25 years after 9/11, where does Afghanistan stand?

This September marks twenty-five years since 9/11 when a coordinated attack struck the heart of New York City. It’s a date that reshaped Afghanistan, upended the region and altered the course of global politics.

Policy papers, military campaigns and aid statistics tell part of this story; so do ordinary Afghans who lived its promise and witnessed its collapse.

Bashar Khilji’s* life captures that journey. His family fled Afghanistan’s civil war in the 1980s and raised him as a refugee in Pakistan, while maintaining close ties to their homeland.

Then came September 2001.

Following 9/11, US-led forces invaded Afghanistan, toppled the Taliban’s first regime and backed a new republic in Kabul. What followed was a two-decade experiment in state-building, democracy, women’s rights and social change, bringing new possibilities for a generation of young Afghans, including Khilji.

In 2004, Khilji, then 27, returned home with his family, convinced his country was on the path to a prosperous future. He earned an English degree from Kabul University and worked for a Western-funded NGO dedicated to building civic institutions in the rural areas.

Today, twenty-five years after 9/11, Khilji’s dream has tragically come full circle as the Taliban returned to power in 2021 after the US withdrawal.

The foundations of collapse

During those optimistic middle years, Khilji spoke with fierce belief in Afghanistan’s transformation. He pointed to a vibrant media, millions of children, especially girls, in school, expanding universities and women entering the workforce in groundbreaking numbers as proof that Afghanistan was changing. According to Reuters, the percentage of women in the workforce was 16.5 in 2020 and stands at a mere 5% now.

Yet even during those hopeful years, Khilji saw the limits of this progress.

When he travelled beyond major cities into rural districts, he encountered a very different reality: systemic corruption, foreign aid lost to phantom projects, weak government institutions, severe ethnic divisions and an escalating Taliban insurgency fuelled by rural alienation.

“The central government remained concentrated in cities like Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif,” he told me in 2018, three years before the Taliban returned. “Across much of rural Afghanistan, the state was weak.”

In the Pashtun borderlands near Pakistan, the Taliban ran a shadow government while regional warlords held influence elsewhere.

Khilji attributes the Afghan Republic’s August 2021 collapse to the Doha Agreement, the fixed US withdrawal timeline and the Taliban’s tactical adaptability.

“When the US signed the Doha Agreement and announced its withdrawal schedule, optimism gave way to quiet dread while the Taliban grew bolder,” said Khilji. “The West sold our dreams and efforts, leaving us in the lurch.”

But the road to collapse ran deeper. Years of institutional weakness and systemic corruption had weakened the state from within.

When foreign support was removed, the political order collapsed with astonishing speed.

This came despite years of monumental international investment in Afghanistan.

After the 2001 invasion, the United States alone allocated more than $145 billion toward Afghan reconstruction, state-building and security-force training, according to figures from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The US Department of Defence spent a further $837 billion on direct combat operations.

The war claimed the lives of 2,443 American troops and 1,144 allied troops, while leaving 20,666 US personnel injured, according to SIGAR. The human cost for Afghans was vastly higher: at least 66,000 Afghan troops and more than 48,000 civilians were killed, with another 75,000 civilians injured since 2001. SIGAR notes that these figures are likely significant underestimates.

Endemic corruption widened the gap between government spending and domestic revenue. “Ghost soldier” payroll fraud, corrupt appointments and compromised supply chains weakened the military and the government’s legitimacy among ordinary Afghans.

“It was the collapse of the social and political world Afghans had built over two decades,” Khilji said. “But blaming the West alone is wrong. The Afghan ruling elite, who looted the country before fleeing, bear primary responsibility.”

The return of the Taliban

When the Republic fell in August 2021, many observers expected a prolonged civil war. Instead, the Taliban rapidly consolidated control, establishing a highly centralised, Pashtun-dominated, Sunni-Hanafi theocratic state.

In Kabul, key ministers, such as Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Sirajuddin Haqqani, Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob and Amir Khan Muttaqi, oversee major areas of administration, security, economic policy and foreign relations.

But ultimate authority has increasingly shifted away from the capital to the Taliban’s ultraconservative supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, who resides in Kandahar.

Akhundzada has concentrated political and religious power around himself and a trusted inner circle of religious scholars, placing loyalists throughout key state institutions and security structures. The result is a system fundamentally different from the internationally backed Republic.

The Taliban leadership has made clear this arrangement is permanent, effectively eliminating any chance of forming the inclusive government long demanded by Western nations.

Afghanistan has therefore come full circle in one of the most striking reversals of the post-9/11 era. The movement driven from Kabul by the US-led invasion twenty-five years ago once again rules the country, while the Republic that international powers spent two decades constructing has disappeared.

For Khilji, the reversal is deeply personal.

He remains in Kabul, not because he has chosen the Taliban’s Afghanistan, but because he cannot leave his ailing parents. While his two brothers support the family from Europe, Khilji is still in the city where the Taliban now centralise their power.

“Like me, millions of Afghans are stuck here,” Khilji said. “We spent twenty years building a country, only to watch it turn into something completely unrecognisable.”

Life under the new Taliban regime

The US withdrawal ended its “War on Terror” and sharply reduced large-scale fighting, as the Taliban now control the state. But the absence of battlefield violence has not brought broader stability.

Afghanistan today is poorer, more isolated and fundamentally transformed, facing severe economic hardship and humanitarian deprivation.

Following the 2021 takeover, Afghanistan lost foreign grants that previously funded 75 percent of public expenditure. The shock was compounded by frozen central bank assets and suspended international aid.

By 2026, the International Rescue Committee reported that 21.9 million people, nearly half the population, require urgent humanitarian assistance. Aid reductions, climate shocks and the forced return of millions of Afghan refugees from Iran and Pakistan have placed already fragile public infrastructure under enormous pressure, it added.

