Steve Brooking is the former chargé d’affaires at the British Embassy in Kabul and was special adviser to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan from 2015 to 2021.
How has day-to-day life become worse for Afghans since the United States and its allies withdrew abruptly from Afghanistan in the late summer of 2021?
That depends on where those Afghans are living and what they were doing. Life for lots of ordinary rural Afghans hasn’t changed much, it is still subsistence farming. Until last year, the success stories of girls in education, new hospitals, schools and clinics were concentrated in the towns and cities.
