Five years after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, 2.4 million girls have no access to secondary education. The figure comes from the UN, which is once again demanding that the right to schooling be restored. Once again - because this demand is repeated every year, and every year the result is the same.

UNESCO points to something worth reading twice: Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls and women are officially forbidden from attending secondary school and university. Not made harder. Not unevenly available. Forbidden, in writing.

Hoda Jaberian of UNESCO said the thing adults find easier to leave unsaid - five years is almost the entire secondary education of a child. So this is not a postponement. This is a generation that has had the whole period taken from it, and that period does not come back with a later amnesty.

What had been built, and how fast it fell

The takeover on 15 August 2021 set things back two decades. Up to 2021, nearly a million girls were enrolled in secondary schools - a figure that would have been unimaginable in 2001. Since then the restrictions have expanded to higher education, to employment and to public life in general.

That is the lesson rarely said out loud: what takes twenty years to build can be abolished with a single announcement. Institutions look solid right up until somebody checks how much they actually hold.

UNESCO continues to demand the immediate and unconditional restoration of the right to secondary and higher education, calling it a basic human right with no alternative. In parallel, they work through what is left to them - community literacy and skills training, with over 1,000 instructors teaching in local settings, often in public spaces or private homes.

Lessons in somebody else's living room, because the classroom is locked. That is the picture.

From here, from the Balkans, it is easy to treat this as distant news from another world. But education is the one thing no government can give you back once it has taken it. It is a currency that cannot be compensated retroactively - and that does not apply only to Kabul.