“At the exact moment Afghanistan’s hunger crisis hit its worst point in recorded history, the world pulled back the funding needed to respond,” noted IRC Afghanistan Programme Director Bostan Fahim in a statement.

Today, roughly three-quarters of Afghans face acute subsistence insecurity. Although the Taliban have increased domestic revenue through customs collection and mining royalties, per-capita income stood at $416.9 in 2024.

The regime’s ban on poppy cultivation has also transformed rural Afghanistan. While the ban dramatically reduced poppy production, it removed a major source of income for millions of vulnerable rural households, creating another economic shock in communities already struggling with poverty.

For people like Khilji, the economic crisis carries a quieter but dangerous weight.

“People cannot speak out openly under Taliban suppression,” Khilji warned. “A volcano of anger is quietly building, and one day it will erupt. But any explosion will only trigger more violence, and after five decades of endless civil war, Afghans are completely exhausted by this conflict.”

The social chokehold

Economic hardship has been accompanied by sweeping social restrictions.

Under Taliban rule, women and girls face an extensive system of restrictions that human rights organisations and UN bodies have described as “gender apartheid.”

Dozens of religious decrees issued by the Taliban administration ban girls from secondary and higher education, bar women from most employment, and restrict public movement without a male family member (mahram). This systematic gender persecution prompted the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader, Akhundzada, and his key aide, chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani.

Khilji and others like him are struggling to cope with this regression. Educated alongside his two sisters in Karachi, he now worries about his three children, including two young daughters.

Though his wife is educated and buys books for their children to study at home, the broader collapse of women’s rights alarms him. “What happens to half our population?” Khilji asked. “In a few years, we won’t even have female nurses or doctors in hospitals, let alone in other professions.”

Public dissent is often met with harsh repression, leaving journalists, human rights workers, and civil society actors operating under severe constraints.

Religious and ethnic minorities also face systematic exclusion. Shia Hazaras, who make up roughly 15 per cent of Afghanistan’s population, have seen Shia Ja’fari jurisprudence erased from courts, universities, and secondary schools, with university students forced to sign written oaths adhering to Sunni Hanafi jurisprudence.

Similarly, Salafi (Ahle Hadith) communities face intense scrutiny. The Taliban view them with deep suspicion because their primary rival, Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), shares similar theological roots. “If Taliban soldiers would spot a Salafi with a traditional long beard, they would verbally abuse and single him out on the street,” a Salafi leader from Kunar said. 

Regional terror threats from Afghanistan

The Taliban’s consolidation of power and Afghanistan’s isolation from the West have created an environment where militant networks operate with limited external counterterrorism oversight.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Al-Qaeda remains active, but global jihadism no longer revolves around a single organisation, leadership, or geographic centre. Its offshoots and competitors now fuel conflicts far beyond Afghan borders.

“If you start with 9/11, Afghanistan was at the centre because the Taliban was hosting Al-Qaeda,” said Pearl Pandya, South Asia Senior Analyst at ACLED. “Twenty-five years later, the Taliban is back in power —but the jihadist landscape looks very different. Multiple militant groups pursue their own agendas within Afghanistan, while neighbouring countries in South and Central Asia face heightened risk.”

The Taliban’s victory handed Pakistani terror groups, such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Hafiz Gul Bahadur-led Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen Pakistan (IMP), a surge of momentum, ideological validation, and cross-border safe havens. This support threatens to erase hard-won security gains from past military operations like Operation Zarb-e-Azb.

Though these factions target Islamabad rather than Western capitals, their presence inside Afghanistan has deeply strained bilateral relations. Escalating friction has prompted Pakistani airstrikes across the border, stricter trade barriers, and the expulsion of more than 2.5 million Afghans from Pakistan since September 2023.

The TTP remains a top security threat for Pakistan. ACLED data shows that TTP operations in 2026 have already outpaced levels from the same period in 2025 — which was among Pakistan’s deadliest years in over a decade.

A recent UN Security Council report exposed the deepening ties among these factions. Al-Qaeda’s propaganda outlet, As-Sahab, openly praised TTP strikes on Pakistani state targets. Additionally, the report revealed that Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) serves as the operational backbone for Gul Bahadur’s IMP, the network behind devastating suicide bombings against security personnel.

Twenty-five years later today 

The central question, twenty-five years after 9/11, is not simply whether the US-led intervention succeeded or failed. It is what remains after the experiment ends.

A European official visiting Islamabad recently remarked that the West has largely lost interest in Afghanistan, reflecting how far it has receded from global priorities.

Yet, international engagement has not vanished entirely. Several Western governments maintain technical ties with the Taliban, such as Germany’s coordination on fast-tracking deportations.

Practical economic interests also endure: just this week, Afghanistan signed a $200 million hydrocarbon exploration agreement with Saudi Arabia’s Delta International Energy, covering 22,000 square kilometres in the country’s west.

For ordinary Afghans like Khilji, however, there is no moving on. His journey mirrors Afghanistan’s trajectory: displacement, return, hope, reconstruction, disillusionment and collapse.

Today, he remains in Kabul, watching that promised future recede, while the very movement the world sought to defeat once again defines the country’s present.

Ultimately, the trajectory of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan demonstrates that territorial consolidation is not synonymous with long-term political stability. A regime can control land, clear streets, and suppress dissent through force, but it cannot coerce sustained prosperity or genuine peace.

Until Afghanistan has a government whose legitimacy rests on the consent and inclusion of its people, its apparent stability will remain a fragile illusion. Khilji, like millions of Afghans, is left living with that uncertainty, waiting for the contradictions beneath this imposed stability to erupt. 

*The first name of the person has been changed to protect his security under Taliban rule.