Afghanistan's three-front war

Pushp Saraf

pushpsaraf@yahoo.com

Since the Taliban seized Kabul on August 15, 2021, Afghanistan has been governed by an armed, religiously driven movement that has remade the country in line with its austere reading of Islamic law. The regime is fighting on three fronts at once. The first is of its own making: a relentless campaign against women, shutting them out of education, employment and public life. The second is a deepening confrontation with Pakistan. Islamabad accuses Kabul of sheltering the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an umbrella of militant groups, blamed for sustained violence inside Pakistani territory, fuelling disputes over sovereignty and security. The third, which is the one that matters most to ordinary Afghans, is the fight against crushing poverty, unemployment and hunger. It is also, ironically, the one treated with the least urgency.

For millions of Afghans, mere survival has become the overriding concern. The modern-day "Kabuliwala", gentle, hardworking everyman who once embodied Afghanistan's human face, has all but vanished, swallowed by conflict, deprivation and fear in his own homeland.

It is worth remembering who that figure was. In Rabindranath Tagore's immortal 1892 short story, the "Kabuliwala" was a humble dry-fruit seller from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, whose tender bond with a little girl in Kolkata came to symbolise the triumph of human affection over barriers of nationality, religion and class. He saw in the Kolkata child the reflection of the daughter he had left behind. The story's emotional resonance only deepened with the acclaimed Bengali and Hindi film adaptations, still regarded as one of Indian cinema's most moving portrayals of shared humanity. Today, that "Kabuliwala" feels like a relic of a vanished world. It is fair to ask whether present-day Afghanistan, scarred by decades of war, still has room for such ordinary, compassionate lives.

Draconian, discriminatory decrees

Nowhere is that erosion clearer than in the regime's latest assault on women's rights. On June 1, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child condemned the Taliban authorities for adopting a decree that legitimises child marriage, warning that it undermines "the rights, dignity and future opportunities of girls." The decree, issued on May 14 and known as the "Principles of Separation Between Spouses" or the "Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses" (as described by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and Amnesty International), holds that the silence of a virgin girl who has reached puberty constitutes her full and legally valid consent to marriage. It sets no minimum legal age for marriage at all, effectively overturning the pre-2021 legal framework, which had fixed 16 as the minimum age for girls.

By contrast, the silence of a man or a previously married woman is not treated as consent. The decree also gives fathers and grandfathers unchecked power to arrange and finalise marriage contracts for minors. It bars child brides and other women from taking refuge with their own families in cases of domestic violence with imprisonment for repeated violations.

It further narrows women's escape routes from abusive marriages. A woman seeking divorce on grounds of abuse or neglect cannot obtain one without her husband's consent; where she has no witnesses to back her claims, the decree simply states that "the husband's word is valid," stripping women of any meaningful legal recourse against domestic abuse. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has rightly called the decree part of a "broader and deeply concerning trajectory" in which "the rights of Afghan women and girls are being eroded." UN Women, which works for women's human rights, has echoed that alarm. It has urged the authorities to ensure that laws and policies protect, rather than dismantle, the rights of women and girls.

This decree follows closely on the heels of Decree No. 12, formally gazetted on January 20, 2026, which all but eliminates legal equality between men and women by granting husbands near-total authority over their wives' lives. It decriminalises most forms of domestic violence, including psychological and sexual abuse, holding husbands legally liable only when they inflict severe and visible physical injury. It also allows for the imprisonment of women or their relatives if a woman repeatedly visits her own family without her husband's permission. At the same time it makes the legal process for women seeking relief from such treatment deliberately punishing to navigate.

Together, these two decrees, both adopted in 2026, mark a further escalation in the Taliban's systematic dismantling of Afghan women's rights, building on earlier restrictions that have already stripped women of education, freedom of movement, employment, and autonomy over their dress and public lives.

Misplaced confidence

The Taliban has, once again, brushed aside appeals from nearly every country to uphold gender equality and respect women's human rights. It has invited international isolation in the process, and seems largely unconcerned by it. The regime appears convinced that Afghanistan's strategic location will keep it relevant regardless, as it has for decades, when the country served as a playground for competing great powers. Even today, at least 17 countries maintain diplomatic missions in Kabul, though not one has formally recognised the Taliban government.

The regime seems far more preoccupied with Pakistan's repeated violations of Afghan sovereignty. On June 28, in pursuit of TTP militants, Pakistan launched airstrikes and sent ground troops into Afghanistan, killing at least 36 civilians and wounding 163 others. The Taliban, which is deaf to international demands for women's right, wasted no time demanding the global community's accountability, calling the strikes a "cowardly act of aggression" and a "crime." The operation came within 24 hours of a TTP attack on the Rangers' regional headquarters in Karachi that killed three Pakistani soldiers.

The tit-for-tat clashes have continued for months. Pakistan insists Kabul expel the TTP, which is basically a Pakistani conglomeration of militants, and stop it from using Afghan soil to launch attacks against Pakistani forces and civilians. Diplomatic mediation even by some other countries including China has repeatedly failed to defuse the standoff. The Afghan Taliban and the TTP share deep ideological and historical ties, making it hard to believe Kabul is willing or even able to act decisively against the group. Blood, it seems, runs thicker than diplomatic necessity, and with the Taliban, the TTP and Pakistan all leaning on force while offering peace little more than lip service, the conflict shows no sign of ending.

Humanitarian disaster

Compounding all of this is a deepening humanitarian catastrophe. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 21.9 million people-roughly 45 percent of Afghanistan's population-need humanitarian assistance simply to survive. International donors remain wary of channelling funds through a Taliban government that systematically represses women and girls; as a result, the UN's $1.7 billion appeal for humanitarian operations was, by mid-2026, only 14 percent funded. The World Food Programme, which once fed four million Afghans every month, has been forced by funding shortfalls to halve that to two million. Malnourished mothers and children still arrive at clinics, only to be turned away once supplies run out.

Afghanistan is thus a country waging war on its own women, on its neighbour, and on hunger itself. It is this backdrop that the figure of the "Kabuliwala" feels furthest from reach. Tagore's dry-fruit seller survived on the kindness of strangers and the hope of a daughter waiting at home; today's Afghanistan offers its ordinary people neither kindness nor hope, only the daily business of survival. Until the guns fall silent and its women are allowed to live freely again, Afghanistan will remain a place where the "Kabuliwala" cannot return. It is not because "Kabuliwala" has stopped looking for home, but because home, as he once knew it, no longer exists.