For five years now, the world has mostly asked one question about Afghanistan: how did it fall? I understand why. I lived, like so many others in my generation, through the answer to that question. Our generation has spent a long time trying to understand exactly where the structure gave way. To treat a disease, the first step always is to diagnose it. We need to diagnose and understand very clearly what went wrong with Afghanistan.
But diagnosis is not a plan, and five years of rehashing what happened from every single angle imaginable has produced very little serious thinking about what comes after it. Ask most people what Afghans should actually be doing right now, this year, this decade, to prepare for whatever comes next, and you will get silence, or you will get slogans. Neither is good enough for a country that has already paid this much.
The conclusion that I have come to, based on my humble yet firsthand experience, is that we can't go for quick wins anymore, and we can't expect changes to come fast if we want those changes to be foundations for a future. But here's a bitter truth for every Afghan out there: states are not restored by the return of good intentions. They are restored by the quiet, unglamorous accumulation of specific things, built years before anyone is allowed to use them.
Here is what I believe those things are, for Afghanistan, over the next five to ten years.
The first is a leadership bench that we need now from the people of Afghanistan, and a bench that's going to be built now, not summoned later. Every successful transition out there in the world, and every failed one, turns on the same variable: whether there were people ready to actually govern when the opportunity arrived, or only people ready to oppose what came before. Somewhere right now there need to be young Afghans, in the diaspora and, where conditions allow, inside the country, being trained in the actual mechanics of governance, budgeting, negotiation, and public administration, so that the next opening is met with competence instead of a vacuum. We've seen too many instances of this happen within our own country. We ought to have learned our lesson by now, no?
The second is a repository of accountability, built while the events are still happening rather than reconstructed afterward from memory. We'd need this base to understand and document the issues as they happen and when they happen. Post-conflict states almost never fail from a lack of blame. They fail from a lack of documentation of where money went, who was accountable for what, and what commitments were made and broken. Any future government, any tribunal, any truth process, any serious reform effort will need a record that exists before it is needed. Building that now, while it is still possible to build it accurately, is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is the foundation everything else stands on.
The third is breaking the aid-dependency pattern before it gets rebuilt exactly as it was. Afghanistan's last two decades of reconstruction were financed almost entirely by foreign money flowing through structures that never developed real Afghan economic self-reliance underneath them. Any future that comes next cannot simply repeat that architecture with a different set of donors and the same fragile foundation. Diaspora capital, remittance infrastructure, and real investment vehicles are all things that need groundwork now, so the next chapter does not begin exactly where the last one collapsed.
The fourth is claiming a seat in rooms Afghanistan is currently locked out of, and where they speak about Afghanistan. No recognized government means no voice at climate negotiations, no place in regional water-sharing talks with neighbors who will shape Afghanistan's future with or without Afghan input, no seat in the regional security conversations that already treat Afghanistan as a subject rather than a participant. Someone has to hold that space in the meantime, or those decisions get made entirely without the people they will affect most.
The fifth is building a coalition instead of a chorus of separate grievances, or the constant attacking and dismantling of each other that only leads to further division. A great deal of diaspora energy right now goes into rehashing the past and deciding exactly who is to blame for what happened. I understand the impulse, as I have felt it too, once too often, but grief spent arguing with other Afghans is grief that never reaches the people actually deciding Afghanistan's future. The next decade needs something closer to one voice, capable of being taken seriously in rooms where fragmented voices are not.
The sixth is preserving what the war has not yet managed to take, deliberately rather than by accident. The poetry, the music, the oral history, all of which have survived so far mostly by luck and stubbornness. A country worth returning to is not just territory. It is memory, and memory needs deliberate work to survive the years ahead the way it has survived the years behind us.
None of these six things are dramatic, and none of them will trend the way outrage trends. We just need Afghans to understand that our nation, our home, is ours, and we get to decide our future, if, and that is a big if, we know what is at stake and how far we are willing to go to do that. The next generation of Afghanistan cannot afford to make the same mistakes as the past ones. They cannot follow the same failed leaders. They cannot be the same failed leaders. A new chapter, a clean slate, is what we need.
My two cents. It might be more painful to be patient, but history has shown that quick wins and impatience keep that same vicious cycle rolling.
