Afghanistan has seen an impressive growth in urbanization in the years following the ouster of Taliban in 2001. The urban sprawl of Afghan cities and towns now expand beyond their old limits, embracing outlying areas in suburbs where living was unthinkable merely a decade ago. Kabul, or to be precise the Greater Kabul, leads the pack. From a small city of around one million in the 1990s it has expanded and grown to house, feed and sustain five times that number.

Today, in the city and its vast but impoverished suburbs live more than five million people. By any estimates and forecasts, Kabul's population will only grow in the coming years. Kabul, in its today's form and with its current infrastructure, is barely able to provide sustenance to more than two million people.

The gradual build-up in communities and the incoming waves of new-comers have all worked to make Kabul confront a major urban crisis where the rapidly growing numbers of inhabitants overwhelm the limited and fragile infrastructure of the city.

Ghettoisation and slumization of Afghanistan's cities
Kabul is a prominent example of how Afghanistan's cities and towns are facing an acute urban crisis. Internally-displaced people, returnees from abroad and hundreds of thousands of migrants from villages and rural areas are fueling a vicious urban crisis that is growing worse by each passing year.

The ongoing crisis involves vast and flagrant inadequacy of our cities to provide a minimum of amenities, facilities and infrastructure to the teeming of poor masses who live in suburbs and its outlying areas. The Afghan cities are unable to cope with the influx of new migrants and settlers; what they can offer fall way short of what is actually needed.

Clean drinking water, electricity, sufficient and affordable housing, roads, connectivity and transport, educational and healthcare facilities to the teeming millions of impoverished denizens are what are lacking and considering Afghanistan's unfolding population explosion , will get only worse in the coming years.

The city of Kabul is witnessing its suburbs grow by each passing year in a haphazard, unplanned and unregulated manner. The government, thus far, has been unable or unwilling to take effective steps to regulate Kabul's runaway urban growth.

The result has been and is unprecedented ghettoisation and slumization of Kabul and its vast suburbs. This trend is ongoing also in other cities and towns including Mazar-e Sharif and Herat. There is a limited period of time available to check, control and arrest this runaway growth in ghettoisation of our country's largest cities.

The current trend is deeply worrying. Providing these vast slums and ghettos with even the most basic of facilities and urban infrastructure is a hugely expensive undertaking. The main problem is that as years pass by and this slumization becomes more expansive, the gap between the enormity of the problem and the abilities and means of the government gets larger.

If today, the government of Afghanistan, in partnership with foreign donors, has to provide the most basic of infrastructure to around 3 million inhabitants in and around Kabul, a decade from now, this figure would at least double to 6 million. The problem, as discussed, is set to only grow worse in the coming years and decades.

This urban crisis that Afghanistan faces should be placed within the larger perspective of Afghanistan's runaway and wild population growth and the accompanying problem of economic stagnation and lack of economic development in the country. In the absence of economic growth (inclusive economic growth of course), and as long as the bulk of the population in the country cannot afford access to decent housing due to poverty, the country's urban crisis would only worsen.

This poverty and the ongoing rapid population growth are the two foremost factors that are and will be fueling the country's urban crisis. Ten to twenty years down the line, Afghanistan's urban crisis would only get much more severe.

The government of Afghanistan and the international community's efforts in Afghanistan have failed to address the country's urban crisis. Their efforts have been haphazard and limited at best. There are scores of NGOs whose works are limited to taking care of sanitation and hygiene requirements of urban communities. Above this level the NGOs and the private sector efforts have fallen short of meaningfully addressing the country's appalling urban conditions.

Numerous new townships and private sector real estate developments have sprung up throughout the country mainly catering to the urban rich and the foreign-connected elite. These new developments fall way short of Afghanistan's rapidly growing urban infrastructure needs.

The government of Afghanistan and the Ministry of Urban Development have taken up a number of initiatives including developing a number of townships such as the New Kabul project. These efforts, unfortunately, continue to be haphazard and fade in front of the magnitude of the problem. The New Kabul project, is expected to take billions of dollars in so far unfunded budget and would take up years and decades to come up.

The growing urban-rural divide
The widespread inequality between the country's cities and its villages and rural areas in terms of employment opportunities, infrastructure and access to basic facilities for a healthy living is forcing hundreds of thousands of Afghan people to abandon farmlands and seek livelihoods in Afghanistan's large cities such as Kabul.

The continued drought conditions and the prolonged dry spell in many provinces are factors that are further fueling this ongoing large displacement of people and communities in Afghanistan. It is a fact that urbanization is a dominant trend word-wide especially across the developing world, but the situation in Afghanistan is worrying since this large displacement of people and communities is driving a dangerous trend of ghettoisation of Afghanistan's cities. These factors would further add to poverty and Afghanistan's urban woes.

Across all developing countries, all governments have traditionally been taking up large affordable housing projects and distributing them among the poor, the needy, and the vulnerable sections of the population. Such large housing projects have long been the norm across the world. Here in Afghanistan and in pursuit of neo-liberal policies brutally imposed on Afghanistan, the government is a mere mute spectator, watching as the tragedy of Afghanistan's urban crisis slowly unfolds.