Afghanistan

The two men, detained in the western city of Herat on August 9, were released on Thursday morning and appear to be in good health, says the UN.

Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities have released two United Nations staff members who were detained more than a week ago, though the reason for their detention remains unclear, the UN said.

The two men were detained in the western city of Herat on August 9. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said they were released on Thursday morning and appeared to be in good health.

“UNAMA has not been formally notified of the reasons for their arrest and detention and continues to follow up with the de facto authorities,” the UN said in a statement, adding it understood that charges against the two had been dropped.

It said the organisation was also following up “to ensure respect for the privileges and immunities of the United Nations, as well as the safety, security and freedom of movement of United Nations and associated personnel throughout the country”.

The arrests were the latest in a series of detentions by Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities. Last week, Human Rights Watch said six staff members of a local organisation working on women’s and children’s rights had been “forcibly disappeared” for more than a month.

“For us, we’re just delighted that [the two staff members] have been released, they’re in good health, and they face apparently no more judicial legal issues,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters at the organisation’s headquarters in New York.

Afghan authorities did not immediately comment on the release.

Multiple UN agencies operate across Afghanistan in a range of areas, including health and humanitarian response. The country has been hit hard by international aid cuts and faces numerous challenges, including the return of millions of its citizens from Iran and Pakistan in recent years.

The UN mission’s mandate from the UN Security Council includes promoting and supporting humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people, as well as promoting human rights, equality for women and girls, inclusive governance and economic stability.

The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, as the United States and NATO forces withdrew from the country after two decades of war.

Shortly after, they barred girls from education beyond primary school and banned women from nearly all employment, effectively excluding women and girls from public life. They have also removed minimum-age protections for girls’ marriage and made domestic violence punishable only in cases in which a woman has suffered visible injuries or broken bones.

More than half of women’s organisations still operating in Afghanistan could cease operations within the next year, UN Women warns.

Five years since the Taliban came to power, the United Nations has warned that funding issues mean more than half of women’s organisations still operating in Afghanistan could cease operations within the next year.

Susan Ferguson, UN Women’s special representative in Afghanistan, appealed to donor countries on Friday not to cut funding for women’s programmes, saying to do so would only deepen the suffering of Afghan women.

More than half of 74 women’s organisations surveyed in April are likely to have to suspend operations or close in the next year due to funding problems, Ferguson said.

The UN’s $1.7bn humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan was only 25 percent funded, and nearly three-quarters of the women’s organisations had experienced funding cuts in 2025, while about two-thirds reported that they had six months or less of operational funding remaining, she added.

The UN’s call comes as the Taliban marks five years since US forces withdrew from the country, effectively handing back power to the group in August 2021, after 20 years of war.

Bright white flags of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan have been installed this week across the Afghan capital Kabul, with new murals declaring: “Independence is a sign of dignity, pride and identity”.

The Taliban is also hosting a cricket match as part of the celebrations – but, just like much of public life in Afghanistan, women and girls are barred from attending.

Crippling restrictions for Afghan women

The Taliban has imposed more than 100 decrees restricting women’s rights since returning to power, affecting nearly every aspect of their daily lives, from education and employment to freedom of movement, healthcare and access to justice, Ferguson said.

Despite repeated Taliban promises to find an ideologically compliant way for them to attend school, girls are still banned from secondary schools and women from universities.

More than half of 3,200 women surveyed by UN Women said they now leave their homes only once or twice a month.

Seven in 10 women described their mental health as bad or very bad, Ferguson said.

On Friday, a group of 56 countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Lebanon, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, issued a joint statement at the UN renewing calls on the Taliban to reverse restrictions on women and girls, saying its “systematic repression of women and girls has become a defining feature of the current system”.

A slew of challenges

Five years of Taliban rule have left wider Afghan society facing a slew of other challenges.

More than half of primary school-aged children are out of school, and child malnutrition has reached critical levels in a third of Afghanistan’s provinces, according to the UN World Food Programme.

Infrastructure in the country has been damaged by a series of deadly earthquakes and floods that have also killed thousands.

While deaths from “terrorism” have fallen precipitously since the Taliban took power, according to data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal, the country has become embroiled in a series of deadly border confrontations with its neighbours in both Iran and Pakistan.

The country also remains relatively diplomatically isolated, with Russia being the only country worldwide to formally recognise Taliban rule.

What Five Years of Directives Add Up To

On August 10, 2026, Reporters Without Borders marked five years of Taliban rule with an assessment that Afghanistan has become, in the organization’s words, a prison for information. The report catalogs more than twenty national directives and a long list of provincial decrees, most delivered verbally rather than published, that have progressively stripped Afghan journalism of independence. The starkest new detail is legal rather than administrative. A Code of Criminal Procedure quietly enacted in January 2026 now punishes insulting the country’s supreme leader with thirty nine lashes and a year in prison, and insulting the wider leadership with twenty lashes and six months. Afghanistan sits at one hundred seventy fifth of one hundred eighty countries in RSF’s 2026 World Press Freedom Index, alongside North Korea, Eritrea and China, as global press freedom overall falls to its lowest point in twenty five years.

