“PEACE is more difficult than war,” said Abbas Stanikzai, the Afghan Taliban’s top negotiator, in an interview with the BBC in February this year. The war in Afghanistan has dragged on for so many years that one tends to forget what is actually at stake: the future of the country’s children. A new Unicef report titled Preserving Hope in Afghanistan: Protecting children in the world’s most lethal conflict is a timely reminder of the ultimate cost of the 40-year-old conflict. The report sheds light on the extent of the adversities suffered by millions of Afghan children simply because they have been born and raised in a country which has been described as “the world’s worst killing field”. According to the report, on average, as many as nine children in Afghanistan were killed or maimed every day in 2019 — a year termed as particularly deadly for the country’s young ones “even by Afghanistan’s grim standards”. It reveals that at least 6,500 children died while 15,000 were injured between 2009 and 2018. The recent surge in suicide attacks and clashes between pro- and anti-government forces have raised the rate of child casualties by 11pc in the outgoing year.

The report also calls out all parties involved in the conflict for failing in their duty to protect Afghanistan’s children from the ugly consequences of war. However, conflict-related violence is not the only factor preventing Afghan children’s right to be able to lead normal lives. Severe malnutrition, an indirect effect of the prolonged war, affects as many as 600,000 children under the age of five. Similarly, the country’s shattered infrastructure has kept at least 3.7m children away from schools, while at least 30pc of children are engaged in labour to support their families. The report states that nearly 4m Afghan children need some form of humanitarian assistance to help alleviate their difficulties. In her statement released with the report, Unicef’s executive director Henrietta Fore said: “Children, their families and communities suffer the horrific consequences of conflict each and every day. Those same children are desperate to grow up, go to school, learn skills and build a future for themselves.” As the negotiations between the Taliban, and the US governments resume to look at the possibility of ending the long war, there may be reason to hope that the children of Afghanistan will have a chance to experience a life of peace, as opposed to their present existence of hardship and fear.

Published in Dawn, December 26th, 2019