Afghanistan before August 2021 was not a success story. It was fragile, aid-heavy, distorted, and deeply dependent on foreign assistance. Corruption was real, governance was uneven, and the economy survived more on international patience than internal strength. But despite all its flaws, it was still a state. It had institutions, however weak. It had systems, however inefficient. It had rules that could be navigated, challenged, and improved.
Before 2021, Afghanistan’s economy was institutionally legible. Budgets existed. Ministries functioned. Salaries were paid with some regularity. The central bank operated within global financial norms. Private businesses, especially in telecom, construction, transport, and banking, could at least plan within a known framework. The economy was distorted by aid, but it was visible, measurable, and connected to the world.
Under the Republic, illicit activity such as opium production and smuggling existed alongside the formal economy. It was a parallel structure, not the backbone of the state. Under the Taliban, that distinction collapsed. The shadow economy did not just expand. It moved to the center. Revenue collection shifted from taxation to coercion. Governance shifted from law to fear. Economic participation shifted from productivity to loyalty.
The pre-2021 state employed hundreds of thousands directly. Teachers, health workers, administrators, engineers, technicians. That employment base created circulation, demand, and a fragile but functioning middle layer of society. Today, formal employment has shrunk into irrelevance. Skilled labor has fled. Professionals have been replaced by ideologues. Competence has been subordinated to obedience.
The Taliban like to portray the previous system as corrupt and foreign-imposed. What they avoid admitting is that corruption at least operated within institutions. Today, there is no institution to corrupt. Power is personalized, opaque, and unaccountable. Decisions are issued as decrees. There is no appeals process, no regulatory clarity, no predictability. Investors do not fear Afghan markets. They fear Taliban arbitrariness.
Infrastructure ambitions once tied Afghanistan to regional futures. TAPI, CASA-1000, transit trade corridors, energy integration. These projects were not charity. They were bets on Afghanistan becoming a corridor rather than a cul-de-sac. Taliban rule turned that bet into a liability. No serious regional investor will commit billions through a territory governed by an unrecognized regime with an insurgent legacy and no legal guarantees.
Perhaps the clearest difference lies in human capital. The Republic, for all its failures, invested in education, including women. Incremental gains were made over two decades. The Taliban erased them in months. This was not caused by sanctions. This was not imposed by foreign powers. This was a conscious ideological choice. By excluding women from education and work, the Taliban amputated a quarter of the economy by decree.
A flawed, aid-dependent state can be reformed. A system that rejects half its population cannot. The Republic’s economy was imperfect but improvable. The Taliban’s model is not an economy at all. It is a survival mechanism built on extraction, isolation, and control.
Afghanistan did not move from corruption to purity. It moved from dysfunction to regression. From a broken state that could still be fixed to a broken idea that refuses fixing.