From Verbal Orders to Written Law

The Taliban’s approach to media control has moved through recognizable phases since retaking Kabul in August 2021. Eleven rules issued that September gave authorities broad power over what could be published. Restrictions escalated from there: a November 2021 ban on interviewing regime critics, a March 2022 prohibition on rebroadcasting Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and a July 2022 declaration by supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada that criticizing officials contradicts Islamic law, which recast basic accountability as religious transgression. Afghanistan’s 2015 Press Law, the last formal legal protection for journalists, was repealed in April 2024. What followed was an acceleration rather than a pause. September 2024 rules banned live political programming and limited on air guests to Taliban approved voices. A July 2024 law prohibiting broadcast images of living beings has since spread to more than twenty provinces. Women have been pushed out of the profession in stages, from mandatory face covering for television presenters in 2021 to a March 2025 Kandahar order banning women’s voices from radio entirely.

The Shift From Deniable Pressure to Permanent Law

What separates the January 2026 Code of Criminal Procedure from everything that preceded it is durability. Verbal orders and provincial decrees can be denied, reversed or applied unevenly, and much of what RSF documents over the past five years was communicated exactly that way, through unpublished instructions passed down from de facto ministries rather than through any formal legislative process. A criminal code cannot be waved away the same way. The document only became public because it was leaked; the Taliban never announced it. RSF notes the code does not mention journalists specifically, but it offers them no exemption either, meaning ordinary reporting on Taliban governance now falls under the same provisions that criminalize insulting the leadership. A separate article requires citizens to report any contact with government opponents, extending the incentive to inform beyond state security services into the population at large. Legal researchers reviewing the code have also flagged provisions dividing defendants into social categories, with punishment calibrated to status rather than offense, a structure that undercuts equal treatment under law well beyond the press freedom question alone.

The scale of the resulting collapse is difficult to overstate. RSF’s country data shows forty three percent of Afghan outlets disappeared within three months of the takeover, more than two thirds of the roughly twelve thousand journalists working in the country in 2021 have left the profession, and eight in ten women journalists have stopped working entirely. Behind each of those figures sits a newsroom that no longer exists or a byline that no longer appears, the practical result of a five year campaign that RSF’s South Asia desk head has described as turning criticism itself into a legal offense.

None of this makes Afghanistan an isolated case, which is what gives the story weight beyond South Asia. RSF’s own 2026 index places Afghanistan’s collapse inside a broader global pattern: more than half the world’s countries now rate as difficult or very serious environments for journalism, the worst showing the index has recorded in a quarter century. The organization has also pointed to a specific mechanism spreading well beyond authoritarian states, in which national security and counterterrorism justifications, first normalized after the September 11 attacks, are increasingly invoked to restrict reporting on matters of public interest, a pattern RSF says now appears in established democracies as well as in regimes like Afghanistan’s. Afghanistan represents the extreme endpoint of that continuum rather than an exception to it, which is precisely why treating it as a uniquely Afghan problem understates the lesson.

The crackdown has also produced a measurable outflow with consequences well beyond Afghanistan’s borders. RSF data shows the number of countries journalists have been forced to flee from worldwide has doubled over five years, from nineteen to forty, with Afghanistan topping the list. Those journalists do not disappear once they cross a border. Pakistan and Iran, the two most common host states, have each carried out mass deportations of Afghan refugees through 2026, and independent reporting from RSF and Human Rights Watch has documented Afghan journalists, including some holding valid visas, among those detained and forcibly returned toward the same authorities they fled. Resettlement pipelines to Europe and North America have slowed at the same time, leaving exiled journalists in prolonged legal limbo in third countries with limited protection. For policymakers well outside the region, that combination turns a domestic censorship story into a live test of asylum and non return commitments.

Three Paths From Here

The most likely trajectory is continued institutionalization rather than reversal. The Taliban leadership has shown no interest in press freedom as a bargaining chip for international recognition, and the shift from verbal directive to codified criminal law suggests an intent to make current restrictions permanent rather than negotiable. This path is highly likely through the remainder of 2026 and into 2027, with enforcement of the new code expanding province by province and further directives layered on top of an already dense regulatory web.

A second, less likely path involves narrow, tactical loosening tied to international engagement. If the Taliban pursues formal recognition or unlocked aid financing, cosmetic concessions on foreign broadcasters or select outlets are possible, mirroring past patterns of selective accommodation when the leadership has wanted to project moderation to specific foreign audiences. This outcome is possible but not likely to alter the underlying legal architecture, since Akhundzada’s own framing of criticism as a religious offense forecloses any structural reform led from within the leadership itself.

A third path, already underway, is a deepening exile crisis that draws in host and resettlement states more directly than the domestic censorship story alone ever could. Continued deportations from Pakistan and Iran, combined with stalled resettlement processing in Europe and North America, raise the probability of a high profile forced return case drawing sustained international attention, potentially forcing governments to clarify protection commitments to Afghan media workers in ways they have so far avoided through case by case handling. This path is likely to intensify over the next twelve months regardless of what happens inside Afghanistan itself, since it depends as much on Pakistani and Iranian deportation policy as on any Taliban decision.

Why a Domestic Censorship Story Is Not a Domestic Story

Afghanistan’s press freedom collapse will keep being read as an isolated horror story unless it is placed against the trend line RSF itself is now drawing, in which national security framing, once confined to the world’s most repressive states, is migrating into ordinary governance practice elsewhere. The clearest near term indicator to track is enforcement, not legislation. The Code of Criminal Procedure has existed on paper since January 2026 without a confirmed public prosecution under its press relevant articles. The first documented case brought under Article 19 or Article 23 against a journalist or commentator will mark the moment Taliban media law moves from threat to precedent, and from precedent to template.

