A Wish for Afghanistan

The speed of the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan in August 2021 took the world by surprise. Now there is uncertainty and fear among many Afghans - what will Taliban rule look like? What will become of their country?

The Taliban took control of Kabul just weeks before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the event that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and the Taliban’s fall. It was hoped this would be a new beginning, bringing peace to a country that had known nothing but war since the Soviets invaded 20 years earlier. After 2001, there was a new constitution and elections; women returned to parliament, girls returned to school and civil society flourished. But there was also a resurgence in violence. And now, with the last American soldier gone and the Taliban back in power, many Afghans are fearful for the future.

The BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet has followed every twist and turn of the Afghan story. In this landmark series of interviews for the BBC World Service, she hears from Afghans how the last 20 years have shaped them: their dreams for a new future and their fears that the cycle of violence will never stop.

Afghans have a word which seems to capture this moment: kashke. It’s a word that conveys sadness, regret and hope, roughly translating as “if only”, which is why we’ve called this series A Wish for Afghanistan.

Hosted on BBC

This podcast may use tracking and attribution, dynamic content insertion and is insecure

Stats: Statistics are produced by BBC to help A Wish for Afghanistan to understand how many downloads it is getting, or how many people are listening. Your device’s IP address and user agent is used to help calculate this figure. Here is more detail about podcast statistics.

Tracking and attribution: BBC or its partners may connect the fact you listened to this podcast to an action elsewhere on the internet. For example - it may spot a device that downloaded an episode of A Wish for Afghanistan later visited the website of an advertiser; or it may track that a device that listened to A Wish for Afghanistan also listened to a different show. This form of attribution is used to measure advertising effectiveness.

Dynamic content insertion: BBC may use limited data that they know about you - the device you’re using, the approximate location you’re in, or other data that can be derived from this, like the current weather forecast for your area - to change parts of the audio. A Wish for Afghanistan may do this for advertising or for other forms of content, like news stories.

A Wish for Afghanistan is able to use the above tools since its podcast host or measurement company offers this service. It doesn’t mean that this individual podcast uses them, or has access to this functionality. We use open data.

This uses an insecure connection. This podcast uses an HTTP, not HTTPS, address for its audio files. These are not encrypted, and may allow people who can see your internet traffic - like your internet service provider, employer or even your government - to know that you listen to this podcast.

Here’s more about insecure links and unique domains.

In the news

British Podcast Awards 2022: the winners (Jul 25 2022)

Listen and follow

Information for podcasters

• Podcast GUID: ab66cdc7-73d5-56c7-bc77-619ae7890922
• This podcast doesn’t have a trailer. Apple Podcasts has a specific episode type for a trailer, which also gets used by many other podcast apps: but there isn’t one correctly marked in the RSS feed from BBC.
• This podcast appears to be missing from iHeartRadio. We list all the podcast directories to be in.
• See all episodes
• See this podcast’s listener numbers, contact details and more at Rephonic
• Validate this podcast’s RSS feed with Livewire, Truefans or CastFeedValidator

Privacy: The player will download audio directly from BBC if you listen. That shares data (like your IP address or details of your device) with them.
Affiliate links: This page links to Apple Podcasts. We may receive a commission for purchases made via those links.
Cache: This podcast page made Nov 16, 10:17am UTC. Scheduled for update on Dec 16. Rebuild this page now