Afghanistan’s battlefields are quieter, but millions of girls remain excluded from education. The consequences will emerge slowly – in missing doctors, teachers, midwives and skills.

Afghanistan has stopped fighting. It has also stopped producing the doctors, teachers and midwives it will need in 10 years. Only one of those facts shows up in the data.

UNICEF projects that Afghanistan could lose 5,400 female health workers by 2030 and as many as 9,600 by 2035 if current restrictions on girls’ education and women’s employment continue, roughly a quarter of the 2021 workforce. Female representation in the civil service has already fallen from 21 per cent in 2023 to 17.7 per cent in 2025. In a country where female health professionals are indispensable to maternal and child care, the damage reaches well past the women prevented from working, arriving eventually at patients who will find the professionals they need no longer exist.

This deterioration is unfolding alongside an apparently contradictory story. By the most conventional measure of war, Afghanistan has become dramatically less violent. Battle-related deaths recorded by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program fell by more than two orders of magnitude after 2021 and have remained in the low hundreds since. The end of nationwide territorial warfare has delivered a genuine security dividend to Afghans who spent decades living around insurgency, airstrikes, checkpoints and shifting front lines. That improvement should neither be denied nor diminished. The difficulty lies in what gets inferred from it.

Economic indicators reinforce the impression of recovery. Afghanistan has returned to aggregate........

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