WASHINGTON — Calling Donald H. Rumsfeld energetic was like calling the Pacific wide. When others would rest, he would run. While others sat, he stood. But try as he might, at the pinnacle of his career as Defense secretary, he could not outmaneuver the ruinous politics of the Iraq war.

Regarded by former colleagues as equally smart and combative, patriotic and politically cunning, Rumsfeld had a storied career in government under four presidents as well as nearly a quarter century in corporate America. After retiring in 2008 he headed the Rumsfeld Foundation to promote public service and to work with charities that provide services and support for military families and wounded veterans.

The two-time Defense secretary and one-time presidential candidate died Tuesday, surrounded by his family in Taos, N.M. He was 88.

“Rummy,” as he was often called, was ambitious, witty, engaging and capable of great personal warmth. But he irritated many with his confrontational style. An accomplished wrestler in college, Rumsfeld relished verbal sparring and elevated it to an art form; biting humor was a favorite weapon.

Still, he built a network of loyalists who admired his work ethic, intelligence and impatience with all who failed to share his sense of urgency.

From his earliest years in Washington, he was seen by friend and foe alike as a formidable political force. Bryce Harlow, an associate of President Nixon who helped persuade Rumsfeld to resign from Congress and join Nixon’s Cabinet as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969, called him “rough and ready, willing to tangle” and “the kind of guy who would walk on a blue flame to get a job done.”

Rumsfeld is the only person to serve twice as Pentagon chief. The first time, from 1975 to 1977, he was the youngest ever. The next time, from 2001 to 2006, he was the oldest.

He made a brief run for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, a spectacular flop that he once described as humbling after being used to success at the highest levels of the government, including stints as White House chief of staff, a U.S. ambassador and a member of Congress.

For all Rumsfeld’s achievements, it was the setbacks in Iraq in the twilight of his career that will likely etch the most vivid features of his legacy.

::

By the time he arrived at the Pentagon in January 2001 for his second stint as Defense secretary, the military that Rumsfeld inherited was in a slow-motion transition from the Cold War era to a period dominated by ethnic conflicts in the Balkans, humanitarian crises in the Horn of Africa and spasms of terrorism around the globe. Among the other prominent worries: China’s military buildup and the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.

But nine months into his tenure, on Sept. 11, Rumsfeld found himself facing a threat that would consume the remaining years of his tenure. When a hijacked American Airlines jetliner slammed into the Pentagon, he was in his third-floor office, meeting with nine House members. He later recalled that at the instant of impact, the small wood table at which they were working trembled.

Rumsfeld was among the first to reach the smoldering crash site, and he helped carry the wounded in stretchers before returning to his duties inside the building.

The nation suddenly was at war. U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7, and with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon helm, the Taliban government in Kabul was toppled within weeks. Frequently presiding at televised briefings on the war, Rumsfeld became something of a TV star, known for his plainspokenness.

Within months of that success, President George W. Bush’s attention shifted to Iraq, which had played no role in the Sept. 11 attacks. Rumsfeld and others in the administration asserted that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was armed with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, and that the U.S. could not afford the risk of Hussein one day providing some of those arms to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003 with a go-ahead from Congress but no authorization from the United Nations Security Council. Baghdad fell quickly, but U.S. and allied forces soon became consumed with a violent Iraqi insurgency. Critics faulted Rumsfeld for dismissing the public assessment of the Army’s top general, Eric K. Shinseki, that several hundred thousand allied troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld arrives in Baghdad in April 2006 to meet with U.S. and new Iraqi government officials.

(Jim Watson / AFP/Getty Images)

Square-jawed with an acid tongue, Rumsfeld grew combative in defense of the war effort, and became a lightning rod for Democrats’ criticism. Years afterward, the degree of blame that should be shared among the White House, Rumsfeld and the U.S. military for the disasters in Iraq remained in debate.

In “By His Own Rules,” a 2009 biography of Rumsfeld, author Bradley Graham wrote that it was “both incorrect and unfair to heap singular blame” for Iraq on Rumsfeld.

“But much of what befell Rumsfeld resulted from his own behavior,” Graham wrote. “He is apt to be remembered as much for how he did things as for what he did. And here, too, he was an internal contradiction. Capable of genuine charm, kindness and grace, he all too frequently came across as brusque and domineering, often alienating others and making enemies where he needed friends.”

In his 2011 memoir, “Known and Unknown,” Rumsfeld offered no hint of regret about Iraq, but acknowledged that its future remained in doubt.

“While the road not traveled always looks smoother, the cold reality of a Hussein regime in Baghdad most likely would mean a Middle East far more perilous than it is today,” he wrote.

He seemed unconvinced that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq poked a hole in the justification for invading, writing: “Our failure to confront Iraq would have sent a message to other nations that neither America nor any other nation was willing to stand in the way of their support for terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.”

Rumsfeld twice offered his resignation to Bush in 2004 amid disclosures that U.S. troops had abused detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison — an episode he later referred to as his darkest hour as Defense secretary.

Not until November 2006, after Democrats gained control of Congress by riding a wave of antiwar sentiment, did Bush finally decide he had to go. Rumsfeld left office in December and was replaced by another Republican, Robert M. Gates.

Defiant to the end, Rumsfeld expressed no regrets in his farewell ceremony, at which point the U.S. military’s death toll in Iraq had surpassed 2,900. The number would eventually exceed 4,400.

“It may well be comforting to some to consider graceful exits from the agonies and, indeed, the ugliness of combat,” he told his colleagues. “But the enemy thinks differently.”

