Four years after the Taliban's return to power security is no longer the defining issue in Afghanistan. Instead, one of the world's worst humanitarian crises is exacerbated by a series of overlapping disasters.
It's a Thursday afternoon in Kabul, the start of the Afghan weekend, and the city is on the move.
Market stalls are crowded with shoppers as vendors try to get their attention by calling out over sacks of lentils, bottles of perfume and piles of second-hand shoes.
Women weave through the bazaars, usually alongside male relatives, while children dart between them.
It's loud, chaotic — almost ordinary.
At a nearby picnic spot the rare sight of a female Ukrainian tourist draws a small crowd.
The Taliban has banned Afghan women from visiting public parks, but foreign women are exempt from the rules.
Shy boys and men gather, angling for a selfie in what is a brief distraction for a group that rarely sees outsiders.
Many Afghans say Kabul now feels safer than it has in decades.
The bombings and suicide attacks that once defined daily life are now considered rare.
Four years after the Taliban's return to power and daily life is defined by enforcement. Constant, and largely unquestioned.
The roads are safe, crime is down and there are armed checkpoints in major cities as well as entry and exit points to each province.
Some see Afghanistan's new-found stability as justification for the Taliban's iron rule.
"We are happy with this government because there is peace," says Aroofa, a Kabul resident.
"Before, there was firing day and night. Now, thanks to God, the country is secure."
But many Afghans remain under severe strain.
Rights have been devastatingly curtailed, particularly for women and girls.
At the same time the country is being squeezed by overlapping crises: shrinking international aid, deepening economic uncertainty, harsh winters and natural disasters — compounded by the mass return of refugees from Iran and Pakistan.
Afghanistan's aid cuts
At a small stall along one of Kabul's main roads a shopkeeper carefully counts out the naan he will sell that day.
The flatbread is a staple in almost every Afghan home and costs around 50 Afghanis, roughly $1.
It sounds inexpensive, but for many families even that is now out of reach.
More than half of Afghanistan's 42 million people depend on humanitarian assistance.
Donor funding has fallen sharply since 2021, driven by competing global crises and Western reluctance to engage with the Taliban's repressive rule.
The damage deepened further this year with the near total shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development.
As a result only a fraction of the $3.1 billion the United Nations sought for Afghanistan has been funded.
"The women and children of Afghanistan need humanitarian assistance," Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban's top spokesman and deputy minister of information and culture, told the ABC.
"We should not politicise the aid issue.
"In the past, the government was spending only 30 per cent of the total aid on the affected population. Now we are spending 70 per cent from the aid assistance and our own revenue for the affected people."
More than 400 health facilities have closed and hundreds of thousands of Afghans have lost reliable access to food and medical care.
Doctors warn children are dying from causes that are entirely preventable.
That reality is stark inside the malnutrition ward at Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul.
There are 10 critical care beds and every one of them is occupied.
When emergencies surge its staff sometimes place three children in a single cot.
Two-year-old Usmania lies crying, her stomach swollen, a feeding tube taped to her face because she can no longer feed herself.
Her mother, Hameeda, watches silently — angry and helpless.
"Sometimes I want to hit the glass shelves in my house," she says.
"I feel so much pain."
In the next bed five-month-old Laila is wasting away. A doctor lifts her arm gently to check on her condition.
"They don't have hair," he explains.
"They lack calcium."
The UN estimates 3.5 million Afghan children are malnourished and at least 1.7 million are at risk of death.
Many families arrive at hospital after months of skipped meals, diluted milk or impossible choices about who gets to eat.
By the time some children receive medical care it is already too late.
Women, power and silence
When the Taliban first swept to power after seizing Kabul in 2021 they were shunned by much of the world.
But the group is no longer isolated in the way it once was.
Regional powers including China, Russia and India have expanded their engagement, reopening embassies, growing trade ties and treating the Islamic Emirate as a political reality rather than a temporary aberration.
Inside Afghanistan power is tightly concentrated.
Public dissent has withered, journalists are detained and protesters are arrested.
Crimes like murder, adultery and theft are punished by public execution and physical force.
The Taliban's leadership is divided between figures who present themselves as pragmatists, eager for recognition and engagement, and hardline ideologues clustered around the group's supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada.
While some senior officials speak cautiously about moderation it is Akhundzada's vision that prevails.
From Kandahar, the Taliban movement's birthplace and political heart, decrees have reshaped daily life.
Girls are barred from education beyond primary school.
Women are banned from universities, most workplaces, parks and bathhouses.
They must cover their faces in public, travel with a male guardian and avoid speaking loudly outside the home.
The Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has replaced the ministry of women affairs and is a key tool used by the Taliban to implement its ideology.
The ministry's network of morality officials and workers are spread across the country, from the capital to remote villages.
Women haven't explicitly been banned from working, but the decrees make it near impossible for women to do many jobs.
