# Dear Afghanistan

- Link: https://perfectnations.org/dear-afghanistan/
- Published: 2026-10-12T13:03:17-04:00
- Author: Preeti Sinha

[The Afghanistan blueprint](https://perfectnations.org/blueprints/afghanistan/)

Perfect Nations™ · Letters to the NationsAfghanistan

# Dear Afghanistan,

You are 43.8 million people, and this year 21.9 million of you need humanitarian
help to get through it. The United Nations is asking the world for $1.71 billion
to reach 17.5 million of you in 2026. Since August 2021, close to $2 billion of 
World Bank support has reached you, not through the authorities in Kabul, but through
the Afghanistan Resilience Trust Fund and the agencies of the United Nations. That
is how the world has chosen to keep faith with the people while withholding it from
the state.

A nation is not its government, and this Letter is not written to one. It is written
to the farmer on land that is more than half farmed or grazed, to the nurse in a
clinic that serves a health system scoring 42 on the World Health Organization index,
the lowest of your seven standards. It is written to the 47.1 percent of you who
lived below the national poverty line in the last survey taken before 2021, and 
to everyone the surveys have not reached since.

> “A nation is not its government. This Letter is written to the farmer, the nurse
> and the child, and to every daughter who wants to finish school.”

Some things have held. Most of you now have basic drinking water and electricity,
and in 2021 renewable sources made 78 percent of the electricity you generated. 
Your mountains send snowmelt into the rivers that water your fields, about 1,162
cubic metres for each of you every year. The United States Geological Survey delineated
twenty mineralised areas worth further study. A transmission line meant to carry
Central Asian power across your land to Pakistan, CASA-1000, carries an $852 million
World Bank commitment, and the Bank says its work in Afghanistan will resume.

None of these assets can carry the Living Line while your daughters are kept out
of secondary school and university. Education is not yet the furthest below the 
Living Line on the measure used here, but it will decide every standard after it:
the nurse who is not trained, the farm that is not modernised, the household that
does not rise above the line. A nation is not its government. This Letter is written
to the farmer, the nurse and the child, and to every daughter who wants to finish
school.

Yours in design,

**The Steward-General**

Perfect Nations · perfectnations.org

 [Read the Afghanistan blueprint](https://perfectnations.org/blueprints/afghanistan/)
[Write to the Stewards](https://perfectnations.org/contact/?nation=afghanistan)