::

Born in Chicago in 1932 as the second child of George and Jeannette Rumsfeld, Donald Rumsfeld wrote in his memoir that he and his father shared a favorite sports team: the Chicago Bears. He recalled that while listening to a Bears game on the radio at home one Sunday in 1941, the announcer interrupted the broadcast to announce that Japanese airplanes had launched a surprise attack on Hawaii.

Rumsfeld was 9.

“I could feel that something terrible had happened,” he wrote. “I saw it in my parents’ faces and heard it in the tense voices reporting the news of the attack.”

After Pearl Harbor, Rumsfeld’s father joined the Navy at age 38, and the family moved frequently to be near him on the West Coast.

In high school Rumsfeld met his future wife, Joyce Pierson. He attended Princeton on a partial scholarship and joined the campus Navy ROTC program to cover his other expenses. In June 1954, Rumsfeld graduated and was commissioned an ensign in the Navy. Six months later he married Joyce.

Rumsfeld launched his Washington career in 1957 as an assistant to Rep. David Dennison (R-Ohio). Soon he was serving as a congressman himself, first elected to represent Illinois in 1962. He served four terms.

One of his early acts as a member of the Nixon White House was to hire a young Dick Cheney, starting a lifelong friendship.

Rumsfeld was working as U.S. ambassador to NATO in Brussels when he was recalled to Washington to lead President Ford’s transition team after Nixon resigned in August 1974. He became the new president’s chief of staff, and in November 1975, his Defense secretary.

After leaving the Pentagon in 1977, Rumsfeld embarked on a successful business career, including as chief executive officer, president and then chairman of G.D. Searle & Co., a major prescription drug manufacturer.

He still dabbled in government service, including serving as a special envoy to the Middle East for President Reagan from 1983 to 1984. It was in that capacity that he met with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in December 1983, while Iraq was at war with Iran.

“None of us in the Reagan administration bore any illusions about Saddam,” Rumsfeld wrote in his memoir. “Like most despots, his career was forged in conflict and hardened by bloodshed. He had used chemical toxins in the war he initiated with Iran three years earlier. But given the reality of the Middle East, then as now, America often had to deal with rulers who were deemed ‘less bad’ than the others.”

Two decades later, he was again dealing with Hussein, this time overseeing a U.S. invasion that toppled the Iraqi leader — and led to Rumsfeld’s own downfall.

He is survived by his wife, Joyce; three children; and his grandchildren.

Rescuers in eastern Afghanistan are searching through mud and rubble after flash floods and a landslide tore through Nuristan province. At least 23 people have been killed and dozens are still missing as officials warn of more heavy rain and a rising death toll.

In the United Arab Emirates, women hold half of all parliamentary seats, a threshold reached by only six national legislatures on Earth. In Afghanistan, a fellow member of the same fifty seven nation bloc, girls are barred by law from any education beyond primary school, the only country where that is true. On July 12 and 13, 2026, delegates from all fifty seven states gathered in Islamabad to adopt a single shared declaration on women’s empowerment. The distance between those two realities is the actual subject the declaration had to confront, whether its authors framed it that way or not.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation represents fifty seven states and close to 1.9 billion people, a demographic scale matched by few multilateral bodies. What it conspicuously lacks is a shared starting point on gender equality, and the scale of that lack is easy to understate until the two ends of the distribution are placed side by side. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 ranks the United Arab Emirates 69th of 146 economies overall, with full parliamentary parity and women occupying nearly two thirds of federal leadership roles. It ranks Bangladesh 24th of 148, the strongest performer in South Asia for a second consecutive year, having closed 73 percent of its overall gender gap after decades of expanding a legislative quota from 7 percent of seats to 30. At the opposite pole, three of the only five economies anywhere in the world governed by an entirely male cabinet, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, are OIC members, and Oman remains the sole national parliament on the planet with no women seated in it at all. Afghanistan sits outside even that range. It is the only country on Earth barring girls from secondary and higher education by law, a policy that currently excludes close to 2.2 million girls from formal schooling altogether.

This is the span the Islamabad Declaration was written into, and it is worth pausing on what that span actually implies. A framework broad enough to be endorsed by both Abu Dhabi and Kabul’s immediate neighbors within the same bloc can, almost by construction, say very little about what any single government is actually required to do. Language capacious enough to cover a country with full parliamentary parity and a country that bars girls from secondary school is language calibrated for consensus, not for consequence. The more useful question, then, is not whether the declaration reads as ambitious, most instruments of this kind do, but whether the bloc has built, or shows any sign of building, a mechanism capable of moving its weakest performers rather than simply narrating the achievements of its strongest.

Where the record earns genuine credit

Some of what the OIC claims for itself withstands scrutiny, and is worth crediting on its own terms rather than dissolved into a general skepticism about summit diplomacy. Female enrollment in tertiary education has expanded meaningfully across member states, and the bloc’s own reporting places women at just over 39 percent of researchers across OIC countries, ahead of the roughly 34 percent global average. Maternal and child health outcomes have improved alongside it. But the most persuasive evidence for what actually moves the needle sits not in the declaration’s language but in the legislative record beneath it. Global data from the Inter Parliamentary Union shows that countries employing electoral quotas elected women at a rate of 31.2 percent in 2024, against 16.8 percent in countries without them, a gap of nearly two to one that survives across regions and income levels. Bangladesh’s own trajectory, from a 7 percent quota to 30, tracks that pattern almost precisely, and the United Arab Emirates reached full parliamentary parity through a comparable top down legal commitment rather than the slow accretion of social change. Where OIC member states have adopted binding, specific instruments, quotas above all others, the results are visible and replicable in the data. That is a genuine and transferable finding, and it rests on firmer ground than most of the rhetoric surrounding it.

