In this Op-Ed piece, Samreen Makhfi, an Afghan woman currently living in Afghanistan, reflects on life in Afghanistan five years after the Taliban’s return to power, using the country’s Independence Day—August 19—as a contrast between its historical aspirations and present conditions. The Debrief’s Chrissy Newton contributed to this report.
Today is August 19, 2026. One hundred and seven years ago, on this day, King Amanullah Khan declared Afghanistan independent. Were Queen Soraya alive to witness this day, sorrow would overwhelm her. Perhaps sorrow would be too small a word.
She carried the torch of education for Afghan girls, believing that a nation could not walk forward while half of its people were kept behind. Now that torch seems to have been extinguished by decrees and prohibitions. Girls are shut out of secondary school and university. Women’s paths into professions that once promised them a future as teachers, doctors, engineers, and artists have narrowed or disappeared. They are granted only the bitter permission to survive, polishing men’s shoes until their hands harden, and begging in the streets until their voices become hoarse.
My sister tells me she even misses the honking of the car that used to take us to school, that impatient horn we once felt irritated by. Back then, she complained about waking up too early and counted the days until holidays. Now she says, “I even miss the feeling of being sleepy, the heavy eyelids, the rush of morning air, the chatter of classmates as soon as we entered the gate.”
What once felt like a burden became a relic. I miss the little shop near our school. I remember the elderly uncle who seemed to know exactly how easily my sweet tooth could betray me. He would smile when he saw us and say, “I’ve brought a new flavor of cupcakes and chocolate.” It is strange how oppression can make you nostalgic for things you once considered ordinary.
Consequences of closing those classroom doors reach far beyond the girls sitting behind them. Afghan men want female doctors to treat their wives, mothers, and daughters. They want women to be cared for by women, especially in matters of health and childbirth. But how can tomorrow’s female doctors exist when today’s girls are prevented from becoming students? The ones who are denied education are the very girls who could have filled those roles.
Decree No. 18, issued in May 2026, states that a girl’s silence after puberty can be interpreted as consent to marriage. Imagine being too young to understand what marriage means, yet old enough, according to the law, for your silence to be placed on a contract you never knew you were signing. And if that marriage becomes a place of violence rather than safety, escape is not equally available to her. Men retain unilateral divorce rights, while women face restrictive judicial avenues for separation. Even the language of the law can become another wall between a woman and the life she wants to reclaim.
However, the walls do not end at the home. The country’s beauty is fenced off, too; women are not allowed to visit many tourist sites, even with their families. Restrictions on women’s access to public spaces have made ordinary pleasures such as parks, public places, and travel another negotiation with authority. I think of Qargha. Its waters glitter beneath the sun, and the breeze carries the scent of pine. Somewhere in that landscape, a girl should be able to laugh beside the water and to dip their hands into its coolness. But even the beauty of the country can become gendered. The mountains remain visible. The lake remains blue. The wind still moves through the trees. Only the people allowed to enjoy them have changed.
At this point, men’s situation is no better than ours. University graduates joke bitterly, “We successfully completed the journey from ‘university students’ to ‘unemployed’.” The joke lands because everyone knows a degree has become a piece of paper. A profession has become a distant possibility. A young person looks toward adulthood and finds the road strangely empty. One of today’s high officials even declared that political loyalty can matter more than merit in terms of opportunities.
Once, even our flawed elections gave us the illusion that our voices could tug, however weakly, on the direction and fate of the country. The ballot box was imperfect, but it gave people the sensation of having a hand on the wheel. Now even that thread has snapped. There is no ballot to mark, no campaign to argue over, no candidate to disappoint us after promising something better. Right now, citizens have no say in the politics of their country. In the media, the only journalists who can survive are those who avoid talking about everything that is going wrong. And underneath the politics is something much more immediate.
Bread
For many families, bread is scarce, and work is scarcer. Poverty does not always arrive dramatically. Sometimes it is an empty cupboard and fridge, a postponed purchase, or a child asking for something that a parent cannot afford. Sometimes it is watching one family struggle while another, somehow, continues to live comfortably, its pockets lined with opportunities that seem to belong to a different Afghanistan.
Leaving has become its own kind of privilege. A person can dream of another country and still find the border of that dream closed. Visas are denied or restricted, and the simple desire to travel somewhere else, to see another country, breathe different air, return home again, can become almost impossible. And yet, even in the face of closed borders, desperation has driven many Afghans to move anyway.
Many, overwhelmed by the hopelessness of life here, have even fled toward Iran while war was still raging there. They looked at a country caught in conflict and somehow decided that perhaps danger there was preferable to the life waiting for them here. There is something devastating about that calculation. When people begin comparing one war with another and asking which one might be easier to survive, you know home has stopped feeling like home.
Afghanistan remains
The mountains have not packed their bags. The morning sun still spills over Kabul. Children still laugh. Mothers still cook. Someone still opens a shop in the morning. Someone still remembers the taste of a particular chocolate. Somewhere, perhaps, a girl still keeps an old school notebook tucked inside a drawer, its pages filled with handwriting from a life that feels increasingly distant. And still, some study through second‑hand phones, and some work online.
Perhaps the world remembers us; perhaps it has turned away. But the true heroes are those who carry our story in their lungs, those who breathe it in, breathe it out, and refuse to let silence become the final language of Afghanistan.
Poem by Samreen Makhfi
It is the fifth year now and the walls
are coming closer
inch by inch, stone by stone
I come to the tree
The same one that has stood through
all our years, older than my father
older than his father, a witness planted
deep in the bones of Kabul
It remembers the golden days
of Zahir Shah, and the ones that followed
It saw the first Taliban rise
and watched them fall
It watched the Republic arrive with its
promises, its flags, its endless foreign money
pouring into the pockets of men who enjoyed
themselves in air-conditioned rooms when civilians
paid with their blood
Then it saw them return. Again.The Taliban
I place both hands on the trunk
and shake it with everything I have
The bark scrapes my palms
The smell of sap rises into my throat
“Tell me,” I scream, “how can you still stand?”
“How, when you have seen everything?”
Great-grandfather cut your branches
for the bitter winters, and you grew them back.
Grandfather carved your strong wood
into a swing for his grandsons,
Father sat beneath your shadow
when the Kabul sun burned the streets white.
And you–you still stand.
I press my forehead against your skin.
You are warm. Steady. Alive.
I am here to borrow some of your strength.
I am tired of history repeating itself
I am tired
I am tired
I am tired
Samreen Makhfi is the pen name of an Afghan woman currently living in Afghanistan.