Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan --

In the Bost Hospital here, a teenage mother named Bibi Sherina sits on a bed in the severe acute malnutrition ward with her two children. Ahmed, at just 3 months old, looks bigger than his emaciated brother Mohammad, who is a year and a half and weighs 10 pounds.

In another bed is Fatima, less than a year old, who is so severely malnourished that her heart is failing, and the doctors expect that she will soon die unless her father is able to find money to take her to Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, for surgery. The girl's face bears a perpetual look of utter terror, and she rarely stops crying. Half of the other children in the ward are crying as well, a cacophony that rarely pauses.

Afghan hospitals like Bost, in the capital of the war-torn Helmand province, have been registering significant increases in severe malnutrition among children. Countrywide, such cases have increased 50 percent or more compared with 2012, according to U.N. figures. Doctors report similar situations in Kandahar, Farah, Kunar, Paktia and Paktika provinces - all places where warfare has disrupted people's lives.

Even the capital has seen an increase.

"In 2001, it was even worse, but this is the worst I've seen since then," said Dr. Saifullah Abasin, head of the malnutrition ward at Kabul's Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital.

Reasons for the increase remain uncertain, or in dispute. Most doctors and aid workers agree that continuing war and refugee displacement are contributing. What is clear is that, despite years of Western involvement and billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, children's health is not only still a problem, but also worsening, and the doctors bearing the brunt of the crisis are worried.

Efforts to educate people about nutrition and health care are often stymied by conservative traditions. Agriculture and traditional local sources of social support have been disrupted by war and the widespread flight of refugees to the cities. And therapeutic feeding programs, complex operations even in countries with strong health care systems, have been compromised as the flow of aid and transportation have been derailed by political tensions or violence.