The economic weakness the whole bloc shares, to varying degrees

Set the political headlines aside and the bloc’s collective vulnerability comes into sharper focus around economic participation. The OIC’s own assessment puts female labor force participation across member states at roughly 41 percent against 76 percent for men, and estimates some 106 million young people across the bloc as neither employed, in education, nor in training, with young women disproportionately represented among them. Southern Asia, the region anchoring several of the OIC’s most populous members, registers the weakest economic participation score of any region tracked in the Global Gender Gap Report, a full thirty five points separating its best and worst performing economies from one another. Even the UAE and Bangladesh, the bloc’s clearest political success stories, have not resolved this dimension with anything like the completeness they have brought to representation, which suggests economic inclusion answers to different levers than legislative quotas do, and that the declaration’s language on finance, entrepreneurship, and employment access is, whether by design or accident, aimed at the harder of the bloc’s two structural problems.

The test the declaration cannot argue its way around

Afghanistan is where the claim that voluntary declarations carry real weight meets its sharpest and least forgiving test. At the same Islamabad conference, delegates stated plainly that the Taliban’s restrictions on women harm the image of Islam and are inconsistent with Islamic teaching, echoing an OIC position from previous years that described the restrictions as contrary to the faith the bloc exists to represent. The Muslim World League, the largest Islamic non governmental organization in the world, has separately and repeatedly urged the Taliban to reverse the bans. The response from Kabul has been unambiguous. Spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid has told international audiences that women’s rights are fully protected under the group’s interpretation of Sharia, and Taliban officials have characterized the education ban as an internal matter closed to outside comment, a position firm enough to have stalled unrelated talks over frozen central bank assets as recently as May 2026.

The stakes of this reach well beyond Afghanistan’s borders. If the bloc’s most unified and most theologically grounded criticism, the accusation that a member state’s policy is contrary to Islam itself, produces no observable change in that state’s conduct, it becomes a reasonable proxy for how much practical force softer, less unified language on labor force participation or quota adoption is likely to carry anywhere else in the bloc. The Islamabad Declaration has no enforcement mechanism for Afghanistan, and, tellingly, does not appear to need one in order to be adopted, since adoption requires only consensus on wording, not compliance with it.

Taking the structural counterargument seriously

There is a coherent case that expecting more than this from the OIC misreads what kind of institution it actually is. A consensus body spanning constitutional monarchies, parliamentary republics, and a Taliban administered emirate cannot plausibly issue binding standards on domestic labor law or family structure without member states either declining to sign or signing without any intention of compliance, an outcome arguably worse than the present voluntary model. Under this reading, the declaration’s proper function is to establish a shared reference point and let reputational pressure and peer example, the UAE and Bangladesh held up as internal proof of concept, do the work that binding law structurally cannot. The newly launched Islamabad Initiative on Women’s Digital Inclusion, a voluntary platform for digital literacy, entrepreneurship, and technology access, is built entirely on that theory of change: participation by choice rather than compliance by mandate. Judged against that more modest theory rather than against an enforcement standard it was never designed to meet, the declaration may be performing precisely as intended, and the fair critique is not that it fails at its stated purpose, but that its stated purpose may simply be too modest for the scale of the problem it describes.

Three paths from here

The most probable trajectory, roughly half of plausible outcomes by our estimate, is that the demonstration effect model continues largely undisturbed: the UAE and Bangladesh keep improving and are cited internally as proof the model works, the bloc’s lowest tier, Afghanistan most starkly, remains unmoved by rhetorical pressure however strongly it is worded, and the aggregate figures stay roughly flat because gains concentrated at the top fail to transmit downward through the distribution.

A second and less likely path, perhaps three in ten, sees middle tier member states, those possessing neither the UAE’s resources nor Afghanistan’s total exclusion, adopting elements of the proposed Gender Equality Dashboard or the digital inclusion platform in a genuine if partial way, narrowing the bloc’s middle even while its extremes remain fixed in place.

A third and least likely path, perhaps one in five, involves the range widening further still, driven by continuing instability among the bloc’s weakest performers, Afghanistan foremost among them but potentially compounded by conflict or governance stress elsewhere, at a pace that outstrips whatever gains the top and middle of the distribution manage to produce.

The indicator worth watching

The clearest available test is not whether the OIC issues further statements on Afghanistan, since it plainly will, but whether the Gender Equality Dashboard or the Digital Inclusion Initiative produces any actual, published, comparative country level data within the current reporting cycle. A voluntary framework that generates public comparison functions differently, in practice, from one that generates only communiques, since comparison is the mechanism from which reputational pressure, the model’s only real lever, actually derives. A second and narrower indicator is whether Afghanistan’s formal relationship with OIC gender programming registers any change whatsoever, even nominal engagement, as distinct from continued flat rejection, since that alone would be the first sign that unified religious framing carries weight the bloc’s other instruments do not.

What this means for institutional readers

For Western multilateral institutions and United Nations agencies, the OIC’s internal variance means that a single engagement strategy toward the bloc on gender issues is analytically weak on its face. The UAE and Bangladesh are credible technical partners on quota design and implementation, while engagement on Afghanistan specifically should continue to run primarily through humanitarian and human rights channels, given that the OIC’s own most unified criticism has already been tested there and found to carry no observable weight.

