A Nation Shaken
The earth shifted in the stillness of night, and in a heartbeat, silence turned to screams, dreams turned to dust, and walls that once offered shelter became tombs. Afghanistan’s mountains, rugged and unforgiving, groaned under the weight of a 6.0-magnitude quake, shallow in depth but deep in destruction. Near Jalalabad, where the Hindu Kush rises as a reminder of the earth’s restless heart, homes collapsed like fragile clay figures, and entire families were buried where they slept. At least 800 lives have been declared lost, over 2,000 injured, and many more remain unaccounted for, their absence marked only by the rubble that covers them. Roads were severed by landslides, and rescue efforts slowed by the unforgiving terrain. Once again, a familiar tragedy repeats itself in a land that seems condemned to grieve after every tremor. This is no isolated incident of nature’s cruelty. Afghanistan has seen this before—an earthquake in 2023 killed more than 1,500, and another the year before claimed more than 1,000. Each time, the headlines read like echoes of past sorrow, and each time the world mourns, only to forget until the next rupture.
But earthquakes by themselves do not kill with such merciless efficiency. It is human frailty, layered into mud walls and unreinforced stone, that turns tremors into death sentences. The tragedy is not that the ground shook—it is that homes were built to fall. Afghan villages, impoverished and isolated, build with what they have: mud bricks, stone masonry, timber beams lashed together by necessity, not design. These “monolithic” constructions stand upright only in calm; the moment the earth shifts sideways, they tumble in slabs of crushing weight. Here lies the bitter truth captured in the seismologist’s phrase—“earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.” Compare Afghanistan’s sorrow to Christchurch,
New Zealand, in 2011. A quake of similar magnitude and shallower depth tore through a city, yet the death toll was 185. The difference is not geological but structural. Where engineering and codes guide construction, buildings absorb shock; where poverty and neglect prevail, they crumble. Afghanistan’s rural hamlets lie scattered across valleys with little access to modern materials or techniques, and the consequence is visible in the mounds of rubble where lives once unfolded. Each collapsed house tells a story not just of nature’s violence but of human vulnerability, systemic neglect, and the absence of even the simplest safeguards.
The future need not mirror the past. Lessons lie close at hand if only they are embraced. Nepal, shattered by the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, undertook reforms that integrated earthquake resilience into its National Building Code, offering simple rules of thumb for even rural builders. Indian engineer Anand Arya, decades earlier, developed techniques to strengthen “non-engineered” homes—continuous horizontal bands of reinforcement, stronger corners, firmer frames around doors and windows. These are not costly miracles; they are low-cost, high-impact measures that transform fragile houses into structures that sway but do not collapse. International donors rushing to Afghanistan with food and tents must also bring something more enduring: training for local masons, handbooks with illustrated techniques, and the insistence that rebuilding funds adhere to resilience standards. “Build back better” must not remain an empty slogan but become the backbone of reconstruction. No building is ever entirely earthquake-proof, but each layer of reinforcement, each improvement in design, is a step away from mass graves and towards survival. And beyond Afghanistan, the region itself must learn to see these quakes as shared warnings. The tectonic boundaries that torment Kabul also haunt Peshawar, Kathmandu, Srinagar, and the plains of northern India. Cooperation on seismic monitoring, disaster preparedness, and common resilience strategies is no longer a choice but a necessity. If the region continues to see each tragedy in isolation, it will continue to mourn in repetition.
For now, grief must take its course. Families will bury their dead, communities will pick through ruins for traces of what they once had, and the world will dispatch aid in convoys of sympathy. But when the dust settles, the deeper reckoning must follow. Afghanistan cannot prevent the ground from trembling, but it can prevent the ground from swallowing entire villages whole. What is needed is not only compassion in the present but foresight for the future. Earthquakes will return, as they always have. Whether they return as tragedies written in rubble or as tremors endured with resilience depends on the choices made today. The Afghan people deserve more than a cycle of sorrow. They deserve a chance to live in homes that can stand when the earth does not.
