Natural disasters often expose the deepest fractures in a society, and the recent earthquake in eastern Afghanistan has done so with painful clarity. What struck in the dead of night was not only a seismic wave but also a reminder of the vulnerability of a nation already reeling from decades of conflict, economic fragility, and political isolation. The tremor, registering six on the scale, has left more than 800 dead and entire villages wiped out in Nangarhar and Kunar provinces.

These are not bustling urban centres with concrete infrastructure but remote mountain communities where houses crumble easily, roads vanish under landslides, and survival depends on fragile networks of kinship and subsistence farming. For the families who lived there, the earthquake was nothing less than an apocalypse. The haunting images that emerge are those of silence and dust. Survivors describe neighbours moving like automatons,........

© The Statesman