For investors and development finance institutions assessing exposure across OIC economies, a female labor force participation range running from roughly 22 percent to over 70 percent within a single fifty seven member bloc constitutes one of the more differentiated and independently checkable indicators available for human capital and productivity due diligence on any individual member state, and merits assessment country by country rather than reliance on the bloc’s aggregate language.

For rights focused organizations and donors, the quota evidence, 31.2 percent representation where legal quotas exist against 16.8 percent where they do not, is the single most defensible, causally grounded policy argument available to press within OIC forums, considerably more persuasive than the broader declaratory commitments on empowerment that lack a comparably rigorous evidentiary foundation.

BEIRUT  — President Trump long railed against forever wars.

For years, whether as president or candidate, he flayed electoral opponents and previous presidents with his signature barbs, calling their entanglements a “complete waste of time” (Afghanistan), “the worst single mistake ever made in the history of our country” (Iraq) and “stupid” (Ukraine).

Yet he now appears to be stumbling into a forever war of his own.

From the first days of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, Trump and his officials insisted their adventure abroad would be the exception, that the conflict would end in a matter of weeks.

Now, 4½ months later, after a torturous, start-stop vacillation between truce and war, the U.S. is pressing on with a fight that has no end in sight — or even a clear definition of what an acceptable end would be.

In the last week, the ceasefire collapsed, with the U.S. and Iran trading daily waves of strikes, leading to the deaths of two American servicemen on Friday when Iranian ballistic missiles struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, where U.S. assets and personnel are stationed.

On Sunday, as the U.S. and Iran launched more air assaults, the U.S. announced that a service member was killed Saturday in Iraq during the controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone.

On March 9, the remains of U.S. Army Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, 26, of Glendale, Ky., then the seventh U.S. service member to die in combat during the Iran war, are transferred at Dover Air Force Base, Del.

(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / Associated Press)

The deaths in Jordan were the first combat fatalities since the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire. One soldier remains missing, according to a statement from U.S. Central Command.

Including the most recent casualties, 17 U.S. service members have been killed and more than 430 wounded since the war began, the Pentagon says.

In Iran, at least 57 people have been killed and more than 517 injured in U.S. attacks in the last three weeks, according to Iranian health authorities. The death toll since the beginning of the war has surpassed 3,500, and more than 27,000 have been wounded.

The U.S. and Israeli militaries have — in the telling of Trump and various officials — decimated Iran’s navy and air defenses, eviscerated multiple layers of its leadership and bombed tens of thousands of targets across the country.

Despite that military pressure, and Trump’s insistence that members of Iran’s leadership “want to make a deal” (he’s said that an accord was on hand no less than 46 times since the start of the war), Tehran has refused to surrender its nuclear and missile arsenals and continues to support its regional militia allies.

Iran has also created a new pressure point to use against adversaries by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas flowed before the war. And it has widened the war’s footprint by targeting countries hosting American military assets.

Trump has vowed to expand bombings to include civilian infrastructure such as power plants and bridges in what he says is a bid to force Iran into negotiations once more.

He has also brought additional forces to the Middle East. According to Centcom, there are now 50,000 troops in the region, along with 20 naval warships and hundreds of warplanes.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the region, declined to comment on the deployments, though on Sunday the New York Times reported that the U.S. was sending to the region F-16 fighter jets from Germany and stealthy F-35 jets from Britain.

For observers, those moves signal that Trump is falling into an escalation trap.

“From Trump’s perspective, the easiest way to demonstrate resolve and power is by just bombing Iran and seeing what that brings about,” said Andreas Boehm, a Middle East expert and lecturer on international law at University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Although those strikes seem tactically impressive, they have not helped him strategically, he said.

“In reality, it doesn’t change the situation because the Iranians won’t budge. And if you confuse tactical and strategic success, then you’re not going anywhere in any kind of war,” Boehm said.

An escalation on Washington’s part is also certain to spark a similar reaction from Tehran, said Vali Nasr, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

“Iran gets a vote here,” Nasr said, adding Iran could up the ante by closing Bab al Mandab, the vital strait connecting the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. It could also widen attacks on infrastructure in Persian Gulf countries — moves that would trigger an even bigger ripple effect across global markets.

“Trump thought wars in the Middle East would be like Venezuela: a big in-and-out without a prolonged war,” Nasr said, referring to the Trump administration’s strike that saw U.S. forces abduct Venezuelan leader Nicholás Maduro and force the remaining members of his government to submit to U.S. control.

“And the reality is that it’s backfired,” he said.

Trump is not the first American president to think a foreign engagement wouldn’t last long. Whether in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq, U.S. leaders dispatched troops on operations they thought would last weeks or months, dismissing warnings that they would be bogged down in years-long occupations.

Iran would be an especially sticky quagmire if Trump were to commit ground troops.

The country’s area — about 636,000 square miles — is more than double the size of Afghanistan, almost four times the size of Iraq, and five times the size of Vietnam — all nations where the U.S. struggled to prevail against adversaries not as well equipped and arguably less ideologically motivated than its adversaries in Iran.

Meanwhile, for a president whose central foreign policy campaign promise was no more wars, the growing number of casualties, along with the escalating damage inflicted by Iran on U.S. assets and allies, has exposed cracks in the support the Teflon-like Trump has enjoyed from his advocates.

Onetime MAGA acolytes, including flagship conservative figures such as Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones, have already turned on the president over the war and other issues. And Republican figures who had tied their star to Trump fear a drubbing in the midterms so long as the war continues.

