What makes this more than a grim statistic is that the Taliban’s own senior officials don’t buy the religious justification. Sher Abbas Stanikzai, the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister and a man who once led its negotiating team in Doha, has twice said publicly that the education ban is “personal choice,” not Sharia, and has urged the leadership to reverse it. Afghan clerics have echoed him since 2022,........

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