The US aid cuts in Afghanistan were as sudden as they were brutal. Even after the US withdrawal and the end of the war in 2021, the United States continued pouring money into Afghanistan. From the 2021 Taliban takeover until last year, Washington had provided nearly $1 billion annually — over a third of all aid flowing into one of the world’s poorest countries. That funding has all but evaporated with the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development.
The agency’s programmes once helped clear landscapes scarred by war and mines, diversify crops and keep millions from hunger. Four million children are now at risk of dying from malnutrition, according to the World Food Program, the most in a quarter-century. “The US withdrawal exacerbated an already bad situation,” said Sherine Ibrahim, a former head of the Afghanistan office of the International Rescue Committee, which received three-quarters of its funding from the US government. “No other donor has stepped in and no one will in those proportions.”
Nearly 450 health centres closed because of the cuts, including a tiny white building in the drought-stricken village of Nalej, where Malika Ghullami safely gave birth to two children in past years and was pregnant again with twins last year. After the midwife and nutritionist left Nalej, however, Ghullami had to be driven on a spine-jarring dirt track to another clinic more than an hour away when she felt the first labour pains one morning this winter. “They were solving our issues,” Ghullami, 34, said of the staff in the now-shuttered clinic in Nalej. “Now we’re left on our own.”
While funding has shrunk, needs have increased. More than 2.8 million Afghan refugees were expelled or forcibly returned from Iran and Pakistan last year and now live in communities struggling to absorb them. Two deadly earthquakes that struck the country last summer and fall left thousands homeless, often in isolated valleys.
Other international institutions, the Afghan government and private businesses have tried to fill the gap, but they are nowhere close to matching the size of American aid. The crisis has been worsened by smaller but still painful reductions in aid from European countries. “We can only provide them with cash,” said Naimatullah Ulfat, a government official in the southern province of Kandahar. “The food, the clothes and other forms of assistance non-governmental organisations were providing, we can’t. It’s going to be very difficult.” The Trump administration has resumed sending aid to some crisis-hit countries, but not Afghanistan. A bill in the Senate would bar the State Department and US-backed international organisations from funding humanitarian programs that might benefit the Taliban, even indirectly.
The isolated province of Daikundi has lost many of its health clinics to the US aid cuts. The clinic in Nalej, surrounded by parched orchards of almond and mulberry trees, was a lifeline for 850 families. The villagers say its closure has hurt children the most. “When I was giving birth, we were losing babies,” said Nik Bakht, Khawari’s mother-in-law. “One would hope that younger mothers these days wouldn’t face that.”
Other clinics are struggling to stay open. Benazir Muhammadi, 32, a nurse at a clinic run by an Afghan non-profit, MOVE, in a remote valley of Daikundi, worked without pay for three months after US funds ran out. The clinic had to let go of its nutritionist. “Proximity health care centres are an absolute necessity,” she said. “You simply cannot wait when you’re about to deliver.”
In 2024, the United States funded over half of Afghanistan’s nutrition and agricultural programmes. Food insecurity has skyrocketed since last year’s cuts. More than 17 million Afghans — 40 per cent of the population — now face acute levels of hunger, 2 million more than last year. Seven provinces face critical food insecurity, the final stage before famine, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a group of international organisations that the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor global hunger. None were at this level a year ago. “That is a 20- to 30-year impact, not a one-year budget decision,” said Mohammad Mustafa Raheal, a research fellow at Lund University in Sweden who studies humanitarian aid delivery in Afghanistan. “You can’t just ‘switch the aid back on’ later and undo that damage.”
The aid cuts have also crippled the response to natural disasters. Months after a summer earthquake killed more than 2,200 people in eastern Afghanistan, families whose homes had collapsed still live in tents battered by freezing winds — a mosaic of white dots amid destroyed villages and cornfields.
On a recent morning in Kunar province, an International Rescue Committee team of a half dozen health professionals visited Badgor, an isolated village hit by the quake. It was the last mobile team that the organisation has kept operating since the cuts, which forced it to disband 33 others. Under a large parasol blocking the winter sun, one of its members examined children who arrived with fever, chest pains and diarrhoea. Tuberculosis cases were ballooning; so was despair.
Humanitarian workers say aid cuts have hampered their ability to survey the needs of Afghanistan’s population. A major concern remains the returnees from Iran and Pakistan. At the Pakistan border on a recent morning, a trickle of Afghans passed a UN sign reading, “Welcome to your sweet country.” Most nonprofit offices there were closed. “The cuts hit us hardest just as returns and needs increased,” said Ahmad Shah Irshad, a UN refugee agency supervisor at a sprawling transit centre with hundreds of tents and shelters near the border. “We don’t know what 2026 will be made of.”
Elian Peltier
The writer is the Pakistan, Afghanistan bureau chief for The New York Times
Safiullah Padshah
The writer is working as a local reporter for The New York Times in Kabul
Yaqoob Akbary
The writer is a contributor to The New York Times Covering Afghanistan
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