If negotiations were to resume, it’s unclear whether Trump and his coterie of negotiators have the stamina or the foreign service expertise to bring about an accord.

After all, the 2015 Obama-era deal aimed at reining in Tehran’s nuclear program took 600 days and hundreds of diplomats and technical experts to negotiate.

With Trump relying on unconventional fixers such as his son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate investor Steve Witkoff, not to mention his evisceration of the diplomatic corps, an agreement of that scale appears unlikely.

“Everything is dependent on the mood of one man,” Nasr said.

“It’s not the system that’s making the decision; it’s not the country making the decision,” he said. “It’s one man, and it depends how he feels like at one particular point in time.”

Tehran too may be less amenable to negotiations with Trump, given his history: During his first term, he pulled out of the nuclear deal and ordered the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, a leading Iranian general.

In his second term, he launched bombing campaigns on Iran during negotiations — twice. And Iran accused the U.S. of repeatedly violating the April ceasefire and the memorandum of understanding signed in June.

Asked on NewsNation on Sunday about Iran’s announcement that it would no longer abide by the memorandum, Trump said, “I couldn’t care less.”

Such factors, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, lead to a formula for prolonged conflict.

“It’s a forever war in the making, and the reason why is that Trump has proven he’s impossible to negotiate with,” Vaez said.

If an agreement as superficial as the memorandum of understanding — which deferred thornier issues for late negotiations — was derailed, then there’s little option other than repeated cycles of violence.

“Once you’ve proven that diplomacy doesn’t work,” he said, “then there’s only war.”

With the passing of another government deadline for undocumented Afghans to leave, Pakistan has launched a new crackdown on thousands still living in the country.

In response to criticism, authorities say they are enforcing immigration laws and cite national security concerns.

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have returned to a country they fled. The UN says they include undocumented migrants, refugees and Afghan citizen card holders.

The campaign has coincided with rising political tensions between Islamabad and Kabul.

But is politics involved in the rising tension between the neighbours? And how is Kabul dealing with the influx of returnees?

Presenter: Scott McLean

Guests:

Obaidullah Baheer – Adjunct lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan

Kamran Bokhari – Senior fellow with the Middle East Policy Council in Washington, DC

Zahid Mahmood – Pakistani defence analyst and former senior officer of the Pakistan Army

Belgium has issued five visas to a Taliban delegation to attend a European Union meeting on migration in Brussels and discuss the deportation of Afghan asylum seekers from European nations.

The meeting, expected to take place on Tuesday, will be the first time the EU has hosted the group since it returned to power in Afghanistan almost five years ago.

A spokesperson from the Belgian Foreign Ministry told reporters that the five visas were granted on Monday after a security assessment and that they are valid for Belgium for one day only.

The European Commission said it has invited the Taliban officials for discussions on irregular migration from Afghanistan to the 27-member bloc, and to also discuss the deportation of Afghan people in the EU who have had their asylum applications rejected.

The EU has not identified which Taliban representatives were invited to the meeting. Several senior Taliban leaders are also under EU sanctions.

“Member States are looking into ways to return persons who have committed serious crimes and who are possibly a security threat. So this is the initiative that the Commission is now following up on,” Commission spokesman Markus Lammert told the EU’s daily news briefing on Monday.

According to a letter seen by the Reuters news agency and addressed to Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a Taliban Foreign Ministry spokesman, the meeting will focus on “the return and readmission of Afghan nationals without a right to stay in the European Union”.

The Commission, however, emphasised that this meeting does not mean Brussels is formally recognising the Taliban.

Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban have steadily curtailed rights, restricting women’s freedom of movement, banning girls from education beyond primary school, and enforcing morality laws that limit free expression and access to employment. European governments also shut their embassies in Kabul when the Taliban authorities returned to power.

Rights organisations have asked the Commission to abandon its plans to talk with the Taliban.

“Any engagement with the Taliban needs to prioritise protecting human rights and accountability – not deporting people to danger there,” Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch, said.

Earlier this month, the EU’s migration chief Magnus Brunner defended the outreach, saying Brussels had no other option than to talk to the Taliban government about returning Afghan asylum seekers who had entered the 27-member bloc irregularly.

European governments have sought a tougher stance on migration as public opinion has hardened, spurring far-right electoral gains across the continent.

EU countries have received about a million asylum applications filed by Afghans between 2013 and 2024, according to the bloc’s migration agency.

Although Afghans are among the nationalities with the highest asylum recognition rates in the EU, overall acceptance has tightened as migration ⁠policies become more restrictive.

About 20 of the EU’s 27 member states expressed interest in returning numbers of migrants without a right to stay, particularly those with criminal convictions, to Afghanistan in a letter last year.

EU law allows for deportations of people convicted of serious crimes or ⁠deemed security threats in certain cases, but returns to Afghanistan have been limited due to the lack of diplomatic relations.

“The focus for member states is very much on persons who have committed serious crimes or who pose a security threat,” Commission spokesman Lammert told journalists Monday.

Afghanistan is, however, currently mired in a deep humanitarian crisis. According to the United Nations World Food Programme, more than 17 million Afghans – or one-third of the population – are “food insecure”, while the country is absorbing tens of thousands of people returning from Iran and Pakistan.

“The desperate scenes of people – including EU staff – fleeing Afghanistan are a recent memory,” Eve Geddie, director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office, said in a statement.

