One year later: how is Afghanistan faring under Taliban rule?

It’s been a year since the Taliban took back control in the country following the withdrawal of US troops. The outlook remains grim. Simon Wilson reports

Taliban
Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world, in terms of per capita GDP.
(Image credit: © Alamy)

How are things now?

Dire. Afghanistan’s economy rapidly collapsed following the Taliban takeover a year ago, with output in the fourth quarter of 2021 a third lower than a year before, according to World Bank estimates. Overall, GDP is expected to decline by around 34% by the end of 2022 compared with 2020, the last full year of the USbacked republic. Currently, the UN says 90% of Afghans are short of food and half are facing acute hunger. Thousands of once-thriving small businesses have closed, and inflation for basic household goods is running at 52% year-on-year. The current humanitarian crisis could, says the International Rescue Committee, kill more Afghans than the past 20 years of war. How was the country doing pre-takeover? In the two decades since the US-led invasion, the economy had grown strongly overall – from an extremely low base as a pariah state under the Taliban in the 1990s – though since 2014 that growth had flatlined.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.