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Living a Mullah’s Life (2): The evolution of Islamic knowledge among village clerics

July 22, 2025

Sharif Akram

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Over the past four decades much has been written about Afghan mullahs and madrasas. Most commentary has focused on the role they have played in the diffusion of militancy and jihadism in Afghanistan. This report takes a very different look. It is the second instalment of a two-part mini-series assessing the changing role of rural mullahs, focusing on those from Khost, Paktia, Paktika and Ghazni provinces in Afghanistan’s southeast. Part 1 looked at their rising economic status which means they are no longer dependent on their communities, but also no longer independent of the state. This second instalment traces the consequences for rural mullahs of changes in Islamic education over recent decades. AAN’s Sharif Akram finds they are increasingly well-educated in Islamic matters and that this, combined with the Islamic Emirate’s privileging of religious status, is allowing them to take more prominent roles in their communities and in the state. 
The first part of this series is available here: Living a Mullah’s Life (1): The changing role and socio-economic status of Afghanistan’s village clerics

In the Arab world, the term alem, plural ulema (Islamic scholar) implies an advanced degree of Islamic learning, rather than just someone who performs religious functions. However, in Afghanistan, it is used interchangeably with two other terms, mullah and mawlawi, the latter being an Islamic cleric with more advanced education. 

This report refers to different types of Islamic schooling. At the apex is the dar ul-uloom or seminary, which is aimed at generating professional Muslim clerics. There are also madrasas, or Islamic schools, which teach all ages from basic Islam to primary-school aged children to advanced classes for young men (or women). There are also hujras, where informal Islamic education is given by a teacher, usually a village mullah, to children or youths. The author uses ‘school’ for non-madrasas.

Religious education has traditionally been the primary source of learning in Afghanistan, with the majority of Afghans – boys and girls – getting some religious education in mosques and madrasas. By contrast, the first schools were only established in 1903 by Amir Habibullah Khan. Until the early twentieth century, most religious education was also conducted outside the purview of the state. In urban areas, this was done through private madrasas endowed by wealthy citizens. In the countryside, as will be looked at in more detail below, there was a more informal system, where in each village, a teacher – usually a mullah – would instruct children and young men in specific religious texts, typically in a mosque, a hujra (a small room adjacent to a mosque, also used to host guests) or someone’s home. Modern Afghan rulers, recognising the importance of religious education to any state-building project, have tried to incorporate it into the state and bring it more closely under state control.

Abdul Rahman Khan (r1880-1901) was the first of Afghanistan’s rulers to establish a state-endowed madrasa, Kabul’s Madrasa-ye Shahi, where around 200 students enrolled at the expense of the state.[1] Abdul Rahman had strained relations with many religious leaders outside Kabul due to his attempts to centralise control of the country, but, under his successors, Habibullah Khan (r1901-1919) and Amanullah Khan (r1919-1929), this state-endowed madrasa produced many high-ranking and typically pro-government ulema and civil servants. In the interests of controlling the Islamic education received by those who would go on to be government functionaries, Amanullah Khan established two additional state-run madrasas in Kabul that would train all religious judges employed by the government. However, government madrasas remained limited to the country’s major urban centres and did not expand beyond them until the 1930s and 1940s. Even by the time of Daud Khan’s rule in 1970s, there were only 20 formal government-run madrasas in Afghanistan.[2] In addition to these, a few dozen private religious seminaries operated under the guidance of prominent religious leaders.

Given the scarcity of formal religious institutions in the country, many Afghans sought religious education in neighbouring countries. After the establishment of a seminary in the Indian town of Deoband in 1867, it replaced madrasas in Bukhara (in modern-day Uzbekistan), as the most popular destination for Afghan students.[3] The importance of the Dar ul-Uloom Deoband in Afghanistan was enhanced by the connections between its leadership and the so-called Frontier Mullahs, religious leaders guiding the militant struggle of the Pashtun tribes against British incursions in the North-West Frontier Province. Connections between the Afghan court and Deoband were also important during the reign of Amanullah, as Indian ulema who had studied there contributed to the development of the state-monitored madrasa curriculum and served as advisors to the court on religious matters.[4]

Religious education in rural areas before the Saur coup d’tat of 1978

In rural areas, little changed in the way of religious education for most of the twentieth century. There were limited options for those wanting a more formal, structured education who did not wish to travel outside Afghanistan. In the southeast, for example, there were a few government-sponsored madrasas, the first of which, Dar ul-Uloom Ruhani, was established in 1972 in a rural area outside Gardez in Paktia province. Some private madrasas were already active in the region. Two of these were in Ghazni’s Andar district – one founded in the 1880s by a prominent religious leader, Mullah Mushk-e Alam, in Shilgar[5] and a second, Nur al-Madaris, founded in the early 1940s.

