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 ...
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Stop Chasing the Past and Start Building the Future?
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...
The Digital Asymmetry: Why the Information Race, Not a Firefight, Is the Taliban's Toughest Challenge
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...
The Taliban’s Western Defenders Have a Consistency Problem
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 ...
Badakhshan's Revolt is a Warning the Taliban Cannot Afford to Ignore
Badakhshan's Revolt Is a Warning the Taliban Cannot Afford to Ignore By Wahab Raofi Just after dawn on July 17, fighters from the newly formed Homeland Soldiers Front (Sepah-e Mihan) launched a coordinated assault on the district headquarters of Yaftal in Afghanistan's northeastern Badakhshan Province. Within hours, the insurgents had overrun Taliban positions, seized government offices, and briefly raised their own banner over the district center. Although Taliban reinforcements later retook the area, the battle marked the first time since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021 that an organized anti-Taliban force had temporarily captured a district headquarters. Militarily, the clash changed little. Politically, however, it may prove to be one of the most consequential events of Taliban rule. The significance of the Badakhshan uprising lies not in the territory briefly lost or regained but in what it reveals: nearly five years after reclaiming power, the Taliban still...
The Hijab Is Vanishing from Iran's Streets—and So Is the Mask of the Mullahs A Stark Warning to the Taliban: The Wind of Change Is Coming for Them, Too. By Wahab Raofi The hijab is falling from the heads of Iranian women—and in the same moment, the mask of the mullahs is falling too. The upheaval sweeping Iran since 2025 has not only given women the courage to remove their headscarves; it has unmasked a regime that is no longer the force it once was. Decades of institutionalized gender restrictions have made women the unlikely catalyst for the Islamic Republic's deepest crisis of legitimacy in its 45-year history. Across the country, women are publicly casting aside their hijabs, defying a dress code that has been enforced by law and by force since the revolution. This is not a fashion statement. It is a generation refusing to accept the terms their parents were forced to live under. An Iranian woman writing under a pseudonym in Persuasion magazine recently descr...
The Extraordinary Meeting of Heaven
The great hall of Heaven was filled with angels. Gabriel, the Trustworthy, struck the gavel and announced: "Honored angels, today's agenda is an important address from the Almighty." He then turned toward God. "Almighty Lord, the floor is yours." God smiled and began: "Thank you all for gathering here. At our last meeting, I heard rumors circulating among some of you. Apparently, there are those who believe I have grown old and that it may be time to replace me with another god. To be honest, such rumors do not offend me. I have heard many like them before. But today I want to clarify something once and for all. Listen carefully. I am less a person than I am a symbol—a symbol of the order and the laws that govern the universe. I have neither created a Heaven nor a Hell. Those who, throughout history, have claimed to be my representatives on Earth were never appointed by me. In fact, I do not even know many of them. I have never called any human being my s...