Afghan Commentary Post

  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 ...

  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 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...

  ده هزار سال بعد فرشتگان در تالار بزرگ آسمانی گرد هم آمده بودند. جبرئیل امین، پس از نواختن زنگ آغاز جلسه، گفت: «حضار گرامی، دستور جلسه امروز این است که ذات اقدس الهی درباره موضوعی مهم با شما سخن خواهند گفت.» سپس رو به خدا کرد و گفت: «ذات اقدس الهی، بفرمایید.» خداوند لبخندی زد و گفت: «از حضور همه شما سپاسگزارم. در جلسه گذشته شنیدم که شایعاتی در میان بعضی از فرشتگان رواج یافته است؛ شایعاتی مبنی بر اینکه گویا من پیر و فرسوده شده‌ام و عده‌ای در فکر انتخاب خدای دیگری هستند! راستش را بخواهید، این حرف‌ها مرا نمی‌رنجاند. من از این گونه شایعات بسیار شنیده‌ام. اما امروز می‌خواهم حقیقتی را برای همیشه روشن کنم. خوب گوش کنید. من بیش از آنکه یک شخص باشم، یک نمادم؛ نماد نظم و قانونی که بر سراسر هستی فرمان‌روایی می‌کند. من نه بهشتی ساخته‌ام و نه دوزخی. کسانی که در طول تاریخ خود را نماینده من بر زمین معرفی کرده‌اند، هرگز از سوی من مأموریتی نداشته‌اند. من حتی بسیاری از آنان را نمی‌شناسم. من هیچ انسانی را «بنده» خود نمی‌نامم؛ زیرا نه به بندگی کسی نیاز دارم و نه به عبادت او. من همه آفریدگان را یکسان ...

  PROLOUGE   The Checkpoint   In a searing summer, when the heat melted the asphalt, the smell of it hung in the air. A line of trucks and buses and passenger cars inched along, waiting to pass the Taliban checkpoint. A group of young boys ran alongside the moving traffic, tapping on windows — some offering bottled water, others chewing gum and maswak toothbrushes. A tall man with a long beard and long black hair resting uncombed on his shoulders, half-naked, wrapped only in the Taliban banner, ran up and down the line, tearing at his own hair, his face bloody, the blood dripping down and staining the white banner red. He had been fine a few days before. He was the commander of this checkpoint. Later, one of his mujahideen brothers described the story this way: The road between Kabul and Kandahar ran straight through Maidan Wardak, and on that stretch stood a checkpoint that had been there long enough to look like it had grown out of the ground — half mud...

  Juma Khan Fateh's rebellion grabs the headlines. The deeper threat is a government that has never earned its people's consent. Juma Khan Fateh is not the Taliban's real problem. The regime is. For the past month, Fateh, a former Taliban commander from Badakhshan, has dominated headlines after breaking with the group. A farmer, warlord, and opportunist, he took to the mountains and is said to command hundreds of fighters. His refusal of the deputy governor post in southern Zabul Province — he chose to go home instead — has been read by anti-Taliban observers as a major security threat, the start of a political earthquake in the non-Pashtun north that could, in time, bring the regime down. In a country with five decades of war behind it, anything is possible. But I don't believe Juma Khan is the greatest threat to this regime. The greater threat comes from the Taliban's own hands. Their policies are weakening the foundation of their rule the way rainwater seeps into...

  The Population Paradox: Why Afghanistan's Growth Is a Barrier to Stability Afghanistan cannot even agree with itself on how many people live within its borders. On July 11, 2026, marking World Population Day, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) put the country's population at 48.6 million. The Taliban's own National Statistics and Information Authority, using a different methodology, put the figure at 37.2 million — a gap of more than 11 million people. Independent demographic models, including the UN Population Division's World Population Prospects, converge closer to 45 million. That the country's rulers and the international community cannot settle on a shared set of facts is itself a symptom of the crisis: a state too fractured to count its own citizens is unlikely to be able to employ, educate, or feed them. In aging societies such as Japan or Germany, population growth is often welcomed as a remedy for shrinking workforces and decl...

  From Stingers to Patriots: Ukraine's Reagan Moment When President Donald Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the recent NATO summit, "We're going to give you a license to make Patriots. That's pretty cool, right?" the offhand remark masked the significance of what may become one of the most important strategic decisions of the war. If implemented, allowing Ukraine to manufacture Patriot air-defense systems would represent arguably the most consequential Western military policy shift since President Ronald Reagan approved the transfer of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the Afghan resistance in the 1980s. The significance lies not simply in the weapon itself, but in what the decision represents. The West is no longer merely supplying Ukraine's defense. It is helping Ukraine build the industrial capacity to sustain it. History does not repeat itself exactly, but it often rhymes. Vladimir Putin should remember how the last Kremlin leadership underestimated that ...

  Last week, Pakistan launched its deadliest strike on Afghan soil in months. Islamabad says it killed dozens of militants. Kabul says it killed civilians. Both are probably right, and both are certainly angrier. The attack lands against a grim backdrop: Pakistan now leads the Global Terrorism Index as the country most impacted by terrorism, recording 1,139 deaths and 1,045 incidents in 2025 — its worst year since 2013. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan drove that surge, carrying out five times as many attacks as the next most active group and increasing its operations by 24 percent over the past year, almost entirely in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa near the Afghan border. Islamabad accuses Kabul's Taliban government of sheltering the TTP; Kabul, in turn, demands that Pakistan finally recognize the Durand Line as a legitimate international border. Neither side is bluffing. Neither is budging. But a decades-old pattern of proxy warfare does not require a new bilateral breakthrough — it requires ...