One of AAN’s interviewees,[6] a mullah from Muqur district of Ghazni province where no madrasa existed until the early 1990s, described the situation in those days:

There were no madrasas back then [in Muqur in the mid-twentieth-century]. Ulema had to travel to different cities and countries and leave their homes just to acquire knowledge. They were often poor and couldn’t afford to stay away [from their families] for long. Besides, knowledge didn’t hold much value at the time – people simply didn’t care about it.

Therefore, the most common form of religious education for mullahs remained an informal, traditional system in each village. In this setup, pupils, boys and girls, typically between the ages of 7 and 12 would study particular religious texts, often without a structured curriculum and usually from the village mullah. Those aiming to become a mullah would stay on and learn additional subjects. This pattern had persisted for generations, with one mullah having studied with another and then passing on his knowledge to the next. This type of education typically took place in mosques, hujras and village homes where only the very basics of religion, without a specific curriculum, were taught. While this informal system was the most accessible option for most would-be mullahs, it was far from equivalent to the structured religious education available elsewhere. Van Linschoten and Gopal described it as “far more eclectic and irregular than the Deobandi curriculum found in major Afghan and Pakistani madrassas.”[7]

Mullahs told AAN that the hujra system had limited their learning. They explained that formal institutions for religious studies were almost non-existent and resources scarce. One interviewee described how mullahs struggled even to find books and teachers:

I remember ulema would borrow books from ulema in another district. They read them and then after that return them. Even when they found books, they needed someone to teach them, but there was no one nearby. Travelling to other provinces or countries was difficult.

This lack of a formal curriculum and of trained teachers and institutional oversight meant that mullahs often acquired only a basic understanding of religious teachings from individuals who, in many cases, were themselves not qualified. They then relied on this limited knowledge to serve as spiritual leaders and educators. As a result, the overall level of religious knowledge among many rural mullahs remained low for many years. Several interviewees who were not mullahs agreed that becoming a mullah required little in-depth religious knowledge. One put it plainly:

If you have a paj [white turban], long clothes, know some Arabic texts and understand a few basic elements of Islam – Congratulations, you’re a mullah. You can do the imamat

of a village. It’s that simple.

As this interviewee highlighted, mullahs typically studied a limited variety of religious texts. The most common were Khulasa (The Compendium), Shurut al-Salat (Conditions of Prayer), al-Mukhtasar al-Quduri (al-Quduri Abridged), Kanz al-Daqa’iq (The Treasure of Subtleties) and Nur al-Zulam (The Light of Darkness), all of which focused on fundamental aspects of Islamic faith and jurisprudence. For instance, Khulasa outlines the obligatory components of prayer, without which prayers are deemed invalid; Shurut al-Salat details the Sunnahs of the prayer, along with the wajibs and mustahabs (obligatory and preferred components) of prayer; and Quduri, written by Imam al-Quduri in the tenth century, this covers the basic essential elements of Hanafi jurisprudence, including to do with worship, business transactions, marriage, divorce, inheritance and criminal law.

Beyond religious studies, some mullahs in the southeast, who were Pashtun, also learnt Persian language and literature. Panj Kitab (The Five Books), a widely studied collection of spiritual and religious Persian poetry by poets such as Abdul Rahman Jami and Fariduddin Atar, played a crucial role in their education. Persian was then the official and administrative language of Afghanistan and proficiency in it was essential for reading and composing formal texts.

Overall understanding of Islamic theology among mullahs was therefore limited; often, their education only enabled them to lead prayers and perform basic rituals in the community such as nikah (marriage) and janaza (funeral prayers). Mullahs did also play an important role in local dispute resolution, acting not as scholars but as independent and respected members of the community. One interviewee recalled:

Just a few books of fiqh [jurisprudence] covered almost all the issues people faced in their daily lives, addressing matters such as nikah, zakat [alms] and janaza that were essential for the community. For more complex matters, they would seek guidance from senior mawlawis. 

Several mullahs told AAN that many of their fellow mullahs struggled even with the basic recitation of the Quran. Instead of following the established tajwid (the elocution rules for Quranic recitation), they would read the Quran as though it were a normal Pashto or Persian text. Few mullahs, according to AAN’s interviewees, understood the meaning of the words they recited. One interviewee recounted multiple occasions in rural areas of Khost where the village mullah was unable to deliver funeral prayers and sermons (which should be in Arabic), so these were delayed until a more competent mullah arrived.

