UN official finds Afghanistan 'deep in crises'

Climate change, women's rights, displacement, poverty: Afghanistan remains a priority as it faces overlapping crises, the UN's relief chief Tom Fletcher told AFP on Wednesday, deploring "brutal" aid budget cuts.

"We've identified 17 crises across the world where our engagement is most urgent, most vital. Afghanistan is high on that list," said the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs in an interview with AFP during a visit to Kunduz province.

Fletcher's visit comes after US President Donald Trump's decision to slash foreign aid sent shock waves across the globe.

Washington had been the top donor to Afghanistan, having spent $3.71 billion in humanitarian and development aid since the Taliban returned to power in 2021 and imposed a severe interpretation of Islamic law.

"We're in a period when we're having to massively prioritise, take brutal choices... literally life and death choices, about where to operate and which lives to save," Fletcher said.

"You can look at Sudan for the scale of the crisis, you can look at Gaza for the intensity, the ferocity of the killing there," he added. "Afghanistan is a different kind of challenge but it's a huge challenge nonetheless."

Climate change is hitting the Central Asian country "particularly hard" and it "will drive the needs even more than conflict will in the period ahead", he said.

"You've got that combined with the existing levels of poverty and these decades of instability and conflict."

The situation of women's rights in the country adds to the layers of a "building up of crisis upon crisis", Fletcher added.

The Taliban authorities have imposed restrictions on women that the UN has denounced as "gender apartheid".