Afghan Commentary Post

  Can Reopening Girls’ Schools Solve Afghanistan’s Main Problem? Afghanistan’s fundamental problem is not closed schools; it is a crisis of political legitimacy Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s former president, who is reportedly under house arrest in Kabul these days, occasionally raises his voice on political and social issues. His statements cannot be compared with those of an ordinary citizen. Karzai was once president of Afghanistan, and he still carries considerable political weight and influence. A few days ago, he once again called on the Taliban to reopen the doors of schools to Afghan girls. On the surface, this is a positive political message. No society can afford to remain indifferent to the denial of education to girls. But if we define Afghanistan’s problem simply as the closure of girls’ schools, we risk overlooking the country’s larger and more fundamental crisis. Afghanistan’s problem is not simply that the doors of schools are closed. The deeper problem is a crisis of...

  A Pact on Paper: Why the Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey Alliance Faces a Difficult Test ANALYSIS Mecca, August 7, 2026 In 2015, Saudi Arabia learned an uncomfortable lesson about alliances. When Riyadh asked Pakistan to join its military campaign in Yemen, Pakistan's parliament debated the request for five days and then unanimously voted to stay out of the war. Islamabad promised to defend Saudi territory if the kingdom itself were attacked, but it refused to send troops into a conflict that Pakistani lawmakers feared could destabilize their own country and damage relations with neighboring Iran. Eleven years later, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have signed a mutual-defense agreement with Turkey in Mecca, declaring that an attack on one of the three countries will be treated as an attack on all. The irony is hard to miss. The new agreement looks formidable on paper. Saudi Arabia has enormous financial resources and access to some of the world's most sophisticated weapons. Turkey has ...

  Literacy Is Not Enough: Why Education Alone Cannot Build an Afghan Nation For much of my life, I believed that education was Afghanistan's best hope for overcoming tribalism. If more Afghans learned to read, attended universities, and studied history, philosophy, and science, I assumed they would gradually see themselves less as members of tribes and more as citizens of a single nation. I still believe education is indispensable. But after watching Afghanistan's political evolution over the past four decades—and observing debates even among the Afghan diaspora—I have come to question one assumption that once seemed self-evident: literacy and university degrees do not automatically create national thinking. Nearly a century ago, Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria conducted a remarkable study in Central Asia. Working among communities where some people had recently become literate while others had not, he discovered that literacy changed the way people reasoned. Illiterate ...

  Over the past few days, social media has once again been consumed by arguments over history. Who killed Sardar Daoud Khan? Who poisoned Amir? Who was responsible for the death of Hafizullah Amin? And who did what a century ago? I want to be careful here, because history matters, and these are not trivial questions. Understanding what happened, and why, is part of how a society learns from its mistakes and holds power accountable. My concern isn't that we ask these questions. It's that we seem to only ask these questions — the same accusations, recycled every few months, rarely moving an inch closer to resolution, and almost never followed by the harder question: now what? Watching one of these threads unfold this week, a man in his sixties and a young university student were trading the exact same arguments their fathers likely traded thirty years ago — same accusations, same certainty, same dead end. Neither walked away from the conversation with anything new. Neither wil...

  In June 2026, the Taliban ordered civil servants and soldiers to stop bringing smartphones to work. A military court order banned the devices for judges, officials, and troops alike. Violators would have their phones smashed, on top of legal and sharia punishment. Officials posted videos of themselves destroying their own devices, to prove obedience. Offices scrambled back to landlines and voice calls. A tracking registry now logs names, job titles, and phone numbers to enforce the ban. The timing wasn't random. The order followed protests in Herat, after Taliban forces arrested women and girls for "improper hijab." Witnesses say Taliban forces opened fire on the crowd, killing at least one person. Videos of the shooting spread fast. The regime's answer wasn't just to crack down on protesters. It was to go after the phones. This is not a small bureaucratic memo. It's a regime admitting something out loud: it fears the phone in its own officials' pocket...

A video recently circulated of an Afghan mullah expressing frustration with the Taliban. His complaint was not about foreign policy or ideology. It was about poverty and hunger. While millions of Afghans struggle to survive, he said, some Taliban officials appear more concerned with personal privileges — including taking additional wives — than with easing the suffering of ordinary people. It was a small but revealing moment. A religious figure from within the Taliban’s own environment was saying what many Afghans quietly say: those who promised to restore justice have failed to address the daily struggles of the people they rule. This raises an uncomfortable question: if the Taliban cannot protect their own citizens from poverty and despair, how can their system of rule — especially its restrictions on women and girls — be defended abroad? To be fair, sympathy for the Taliban among some Western writers and analysts does not usually come from cruelty or indifference. Many have focused ...