One interviewee, a community elder in Paktia, said he remembered a mullah who was unable to read a qabala (land ownership document) written in Persian. When villagers asked him to explain its contents, he had no answer. “The next day,” the interviewee recalled, “he went to another village to learn [the meaning of the document] from another mullah.”

That said, at the district or provincial level, there were usually some prominent mullahs who had a more advanced understanding of Islam, particularly of fiqh. Interviewees from Zurmat in Paktia province, for example, said there used to be five mullahs in the district who were recognised for their knowledge. When village-level mullahs encountered complex legal or religious issues, they would refer people to these scholars, acknowledging their own inability to answer such questions or provide adequate guidance.

Despite their limited knowledge, mullahs were still able to manage affairs and command respect in their communities due to the structure of Afghan society and the socio-economic context in which they lived. As one interviewee put it, “In the entire village, the only person who could read a text was the mullah.” Many of the social rules and norms that governed village life were not derived from Islam, but guided by long-held local customs and traditions that mullahs were not disposed to challenge. Mullahs could participate in this alternative value system without a deep knowledge of Islamic law and theology and therefore they were able to maintain influence in communities even if they had little formal Islamic education.

Conflicts bring drastic change: 1979-2001

A significant shift in education for mullahs was a consequence of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It forced millions of Afghans into exile, with over three million seeking refuge in neighbouring Pakistan alone, where they settled in refugee camps and adapted to life in their new environment.

In those camps, alongside schools, set up by the United Nations and NGOs, a new form of religious education began to take root. Muslims from around the world began visiting to join the fight against the Soviets, offering financial support and establishing madrasas and religious seminaries. These efforts were supported by both charities from around the Muslim world and donations from the Gulf states. As a result, hundreds of new madrasas were established and Afghan refugees enrolled in large numbers, as there were few other opportunities for education in the camps.[8] Mullahs who had previously only possessed basic knowledge of Islam now had the opportunity to deepen their understanding of Islamic theology in these newly established institutions, which offered a more advanced and diverse version of Islamic education than the education provided in Afghanistan’s villages. Most followed the Dar ul-Uloom Deoband educational model, which is Hanafi, the school which most Afghan Sunni Muslims follow, while others, particularly those run by Arabs, who also typically had deeper pockets, adopted a Salafi-Wahabi curriculum.[9] What was on offer, education-wise, also evolved as regular schools in the camps improved during the 1990s. The schools were largely primary, with a few high schools where pupils were selected on ability, and even a few scholarships to Pakistani universities. As the quality of the official camp schools improved, many parents preferred to send their children, especially their boys, to a school, rather than, or in addition to, a madrasa. That was also the case for girls in the 1990s: increasing numbers were enrolled and stayed in school, incentivised by families getting WFP tins of edible oil in exchange, something which helped break the taboo common in some communities against getting daughters educated.[10]

The migration to Pakistan also facilitated connections among people from different regions of Afghanistan. The concentration of diverse Afghans in refugee camps helped spread knowledge among previously disconnected communities. “Many people started learning from well-known mullahs who’d also became refugees. I began studying basic texts from Mullah Miraki from Kunduz [in northern Afghanistan],” one mullah from Khost, in the southeast, recalled. The availability of intellectual resources, particularly books, further supported this growth. “Unlike in Afghanistan, you could find many books there and read them. People would learn [from those books] what they couldn’t understand from another mawlawi,” another mullah explained.

Even after the Soviets withdrew in 1989 and the Moscow-backed regime collapsed in 1992, the subsequent civil war among mujahedin factions left many Afghans preferring to remain in Pakistan. During this period, madrasas offered significant benefits to the (mainly male) teenage students, such as free schooling and food and board, at a time when ordinary Afghans living in the refugee camps struggled. Therefore, many young men who were not from families who had a tradition of sending their sons to become mullahs took advantage of the opportunity for them to acquire a religious education.

After the withdrawal of the Soviets and the fall of the communist government in Kabul, many mullahs who had studied in Pakistani madrasas returned with the idea of establishing similar religious schools in Afghanistan. This coincided with the rise of the Taliban, a movement founded by former mujahedin, mainly from greater Kandahar, who had been religious students (talibs), mostly in hujras in Afghanistan or (less commonly) Pakistani madrasas. The Taliban took over most of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, establishing their first Islamic Emirate.