“It is unconscionable that the EU would now try and deport people to Afghanistan, which has only become more dangerous in the meantime,” she added.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Two roadside bomb blasts in northwestern Pakistan have killed at least seven people.

The first explosion on Saturday hit a vehicle, and the second was detonated as rescuers responded, police said.

“A private pick-up truck carrying passengers was targeted with a remote-controlled IED,” said Yasir Afridi, a police officer in Bannu district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan, using a common acronym for a homemade bomb.

“The injured were being transported to hospital in a car for emergency treatment when a second IED exploded,” he said, adding that three people were wounded.

Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attack and said the government would bring those responsible to justice.

There has been no claim of responsibility for the blast, but the Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP, and other armed groups operate in the area.

Pakistan has blamed Afghanistan for a surge in attacks near the border, although the Taliban government in Kabul has repeatedly denied Pakistani accusations that Afghan territory is used as a sanctuary for armed groups.

Frosty relations have escalated into clashes in recent months, including Pakistani air strikes on Afghan cities.

Pakistani air strikes near the border this month killed at least 26 Taliban fighters, the Pakistani government said, while the Afghan government said 12 civilians were killed.

The border has remained largely closed since violence escalated in October, freezing bilateral trade and disrupting the movement of people and goods.

In April, I accompanied a friend on a visit to villages in Daikundi province, central Afghanistan. The purpose of the trip was to speak to farmer beneficiaries of a project that an NGO operating in the agriculture sector had carried out and to follow up on its impact. The week I spent travelling with him was quite eye-opening regarding the state of the non-profit sector in the country.

The project in question provided zero-energy storage houses to preserve harvests, such as fruit and vegetables, in rural areas. On the surface, the idea was promising: provide farmers with storage space so they could sell their produce over a few months.

However, the farmers we spoke to in several villages showed us heaps of apples decaying beneath the trees. They complained that the storage houses had space for the apples of only two to three families in the entire village.

In another village, we saw frustration with another project from a different NGO. That organisation had bought imported seeds for various vegetables and distributed them among farmers. Staff members provided training, conducted weeks of workshops on cultivation methods and techniques, and regularly monitored the crops.

The local participants invested significant time, energy, land, and water in the project. But the harvest they got from these imported seeds was very little and of poor quality. Despite the enormous amount of money spent by the NGO on surveying, training, logistics, transportation, and staff salaries, the vegetables for each family amounted to about 450 Afghans (roughly $7). There was no accountability for the farmers’ losses.

Such stories are common across rural communities in Afghanistan. While aid organisations publish reports of their achievements, many beneficiaries gain little from poorly designed projects that fail to address the real challenges they face. The cost of these projects is extremely high, but the output is often too little.

Since the Taliban took over Kabul and the US-led coalition withdrew from the country, humanitarian aid and funding in Afghanistan have dramatically collapsed. The struggle to secure funds, however, has not led to better efficiency, accountability, and transparency among the NGOs still operating in Afghanistan.

This is not a recent phenomenon. Between 2001 and 2021, Afghanistan became the poster child for corruption, embezzlement, and waste of foreign aid. One US journalist described it as “the $148 bn failure”.

According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), set up by the United States to investigate fraud with US funds, between $26bn and $29bn was lost due to embezzlement or wasteful spending. This was just funding provided by the US government; there is no estimate for how much was wasted from other donors.

While much of the foreign funds went to the security sector, a significant amount went to the non-profit sphere, where waste was also widespread. Millions, if not billions, worth of projects became a missed opportunity to improve the lives of Afghans, especially in rural areas. This is a legacy that persists to this day.

This situation is not unique to Afghanistan. The development sector across the world is known for waste and inefficiency. In the Afghan context, that is exacerbated by the lack of control and difficulty of ground work.

Many foreign NGOs do not directly implement their projects; instead, they work through implementing partners (IPs), which themselves outsource implementation to subcontractors. This extended chain of actors means that often there is a lack of proper quality control and supervision, and there is motivation to carry out lower-quality work in order to increase profit.

Furthermore, the primary concern of IPs is securing funding. So they often present project proposals that look great on paper but do not necessarily have a substantial impact on the circumstances of the local population or address their most urgent needs.

Finally, there is a lot of waste in remuneration, especially when it comes to international staff. Foreign employees often have salaries as high as $10,000–20,000 for doing work that a local hire can do for much less.

It is clear that amid global cuts to donor funding, the development sector is struggling. This should be a moment of change. In Afghanistan, where the need of the local population is enormous while available financing is shrinking, NGOs can take this change into their own hands.

The simplest first step NGOs can take is to employ qualified locals to plan and lead projects. They would know the local culture, realities, and actual needs of communities, as well as market prices and field conditions. They can help not only optimise project costs but also ensure that they actually have a real, measurable impact.

In addition, NGOs should avoid having an extended chain of IPs and subcontractors. They should also regularly collect feedback from local communities and field workers directly in order to evaluate project effectiveness during implementation in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Projects are more likely to produce sustainable results if NGOs invest in addressing pressing nationwide challenges, such as unemployment, infrastructure, and market access.

Improving efficiency and effectiveness would not only ensure Afghan beneficiaries get better services and help, but it would also make organisations more competitive for the dwindling pool of funding. This is the only way to salvage the NGO sector not only in Afghanistan but in the rest of the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

At least 22 people have been killed and 36 others injured when a truck carrying recently returned Afghan refugees overturned in eastern Afghanistan’s Laghman Province.

Officials say the driver lost control of the vehicle and authorities have launched an investigation.