What Did We Lose?

In 2023, I was in Pakistan. I often found myself struggling to explain Afghanistan to people whose understanding of our country was so different from mine. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the new government that had come to power after the collapse of the previous one.
Most of those opinions were rooted in religious and ideological beliefs. “You should be grateful,” they would tell us. “You should thank God that you have such a government. You are finally living under peace and stability. There is no longer war in your country. And look at your currency—the dollar is worth around 80 rupees in Afghanistan, while it is nearly 300 here.”

I would listen to them, and my eyes would fill with tears.
What did we lose?
I could not explain exactly what we had lost. I could not put into words the thing we were mourning—not in the way I felt it, not in the way it lived inside me.

And that inability to explain it hurt deeply.

Afterward, I began searching for something—a piece of writing, a poem, a photograph, a film—anything that could somehow express what we had lost, why we were mourning, how profound and heavy this grief was, and how devastating it could be when such grief is not even recognized.

Perhaps there is no bomb in the world more destructive than that.

A bomb destroys bodies.

But what do you do with a body that still breathes after its soul has already been sacrificed?

For five years, I have sometimes tried to arrange words beside one another, hoping that perhaps they could give those who have never experienced it a glimpse of the grief we have carried. I wanted them to understand that we have every right to mourn what we lost.

But every time I begin to write, I eventually realize how small my words are. How inadequate language is when faced with certain realities. How powerless words can be when asked to describe what has happened to us.

Sometimes, I feel that by writing about this grief, by trying to remember it and give it a shape through language, I am committing an injustice against the grief itself. As though no sentence could ever be large enough to contain it.

So I write.

I finish.

And then I delete everything.

I have been doing this for years.

But tonight, I want to write an answer to the question:

What did we lose, and why are we mourning?

And this time, I will not delete it.

Perhaps these words will still be inadequate. Perhaps they will only capture a small corner of what we have lived through. But perhaps, just perhaps, they will allow someone who has never experienced it to understand.

Tonight, I write not as a woman, but as an Afghan.

An Afghan who had dreams for her country.

An Afghan who had plans for the future.

If I had to answer in one word, I would say this:

We lost hope.

Imagine a person who has lost hope in life, who cannot make plans for tomorrow, who lives in a painful state of uncertainty. What could truly make that person happy except the return of hope?

Tourism? Wealth? A house? A car?

No.

You cannot understand this unless you have experienced hopelessness yourself: none of these things can make a person who has lost hope truly happy.

We did not have much comfort during the years of the Republic either.

Our schools were far from perfect. Our universities were not world-class. Our industries had not developed enough. There was money in the country, but the foundations of a functioning economy—power infrastructure, factories, sustainable industries—were painfully weak.

There were fathers who returned home every night carrying the weight of a thousand fears, wondering how they would answer their hungry children who had been waiting since morning for something as simple as a piece of bread.

There were mothers who lived in constant fear for their children fighting on the front lines. Toward the end of the Republic, the number of people killed in the war had reached devastating levels. Almost every mother seemed to know the pain of losing a child—whether in direct fighting or in the endless suicide attacks that had stolen peace from Kabul and other cities.

And yet, we stood.

We endured.

We were willing to give everything for our country.

Why?

Because we had hope.

Hope for a brighter tomorrow.

Hope for a more secure future.

Hope for life.

Hope for progress.

Hope that one day we could rebuild our wounded and broken country.

Hope that through education, we could build a better future for ourselves—and, perhaps, a more prosperous and dignified Afghanistan.

Parents would gather the broken remains of their children after an attack on a university, a school, or a place of learning. They would weep. They would grieve.

And the next day, they would send another child back to that same place to study.

They did not surrender.

When Kabul University—the country’s largest center of higher education—was attacked, young students were killed and wounded. Yet the next day, other students returned with even greater determination, as if their presence itself were a defiant answer to those who wanted to destroy knowledge.

They returned because they believed that education mattered.

They returned because they believed tomorrow mattered.

They returned because they still believed Afghanistan belonged to their dreams.

Today, Afghanistan is at peace in the sense that young people are no longer being killed on their way to school.

But what is the value of peace when the desire to walk through the school gates has been taken away?

What is the value of an open university when young people no longer believe in the future that education was supposed to lead them toward?

I know many young men who were my classmats, worked with me, or lived in our neighborhood. They were allowed to attend university, yet they abandoned their education.

When I asked why, their answer was painfully simple:

“Why should we study? For what? And for whom?”

They felt they had no country.

No future.

Many universities have closed because there are no longer enough students to keep them open. Only a small number remain active. Graduate programs that once attracted thousands of applicants have disappeared.

People once paid money simply for the opportunity to continue their education.