Five years is a convenient number for a government to grade itself on, and the Islamic Emirate did exactly that in August 2026. Zabihullah Mujahid told Xinhua that the Afghan currency, the Afghani, had stabilized at 66 to 70 to the dollar, up sharply from a low of around 130 to the dollar right after the takeover.
Afghanistan’s National Procurement Commission said it had approved 562 development projects worth close to $2 billion in 2025 alone. Officials speaking to reporters put it even more simply: exports had roughly doubled in five years. A year earlier, Mujahid had already rolled out a five-year development strategy built around governance, security, and growth. Put together, it reads like a government that pulled its economy back from the edge.
Except the UN Development Program has a very different number for the same country: 74% of Afghans still cannot meet their basic needs, a figure that hasn’t moved in three years.
Neither claim is made up. Both are, in their own way, true. What actually settles which one describes the real state of the economy is the trade data underneath both claims—exports, imports, and the gap between them—measured across the Emirate’s five years against the Republic’s last thirteen.
The Republic’s Baseline
Between 2008 and 2020, Afghanistan’s exports averaged $1.93 billion a year against imports of $6.05 billion, leaving an annual gap of $4.12 billion the country could not cover on its own. Exports actually peaked early, at $3.06 billion in 2011, then slid down to just $1.52 billion by 2020, even while imports kept climbing.
That gap wasn’t a one-off crisis. It was the normal condition of the Republic’s economy for over a decade. Foreign aid covered close to 40% of the country’s entire GDP and about 75% of the government’s spending, so the deficit reflected how the state paid its bills, not how competitive its exports were. Whatever the Emirate claims about a boom needs to be measured against this decade, not against the collapse that followed it.
The Fall of Kabul and the Emirate’s Own Case
Since 2021, the Emirate’s economic pitch rests on three factors: exports climbing, customs collection hitting record highs, and a currency that’s gotten noticeably stronger—all of it supposedly replacing the foreign aid Kabul lost. The number officials repeat most often is the export jump from $850 million in 2021 to $1.8 billion in 2024, which works out to a 112% increase. That figure checks out. It isn’t spin.
Here’s where it gets confusing, though, and it’s worth slowing down on. The 112% increase and the Republic-era average mentioned a few paragraphs back don’t seem to sit together. If exports climbed 112% under the Emirate, how can the Emirate’s own four-year average—$1.42 billion—still come in lower than the Republic’s $1.93 billion? Both numbers are correct at the same time. They’re just answering two different questions.
The 112% figure measures how far exports climbed off the floor of 2021, right after the economy had just collapsed. The $1.42 billion figure measures the entire Emirate period against the entire Republic period. A country can post triple-digit growth coming out of a crash and still end up worse off than it was for most of the previous decade, and that is basically what happened here. It’s also the trick the “boom” narrative depends on: Quote the recovery number; stay quiet about the baseline number.
Here is what the full seventeen-year picture actually looks like:
Put the two lines next to each other, and a couple of things stand out. Exports under the Emirate never actually climbed back to where they sat for most of the Republic years. Imports barely paused—after a brief dip right after the takeover, they went straight back to climbing, averaging $7.76 billion a year, about 28% above the old Republic average.
The Dollars, Not the Percentages
| Metric (annual avg.) | Republic 2008–2020 | Emirate 2021–2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Exports | $1.93 billion | $1.42 billion |
| Imports | $6.05 billion | $7.76 billion |
| Total trade | $7.98 billion | $9.18 billion |
| Trade deficit | $4.12 billion | $6.34 billion |
| Exports’ share of imports | 32% | 18% |
Percentages can be misleading when the starting point is close to zero. Exports did grow faster than imports in percentage terms during the Emirate years, around 28% against 20%, but that’s mostly because exports were climbing back from a near-total collapse of $850 million in 2021. Switch to actual dollar amounts, and the picture flips. Imports grew by about $4.5 billion between 2021 and 2024. Exports grew by around $950 million over the same four years, under a quarter as much.
That’s why the trade deficit didn’t close; it opened wider, going from about $5.25 billion in 2021 to
$8.8 billion by 2024 and pushing the Emirate’s yearly average up to $6.34 billion, 54% above what the Republic averaged. Rising exports sitting next to a fast-widening deficit isn’t usually what an actual export-led recovery looks like.
What Afghanistan Is Actually Selling
Look past the totals at what’s actually being sold, and the export base looks thin. By 2024, food and textile products made up about 82% of everything Afghanistan exported, up from 71% the year before—that’s concentration, and it isn’t a good sign dressed up as one. Coal shows how fragile that concentration really is. The government had been holding coal up as one of its bigger wins, and then in 2024 coal exports fell 64%, down to just $92 million, the moment Pakistani buyers went back to their usual suppliers.
A single sourcing decision by buyers in one country was enough to erase a “success story” within a year. Something similar, on a much bigger scale, played out when border clashes with Pakistan escalated into what Pakistan’s defense minister called an “open war” in February 2026, and trade between the two countries stayed suspended for close to ten months before Pakistan moved to reopen the crossings in August 2026. An export base leaning this heavily on one or two neighbors isn’t built to survive a bad year, let alone a bad decade.
Whether Any of This Reached People
None of this shows up if the only thing being measured is trade totals. The real test is whether it reached anyone’s daily life, and mostly it hasn’t. GDP per person dropped from around $511 in 2020 to $357 in 2021, a 30% fall in a single year, and has only climbed back to about $414 by 2023—still short of where it started.
Close to 48% of the population was living below the poverty line as of 2024, and Afghanistan’s Human Development Index came in at 0.496, in the “low” bracket, near the bottom of the regional table. Trade volumes can rise on paper while ordinary households see none of it, and that appears to be exactly what’s happening.
To Be Fair to the Emirate
Nonetheless, the administration collected $2.2 billion in domestic revenue in fiscal year 2022, close to what the Republic collected in its last full year before it fell apart, built mainly on tighter customs enforcement at the border and heavy cuts to government spending. On the currency side, the Emirate banned foreign-currency transactions inside the country and tightened capital controls, and that, combined with a deliberately tight money supply, explains a good part of why the Afghani has held up despite Afghanistan having no working central bank relationships or foreign lending. Getting through five years without a prolonged collapse, under sanctions, with reserves frozen and no international aid, is not nothing.
Stopping a fall and building an economy that can actually compete are different jobs, though. The Emirate has managed the first one. The trade numbers suggest it hasn’t really started on the second.
The Verdict
Mujahid’s claims and the World Bank’s numbers can both be true at the same time, because they’re measuring different things. Afghanistan’s trade has recovered since the low point of 2021, but recovery and a boom are not the same claim. What the data actually shows is a narrow, fragile bounce-back helped along by a tighter border and a stronger currency, sitting on an export base that one bad harvest, or one decision made in Islamabad, can still knock over. Five years in, Afghanistan’s economy has stopped falling. It hasn’t caught up to where it was.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Aarish U. Khan is a Research Analyst at the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS). He can be reached at aarishkhan@irs.org.pk.
Asnan Asad is a student at the University of Gujrat, currently interning at IRS. He can be reached at asnanasad10090@gmail.com.
