Pakistan and Afghanistan: a call for health diplomacy and restraint - The Lancet (shared by Niloufar Pourzand)

Title: Pakistan and Afghanistan: a call for health diplomacy and restraint
Author: Zulfiqar A Bhutta, Fawad Akbari, Shabina Raza, Suraya Dalil
Publication: The Lancet
Date: June 19, 2026

This article was written by former UNICEF staff, former Afghan Minister of Health & WHO senior staff, Dr. Suraya Dalil, and her collaborators.

Click here for the article

Summary: 

The article describes how decades of conflict, recent escalations in cross-border hostilities, large-scale involuntary returns of Afghan refugees, and reduced humanitarian assistance have created severe health and nutrition crises in the Afghanistan–Pakistan border regions, especially for women and children. It highlights the disruption of already fragile primary health care and nutrition systems, the threat to polio eradication due to interrupted cross-border cooperation, and the compounding impact of Taliban restrictions on women’s education, employment, and public participation. It calls for urgent health diplomacy, including women-led service delivery, coordinated cross-border vaccination and surveillance, restored humanitarian financing, and a comprehensive humanitarian–development–peace nexus approach, underpinned by a Pakistan–Afghanistan Health and Nutrition Task Force.

Quotes:

“Some 50 million civilians live across the long porous border between the countries, and face enormous health and nutrition challenges related to insecurity, displacement, stoppage of trade, and economic downturn.”
“Polio eradication depends on synchronised cross-border vaccination, and interruption places the entire initiative at risk.”
“The cost of inaction will be huge and paid by the poorest and most vulnerable populations, especially women and children on both sides of the border, whose lives depend on peace, stability, and access to health care.”