While women still work in a handful of sectors such as public health, security, cleaning, arts and craft, there is no formal rule that allows them to do so.
The restrictions have wiped out entire family incomes.
"A few years ago there were opportunities and big salaries," said a construction worker who did not want to share his name.
"Now we are just passing the time. My salary is 20 per cent of what it was.
"I am safe, but my stomach is not safe."
Public expressions of support for these policies are common — but that does not mean private doubts do not exist.
At a popular lookout in Kabul men gather after prayers. Some voice unease, particularly about education.
A local teacher, Abdullah Hamas, argues that girls should be allowed to study medicine, framing education through necessity rather than rights.
"If we have female doctors there is no need for male doctors to treat women," he says.
Others insist the ban is temporary despite no timeline ever being announced.
"Inshallah, in the near future, girls above grade 6 will return to school," says Naqibullah, a 35-year-old Taliban member.
But some defend the bans outright.
"Our women are not interested in education," says Sayed Mohammad Akbar, who is visiting Kabul from Kandahar.
"You can come to my home and ask them yourself."
Afghans who are critical of the Taliban's policies are far more cautious about expressing their views and only do so in private.
Masooma, a 47-year-old woman from Kabul, lowers her voice when she speaks to the ABC.
"If I tell you what is in my heart it could create problems for me," she says.
"I could face threats. I have a lot of pain. How can I explain that?"
Despite repeated international pressure the Taliban has offered no clear plan for when girls will be allowed to return to school beyond grade 6.
Officials speak instead of creating the right "environment" without ever defining what that means.
Across hospitals, camps and villages the consequences are already visible.
A generation of girls is being cut off from education while communities worry about who will become their doctors, teachers and midwives.
And with each passing day women's lives are getting harder.
A devastating quake
In late August a powerful earthquake tore through eastern Afghanistan, killing more than 2,200 people and injuring thousands more.
Entire villages were flattened in the deadliest quake the country has seen in a decade.
In Kunar's Nurgal, Chawkay and Khas Kunar districts temporary camps now sprawl across mountain valleys.
The five main camps in these areas shelter thousands of families who live in canvas tents pitched shoulder to shoulder on rocky ground.
At night cold air drains down from the peaks and temperatures plunge.
But there is no electricity or heating to keep the camp warm.
Children cough constantly and health workers warn of pneumonia, measles and whooping cough.
Hazrat Azim lives in the camp after losing his house and 39 relatives in the quake — including his father and brother.
"The winter is unbearable," he says.
The 25-year-old remembers searching the rubble for missing children in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, guided only by their cries.
"Everything collapsed," he says.
"We could not see anything."
Inside a tent at Patan camp, Baspanda sits with her three-month-old son who has been sick for nearly two weeks, weakened by diarrhoea.
A cannula is taped to his tiny hand and a plastic bag serves as a makeshift nappy.
"At night, I sit with my child while he cries," she says quietly.
"I cry with him."
His twin brother died two weeks before the earthquake due to cold and water in his lungs.
Medical teams in the camps can offer little more than basic medication.
Each family has a few blankets, but they are not enough, and fires cannot be lit indoors.
In one of the camps four young children have died due to exposure to cold in tents.
The villages hit hardest by the quake lie just an hour away along mountain roads so treacherous that rescuers had to be flown in by helicopter.
Andar Lachak was almost entirely flattened in the quake that killed more than 100 people in the settlement.
"This was a village," says the village head, Hazratullah, gesturing at the rubble.
"Now there is only memory."
But the quake did give women in the area one opportunity.
A small hope in catastrophe
In places like Andar Lachak, which are deeply conservative communities, Taliban restrictions prohibit women from interacting with unrelated men, including doctors.
It's a rule that severely limits women's access to healthcare in this region. The closest clinic where they can see a female doctor is a three-hour walk away.
However, the earthquake forced a rare exception to Taliban rules in the areas in and around Andar Lachak.
Unrelated men were allowed to treat and rescue women in the community — and because of the scale of the disaster authorities allowed female health workers to travel into the area, provided they were accompanied by a male guardian.
It means women in this region are now getting unprecedented access to healthcare.
Shafiqa Salazai is one of just three female health workers allowed to operate in the area.
She travels daily from more than 100 kilometres away, counselling women who have lost homes, husbands and children.
"We listen to those who are traumatised," she says.
"They've lost everything."
For some women the sessions allow them to speak freely to a female doctor or counsellor for the first time.
One of the women being treated, Niazbana, says the access is transformative.
"With a male doctor we cannot talk freely," she says.
"With her we can say everything."
But the clinic is funded for only three more months and when it shuts the rules will resume.
The brief opening carved out by catastrophe will close.
Afghanistan may be more secure than it once was, but as crises stack up — hunger, poverty, repression and disaster — the burden is falling hardest on those with the least power to endure it.
A generation of Afghan women is being asked to wait. No-one can say how long.
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Photography: Haidarr Jones
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