From 2002 to 2021, USAID allocated around $1.3 billion to educational projects in Afghanistan. The number of teachers in Afghanistan increased 7-fold between 2001 and 2019. But for Sarahat, principal of a high school in Kabul, all such data is meaningless. "Although the U.S. claimed that they would rehabilitate education in Afghanistan," Sarahat explains, "they actually destroyed it." According to World Bank data, Afghanistan's adult literacy rate declined from 43 percent in 2018 to 37 percent in 2021, and that of people between the ages of 15 and 24 declined from 65 percent to 56 percent in the same period.