In August 2021, American and allied troops completed their final withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Taliban recaptured the country in a matter of weeks, entering Kabul on August 15. Twenty years of military commitment culminated in chaotic scenes that bore little resemblance to the early victories of 2001.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, the crisis extends far beyond the battlefield. Since seizing power, the Taliban have instituted severe crackdowns on the rights of women and girls. Girls are barred from attending secondary school past the sixth grade, while women have been systematically excluded from universities and higher education. The United Nations has classified Afghanistan as the only country in the world where women and girls are completely forbidden from accessing all levels of education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The prevalence of forced and child marriages remains equally acute. According to UNICEF, roughly one-third of Afghan girls are married before turning 18. In 2026, a new Taliban decree governing marriage dissolutions drew widespread condemnation from the UN and international human rights bodies. Looking at the realities on the ground today, claiming that two decades of war brought lasting victory to Afghanistan remains difficult to defend. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Afghanistan is a nation unlike any other: great powers regularly march in with armies, heavy armor, air power, and grand ambitions\u2014only to retreat years or decades later. The British Empire fought three separate campaigns here in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Soviet Union spent nearly a decade bogged down in a brutal war, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":5103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[498],"tags":[2278,1955,2281,723,2280,2248,2284,2285,2279,2283,1786,2254,2252,2262,2282],"moimportance":[101,104],"motype":[491],"moformat":[93],"class_list":{"0":"post-5114","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-voenna-istoria","8":"tag-afghanistan","9":"tag-calgary","10":"tag-calgary-and-the-war-in-afghanistan","11":"tag-calgary-highlanders","12":"tag-canadas-mission-in-afghanistan","13":"tag-canadian-army","14":"tag-canadian-military-in-afghanistan","15":"tag-canadian-mission-in-afghanistan","16":"tag-canadian-soldiers-in-afghanistan","17":"tag-kandahar","18":"tag-kings-own-calgary-regiment","19":"tag-military-history-of-calgary","20":"tag-military-units-of-calgary","21":"tag-nathan-hornburg","22":"tag-war-in-afghanistan","23":"moimportance-golovna-novyna","24":"moimportance-retranslyacziya-v-agregatory","25":"motype-eternal","26":"moformat-longrid-korotka"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5114"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5115,"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5114\/revisions\/5115"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5114"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=5114"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=5114"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calgaryes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=5114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}