The takeover of the state by talibs played a crucial role in promoting the establishment of more madrasas. The first Taliban government began building them in major cities such as Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad and their surroundings, prioritising religious education over schooling, and indeed adding more Islamic education to both school and university curricula, so that for example, medical students had to devote 50 per cent of their time to Islamic studies.[11] For the first time in Afghanistan’s modern history, both formal and informal religious education, were functioning on a massive scale. Hundreds of new private madrasas for boys and young men were established and thousands enrolled in them.[12] This was a time, when, according to an estimate by UNICEF in 2000, only four to five per cent of primary-aged children, girls and boys, in Afghanistan were going to primary school. (The Taliban had also officially banned all schooling for girls.) The numbers attending madrasas is not known.

Islamic education under the Republic: 2001-21

With the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, this trend slowed, as the new government showed less interest in religious education. Formal madrasas registered with the state were still operational, but not on the same scale as under the Taliban; the government attempted to regulate madrasa education but the majority remained unregistered.[13]

As the insurgency against the Islamic Republic and its foreign military backers intensified, and with mullahs often targeted by United States and NATO forces because of their suspected affiliation with the Taliban, many mullahs from rural areas chose to flee to Pakistan once again. There, they established new madrasas to provide religious education to their fellow Afghans.[14] However, as the insurgency began to gain momentum and control more territory, the Taliban could begin to provide political support to mullahs living in areas under their control inside Afghanistan.

Many Taliban-aligned mullahs, having completed their education in Pakistan, chose to return to Afghanistan and live in those Taliban-controlled areas, where they began establishing their own madrasas. In Paktia province’s Zurmat district alone, for instance, the author knows of a Taliban group commander who established two madrasas in 2014 and 2016, assigning local mullahs to lead them and using his position to collect funds from the community. In Paktika’s Mata Khan district, similarly, the author knows another Taliban commander who established a madrasa in the early 2010s where some 200 youths studied. The subsequent increase in madrasas seems to have met rising demand from communities as, according to our interviewees, a single madrasa would host hundreds of students. One interviewee related that in his home district of Deh Yak in Ghazni, more than a dozen large madrasas have been established in the past decade, each hosting over 300 students.

In rural areas, madrasas were an attractive option for many, because as articulated by one mullah: “When you have five sons, you can’t give them proper attention or education. Some [families] can’t even afford to feed them. So, they some send some to the cities, others abroad and the rest to madrasas, where they learn something and are protected from society’s evils.” Demographic factors have contributed to the trend. “In the past, said one interviewee, “families had many children, but half would die due to a lack of healthcare. Now, he said, “families have many children and no one is dying, so they send them to madrasas, where they are both educated and kept safe.”

Islamic education since 2021

Since the Taliban’s return to power, madrasa education sponsored by the state has expanded even more. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has been both registering informal madrasas that are supported by local charities and communities and providing them with resources, and establishing new, state-run madrasas. Since the 2021 takeover, the IEA’s Ministry of Education has announced that it will establish a large government-supported madrasa in every province, with free food and accommodation for the (male) students and high salaries for the teachers (Radio Azadi). The Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs has also announced separate plans to establish two madrasas in every district (TOLO News). Interest in madrasas comes from the very top of the Taliban government, with many high-ranking Taliban also running their own religious schools. For example, acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi has a madrasa in Kabul’s city’s Shash Darak, acting Deputy Minister of Border and Tribal Affairs Ali Jan Ahmad a madrasa in Musahi district in Kabul province and acting Minister of Water and Power Mullah Abdul Latif Mansur a madrasa in Zurmat in Paktia.

Meanwhile, since the Taliban’s return, many mullahs without formal non-religious education have enrolled in bachelor degree programmes in fields such as computer science, political science, business administration and economics. The author knows more than a dozen such mullahs who are members of the Taliban who are now attending university programmes. The IEA government, to support this, has announced that those who have completed the wara dawra(twelfth grade) in informal madrasas are now officially recognised – after an exam – as high school graduates, which makes them eligible for university enrolment (BBC).[15] Moreover, according to the author’s information, they have also offered those who fought for the Taliban movement and did not have the chance to study in madrasas or schools, the chance to complete high school in a single year without even attending every day.

What do Afghan mullahs learn in madrasas?

