On August 15, Afghan activists around the world marked four years since the Taliban retook Kabul. In Washington, a virtual protest brought together human rights defenders, exiled activists, and diaspora leaders. Their message was urgent but bleak: Afghanistan is slipping into silence, not just under Taliban repression, but in the corridors of global power where its plight has been relegated to the margins.
“Gender apartheid is one of the top strategic tools,” said Elika Eftikhari, executive director of the Washington-based human rights group JINA Alliance told the virtual protest. She stressed that the case for labelling Afghanistan a gender apartheid state does not need to be built—“it already exists on its face since the Taliban has codified it into the law and the Constitution, legal system, and governing documents.”
That reality has defined Afghan life since 2021. Girls barred from classrooms, women erased from public spaces, and harsh punishments justified under a narrow interpretation of Islamic law. Yet while activists chanted at the virtual protest in multiple cities across the US, “Taliban are terrorists,” Washington largely looked elsewhere. The US news cycles that day were consumed by coverage of former President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss Ukraine. Four years after Kabul fell, America seems to have moved on.
The contrast could not have been sharper. Afghanistan, once a centerpiece of US foreign and military policy, has steadily faded from America’s political imagination.
A vanishing priority
After the September 11 attacks, Afghanistan commanded Washington’s undivided attention for two decades. Trillions of dollars were spent, and more than 2,400 American soldiers died there. Yet four years after the Taliban’s return, Afghanistan is a footnote in congressional debates, a sporadic talking point in think tanks, and a rarity in mainstream US media.
“Nothing in Afghanistan aligns with the [current] administration’s focus on commercial diplomacy,” said Dr Asfandyar Mir, Senior Fellow for South Asia at the Stimson Centre. “Unlike the new Syrian regime, the Taliban record is poorer and the regime has no advocates among US allies. Consequently, the status quo will persist. The implication is that Afghanistan will be, at best, the region’s problem and the US will focus on its narrow counterterrorism interests,” he told the T-Magazine in a written reply to questions on the subject.
Mir added that “even under President Biden, interest in Afghanistan only lingered out of fear of collapse on the administration’s watch, given the disastrous 2021 withdrawal that damaged the Biden administration politically.” The difference now, he said, is stark: “The current administration operates without the shadow of the Afghanistan withdrawal. It is more vigilant on counterterrorism and willing to act globally, including in South Asia.”
In other words, Afghanistan matters only in so far as it might incubate terrorist threats. Human rights, governance, and development, the very pillars US officials once invoked to justify their mission, have been effectively abandoned.
The silence of Washington
A recent Brookings Institution article, “The Second Trump Administration Turns a Blind Eye to Afghanistan” (May 2025), bluntly concluded that Aghanistan has “effectively disappeared from US political and media attention since the chaotic 2021 withdrawal.”
The author, Madiha Afzal, argued that the retreat is not only rhetorical. “With deep cuts to humanitarian aid, reduced refugee protections, and little appetite for human rights advocacy, millions of Afghans face worsening hunger, instability, and repression,” says the analytical piece.
As Madiha Afzal notes, “Human rights will no longer be a focus of US foreign policy,” a chilling admission given the scale of suffering for Afghan women and girls. Engagement persists only in fragments: limited counterterrorism cooperation and the quiet reversal of bounties on certain Taliban figures.
For Afghan activists in exile, this selective engagement is both infuriating and devastating. While Russia and Iran are accused of backing the Taliban, the US response is muted. At rallies in American cities, protestors condemned Moscow’s role, but their demands barely registered in Washington’s policy circles.
The virtual protest, titled Global Anti-Taliban Demonstration, issued a resolution shared with T-Magazine urging the US government and the international community to designate Russia as a “terror sponsor,” recognise the Taliban’s system as “gender apartheid,” bring Taliban leaders to justice, protect Afghan refugees, back the people’s resistance, and restore democracy in Afghanistan.
Sadiq Amini, an Afghan human rights activist and organiser of the protest, told T-Magazine in a written response that they welcome the Trump administration’s disengagement with the Taliban. “We are very happy about the Trump administration’s disengagement with the Taliban terrorists in charge of Afghanistan. People of Afghanistan appreciate it. This policy shift will help the people of Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban terrorists through people’s uprising.”
Competing priorities: Iran at the centre
If Afghanistan has fallen off Washington’s radar, Iran has moved to the centre of its counterterrorism map. At a Hudson Institute event on August 19, Dr Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, sketched out the Trump administration’s strategy.
“Iran is front and centre in everything we do in the region because they remain the greatest state sponsor of terrorism,” Gorka declared. “I’ve been telling my colleagues since January the 20th you need to understand one thing, when the president looks at the region he does not slice it down into cylinders of accidents… that one metric, that one prism is Iran.”
Outlining early achievements, Gorka boasted: “We have liberated 72 US citizens in less than seven months, the Biden administration did 80 in four years, we have killed 272 Jihadis since January, excluding the Houthis.”
As he mapped threats from the Middle East to Africa, Afghanistan barely merited mention. Groups like IS-K, which have carried out deadly attacks in Kabul and beyond, were eclipsed by Washington’s singular obsession with Tehran.
A fractured narrative
The silence in Washington around Afghanistan reflects more than shifting priorities. Experts say it reveals how Washington processes legacy of failures. The withdrawal in August 2021, labelled as chaotic, deadly, and humiliating in the public debates, scarred the US politics. Both Democrats and Republicans prefer to look away, avoiding a reminder of America’s longest war and the collapse that followed.
That avoidance has consequences. By treating Afghanistan as a closed chapter, Washington obscures the ongoing realities: Taliban rule has normaliesd gender apartheid, the humanitarian crisis has deepened with aid cuts, and terrorist groups continue to exploit instability.
The activists who rallied on August 15 are trying to force attention back. For them, the stakes are existential. Women’s education, civic freedom, and Afghanistan’s fragile pluralism are vanishing before the world’s eyes. Yet their chants echo in a vacuum, drowned out by geopolitical rivalries elsewhere.
What comes next?
Some analysts warn that Washington’s neglect could backfire. IS-K’s reach has already extended into Pakistan and Central Asia, while Taliban infighting risks destabilising the region. Meanwhile, Russia, China, and Iran are quietly expanding influence in Kabul, filling the void left by Western retreat.
Yet for now, the US is unlikely to re-engage beyond targeted strikes or intelligence-sharing. Humanitarian aid has squeezed, and refugee programmes face tightening restrictions. The shift is clear: Afghanistan is no longer America’s priority, but it may well remain its unfinished business.
As Afzal at Brookings cautions, ignoring Afghanistan does not make its crises disappear. The country is again becoming a testing ground, not for US democracy-building, but for the limits of Washington’s attention span.
Afghan activists say right now Afghanistan’s tragedy is twofold. At home, the Taliban have institutionalised repression to the point that gender apartheid is woven into law. Abroad, the nation has been abandoned by the very power that once claimed to liberate it.
“Gender apartheid,” as Eftikhari put it, “is one of the top strategic tools” of Taliban rule. And yet, for the global community, it is not even a strategic concern. For the women and girls who have lost their futures, for activists silenced or exiled, and for ordinary Afghans caught between poverty and repression, the silence of Washington may feel like the betrayal.
Nilofar Mughal is a Washington-based journalist, formerly affiliated with the Voice of America
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