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KABUL: After a four-year suspension, the Taliban government has announced it would resume pension payments for Afghanistan’s nearly 150,000 retired military and civil servants.
They will be the last public sector workers to receive any payments, after the cash-strapped authorities announced an end to the public pension scheme last year.
“When you’re jobless sitting at home and have nothing, you’re worried about food,” said 71-year-old Abdul Sabir outside the pension department in the capital Kabul.
He was among those scheduled to receive his pension again in a gradual rollout across government institutions.
Retired public sector employees have for the past few years increasingly demonstrated outside government buildings, demanding payments that ended after the return of Taliban authorities in 2021.
“All the pending amounts will be distributed to the retirees,” pension fund director Mohammad Rahmani told AFP this week.
Government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat told local media eventually the years of unpaid pensions would be disbursed.
The Taliban authorities have slashed salaries, which are paid erratically, while replacing many civil servants with loyalists.
They do not publish budgets and their revenue streams are opaque.
Observers say security spending has consumed much of the budget at other ministries’ expense, while slashed foreign aid that previously bolstered the public sector has made pension payments unsustainable.


Most people AFP spoke to expected to receive 40,000-50,000 Afghanis ($580-720) a year from their pension, a relatively small sum that entire families nonetheless will rely on for survival.
Abdul Wasse Kargar said he was currently owed 31,000 Afghanis in debt to friends and shopkeepers, after a 45-year career at the education ministry.
“If they give us our pension, it will solve 50 percent of our problems. We can make ends meet with that and we will be free of some of this poverty and helplessness,” said the 74-year-old, tired of going door-to-door begging for loans.
Nearly half of the Afghan population lives in poverty and the unemployment rate is more than 13 percent, according to the World Bank.
Shah Rasool Omari had tried to get a job during the four years waiting for his pension but said his age dogged his chances.
Potential employers told him that they “want a young boy who can work and who we can order around.”
“I have six sons and then their children, all of them need to be supported from my pension payment,” said Rasool, who worked in the Air Force for 30 years.
Public sector pensions support around 150,000 families, or almost a million people, the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) said in a 2024 report.
The system had been in crisis long before the Taliban takeover, and the economic crunch that followed the disappearance of foreign aid that funded the pension system sounded the death knell, the AAN report said.
“There was simply not enough domestic revenue coming in for the government to both run the country and meet its obligation to retirees,” it said.
Nabiullah Attai now regrets his career with the police.
“I gave 38 years — the best years of my life — to this country,” he told AFP.
“But today, I have nothing to show for it.”

LONDON: Wounds caused by Israeli bombs and bullets accounted for nearly half of the injuries treated at outpatient clinics run by Medecins Sans Frontieres in Gaza last year, according to

Almost a third of day patients treated for such injuries at the charity’s health centers in the territory were children, the figures revealed, further highlighting the devastating human cost to Palestinian civilians of nearly two years of conflict.

The six MSF-supported health centers from which the data was collected were located mostly in central and southern Gaza. More than 200,000 outpatient consultations were conducted at the facilities during 2024. More than 90,000 of them involved wounds, and nearly 40,000 of them were caused by “violent trauma,” primarily the result of bombing, shelling and gunfire.

The data does not include figures for other healthcare services provided by MSF, such as operating theaters and emergency rooms, nor does it take account of people killed at the scene of attacks.

In two of the hospitals, MSF staff found nearly 60 percent of lower-limb wounds were caused by explosive weapons, “often with open injuries to bone, muscle or skin,” according to The Lancet.

“Explosive weapons are designed to be used in open battlefields, but are increasingly being used in urban areas,” the report continued. “The makeshift shelters in which people live following frequent displacement offer almost no protection against explosive weapons, and especially their secondary effects such as blast, shrapnel and incendiary impact.”

The Israeli offensive in Gaza, which has been described as amounting to a genocide by many international organizations and governments, has killed nearly 63,000 Palestinians, about half of them women and children, according to figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Of all outpatients treated for wounds at the MSF facilities last year, nearly a third were children under the age of 15, and another third were women.

The data was gathered before Israeli authorities imposed a total blockade on Gaza earlier this year, halting supplies of food and medical aid. Even before that development, however, the MSF staff collecting the information about outpatients described a lack of “crucial supplies and equipment necessary to treat these complex wounds.”

Almost a fifth of patients arriving at the health centers for first-time treatment of their injuries had infected wounds, the data revealed.

“In one MSF-supported health facility, wound infections were as high as 28 percent,” the report said.

Gaza’s healthcare system has been decimated by the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Half of the 36 hospitals that were operational before the war have closed, and more than 1,500 Palestinian healthcare workers have been killed.

MSF said the violence unleashed by the Israeli military has caused “physical and mental damage on a scale that would overwhelm even the best-functioning health systems in the world.”