As the number of madrasas increased, the nature of religious education also began to evolve. Firstly, hujras are scarcely to be found any more, having been driven out of business by the rise of the madrasa. Secondly, pupils and students in madrasas follow more rigorous curricula and are taught by better-trained teachers. When it comes to the curriculum, the majority of Afghan madrasas (whether formally state-registered or informal) follow the Dars-e Nizami curriculum developed at Dar ul-Uloom Deoband, with some variations, as some madrasas put greater emphasis on non-religious subjects than others[16] This system emphasises traditional Islamic subjects, while also incorporating certain other disciplines such as mathematics, computer science and English. Students study the Quran, focusing on proper tajwid and tafsir (Quranic interpretation). They also study the Hadith – the sayings and actions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, documented in collections such as Sahih ul-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. Fiqh is taught using the foundational texts of the Hanafi school, such as Hidayahand Radd ul-Muhtar.[17]

In addition, students learn Arabic language and literature, including sarf (morphology) and nahw (grammar), classical texts and poetry. Classical Persian poetry, including works by figures like Rumi, are also included. Mantiq and hikmah(logic and philosophy) are taught, incorporating elements of classical Greek and Islamic philosophical traditions, as well as the study of belief. The curriculum also covers rhetoric (balagha), focusing on Arabic literary studies. The curriculum incorporates elements of the teachings of classical Sufi scholars, particularly from the Naqshbandi tradition.[18] Sirat (the life of the Prophet Muhammad) and early Islamic history are also important components of students’ education in madrasas.

This curriculum differs significantly from the one followed in the hujras and the traditional student-teacher method. For instance, it introduces a modern grading system where students study within a structured framework, complete with defined schedules, specific timeframes and exam systems, much like those found in schools and universities. Upon completion of their studies, students are awarded certificates, which allow them to officially claim certain titles that reflect the level of knowledge they have attained. For example, those who acquire only a basic knowledge of Islam are given the title of mullah, while those who pass the fourteenth grade of the Dars-e Nizami curriculum are referred to as mawlawi. After this, students who choose to specialise in jurisprudence are called mufti – they are considered qualified to give fatwas, religious rulings – while those who opt for the advanced study of Hadith are given the title sheikh ul-hadith, or of the Quran, sheikh ul-Quran.

In addition to this more rigorous curriculum, exposure to different discourses on Islamic sciences and the availability of a more diverse literature has, according to interviewees, broadened mullahs’ understanding of the various Islamic schools of thought in recent years. Our interviewees discussed this evolution, many attributing it partially to time spent as refugees in Pakistan, whether studying there or now. One interviewee, a mullah from Nangrahar province, explained:

Madrasas in Pakistan played a key role in spreading [religious] knowledge in Afghanistan. In the past, there were many issues in Hanafi jurisprudence that our ulema had either never heard of or didn’t have the capacity to understand. Now, praise be to Allah, thanks to these madrasas, our ulema have a comprehensive understanding of every aspect of the sharia of the Prophet Muhammad. They are experts in sirah, tafsir, tajwid, mantiq, ilm al-kalam [study of Islamic doctrine], balaghah, and ifta [delivering fatwas].

Another interviewee, a mullah from Gurbaz district in Khost, said:

Our scholars are now as knowledgeable as the great Deobandi scholars. They can even write sharha [explanation of a classical Islamic text] … They’re skilled in Arabic and understand all the issues that are currently important. They know Islamic history, specialise in hadith, and are experts in Quran recitation and its proper recitation. All of this is a blessing from these madrasas, where knowledge has blossomed.

Mullahs and their position in society since the return of the IEA

The increasing understanding of Islamic subjects on the part of mullahs has had complicated consequences for their social status within communities. In part, it has led to increased respect for them and their work among rural conservative communities and the older generation. Among younger educated men, however, their authority and their claim to represent or champion religion and now also the state has been viewed with some scepticism; they may be criticised for being too conservative or for using religion to serve their own personal interests. This is reinforced by the preferential treatment they are given by the current government in hiring those with Islamic credentials. One consequence of this is that many families feel that a religious education for their boys is a more attractive option than in the past. Underlining this point, a university student from Kabul, told AAN:

These days, what gets you a job is not a university diploma but a turban, a beard and a madrasa certificate. If you have them, you can get a job wherever you want; if not, you won’t, no matter how qualified you are.

