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arch 8, 2026: Currently, Pakistani forces are still carrying out airstrikes against Afghan cities and concentrations of Taliban fighters. At the same time, Afghanistan still has problems with Islamic terrorists based inside the country in areas that border Pakistan and Iran. The Afghan government is not yet strong enough to suppress these terrorists or maintain peace throughout the country. Trade with Iran continues uninterrupted, despite the American and Israeli airstrikes against the Iranian military forces and military and government leadership.
Last year Afghanistan had a ten-day war with Pakistan. That compelled Pakistan to carry out air raids on the Afghan capital Kabul and several other cities. There were about 500 dead and wounded. The IEA/Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has been trying to rule the country since 2021 and is having a hard time controlling, much less governing, the entire country. The Pakistani Taliban/TTP, has its bases in Afghanistan on the Pakistan border. TTP is popular in that area and the IEA has been unable or unwilling to eliminate them.
In 2024 the country is suffering from hunger with half the population getting insufficient food. The Taliban enforced strict dress codes for women and prohibited women from working outside the home. Most women no longer have access to healthcare.
All this began back in 2021 when the elected IRA/Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed and was replaced by the Pakistan-backed IEA. It was the Pakistan military that backed the Taliban and the Afghan heroin cartels. Over the last few years, the Pakistan military had found a way to run the government without a coup and all the resulting criticism and sanctions. The defeat of the IRA was accomplished via corruption, intimidation, disruption of the economy and a bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The original withdrawal plan was for a thousand or more U.S. and NATO troops to remain to advise and train the IRA security forces and monitor the corruption. The IRA wanted to survive but to do that they had to keep receiving billions a year from foreign donors, mainly the United States. Refusal to cooperate meant termination of aid and nearly all the foreigners would leave. The Americans got a new government in early 2021 and that led to fatal changes to the withdrawal plan. Everyone was ordered out but was given three additional months to do it. That gave Pakistan and the Taliban an opportunity to increase their pressure on the IRA, which now believed the Americans were going to abandon them.
The new IEA declared a great victory but found that few people, not even most Afghans, saw this as a win. Foreign aid ceased. Nearly $10 billion of IRA cash, held in foreign banks in an effort to reduce corruption, was frozen and no one would recognize the IEA as the successor to the IRA. Several countries designated Afghanistan as a terrorist organization. For the people of Afghanistan, especially the women, that designation seemed appropriate.
The 21st century saw substantial railroad construction. Before that there were less than 25 kilometers off track, most of it for use by foreign companies investing in Afghanistan. Currently there are 400 kilometers of track and more is being added each year. The primary use of current lines is to move cargo from an Iranian port, via an Iranian railroad, into Afghanistan. This liberates Afghanistan from dependence on road traffic from Pakistan. The other major railroad brings in cargo from Central Asia.
Drug production in Afghanistan continues and depends on the Pakistan military for support. The drugs are winning as they usually do wherever they get established. There are not too many narco-states because they all follow the same script. Eventually locals get fed up with the local violence and the growing number of addicts. That leads to more violence and the drug gangs are crushed although usually not completely eliminated. Eventually can take a long time and such is the case with Afghanistan. Compare that to how it worked in Colombia from 2000 on, and Burma after World War II and Iran in the 1950s. The only thing that nearly everyone in Afghanistan can agree on is that opium and heroin are bad. Nearly ten percent of the population is addicted to drugs, mostly opiates and another ten percent make a better living or get rich from the drug trade. Most Afghans consider drug gangs the biggest threat and these are largely run and staffed, like the IEA, by Pushtun tribesmen from four southern provinces. The Pakistan-backed Afghan Taliban have created a heroin-producing Islamic terrorist and gangster sanctuary in Afghanistan. If you want to know how that works, look at Chechnya in the late 1990s and Somalia or Yemen in the early 21st century. No one has come up with any cheap, fast, or easy solution for that. Meanwhile, Afghanistan's core problem is that there is no Afghanistan, merely a collection of tribes more concerned with tribal issues than anything else. The IEA runs Kabul, the largest city in Afghanistan, but not much else.