Mullahs also now feel more able to challenge society. “Ulema have now returned to their original role in society, one IEA official told AAN. “They are now able to abolish many norms that contradict Islam.” Other interviewees agreed and it seems that since the return of the IEA, many mullahs in the southeast have tried to leverage their position in society to challenge older customary norms that they feel are contrary to sharia. Some of the examples they gave are – perhaps surprisingly – progressive. For instance, several mullahs interviewed for this report said that they have been manoeuvring to extend religious education to women – a practice that remains unusual in Afghanistan’s rural areas and in particular those of the southeast, where traditional norms typically restrict female education beyond early childhood. One of the mullahs interviewed told AAN about efforts to provide religious education for women:

The ulema have done a lot of work in this regard. They’re trying to convince people that women, like men, have the right to get an education and that it’s obligatory. They’ve been talking about female scholars from [earlier Islamic] history and how they contributed to jihad in the time of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him). [Mullahs] are amongst the first people who demanded that wealthy folk build madrasas for women and made a safe environment for them to study in. 

Mullahs also reported efforts to promote a woman’s right to receive inheritance in line with sharia, a practice rarely followed in Afghanistan. (For more on women’s inheritance rights, see this March 2025 AAN piece.) “Ulema are preaching about this issue,” said one mullah from Ghazni. “They’re trying to convince people to follow the principle.” Another interviewee from Nangrahar reported that several mullahs he knew of had given their own sisters their inheritance, as mandated by the Quran, in order to set an example for the community.

Similarly, some of the mullahs that AAN spoke to reported that they insist a woman must give her consent to marriage or else the marriage is considered invalid. In Afghanistan this has never been common, although the Quran mandates it. A mullah from Paktia province underlined that: “Getting the consent of the girl in marriage is the most essential element of a valid nikah. The consent must not be imposed on her but should be of her own will. If not, then the nikah is naqis[flawed].”

One other custom that both the IEA government and some mullahs have been trying to reform is the payment of bride price, the sum paid by the groom or his family to the bride’s family.[19] (This is distinct from mahr, the gift given – or promised – by the groom to the bride, as mandated by Islam.) For families with many daughters, high bride prices are valued, and the brides themselves may feel they are a mark of their worth. However, a mullah, who is also an IEA official, from Logar province explained that they also make getting married difficult and, he said, cause social problems:

If someone wants to marry, they need to earn large sums of money, and that created significant challenges. In our district, ulema gathered and explained, from a sharia perspective, how wrong this was and its negative repercussions. They convinced the people to reach a consensus, and the bride prices were lowered. This change has been widely implemented, and now people are very happy with it.

Other interviewees mentioned that mullahs are now better able to influence dispute resolution along the lines of Islamic principles. They described jirgas (tribal assemblies) in the past that would resolve matters not according to sharia but in line with Pashtun tribal norms for compensation known as nerkh (literally, price or exchange rate). As a mullah from Paktia said, things are now changing:

In the past, when someone would seize somebody else’s land, they would either fight each other or ask for help from the qawmi mashran [tribal elders], who would then resolve the matter through a jirga. But now, they refer to the ulema and ask for the resolution of the matter based on sharia.

However, another interviewee from Khost highlighted that mullahs’ efforts to enforce more Islamic practices in their communities often receive a less than positive response:

My friend who studied in Akora [Dar ul-Uloom Haqqania in Akora Khattak, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan] got the imamat of Zangi Kala [a village in Khost]. When he went there, he summoned all the village elders and asked them to show how they perform the prayer and what they recite. Most of the elders didn’t know the correct way. My friend then told them that they should come every day after the night prayer and he would teach them the correct way. Many elders were upset with this and told him that they wouldn’t change what they’d learned from their ancestors, as it was completely correct.

Mullahs and the future of Afghan society 

Mullahs have gained influence and power in recent years, beginning with the jihad against the Soviets and peaking with the return of the Taliban in 2021 – but their growing power has also created controversy over their role in society. Afghan rural society is not always opposed to the idea of religious figures as the key political force in society, but the degree to which communities accept their growing power varies greatly. Some Afghans feel that Islamic government by mullahs is the sole legitimate form of rule; others agree with this concept, but think that the interpretation of Islamic law by the Taliban government or by a particular mullah is incorrect. As the author concluded in the first part of this research, rural mullahs used to be economically dependent on their community and independent of the state. Their rising socioeconomic status has made them economically independent of their congregations, but they now often have greater connections with the state, or indeed have become part of the state, as ministers, governors, police, soldiers, teachers or officials. By chance, this has also gone along with greater Islamic learning.

The implications of being part of a political entity, making policies and running a government are complex for mullahs. On the one hand, they now possess greater political power, which may enable them to shape Afghan society according to their ideas. On the other hand, their new position makes them susceptible to criticism and has created a contradictory image of them in public opinion. Once aiming to be admired for their piety and neglect of worldly matters, mullahs now enjoy state privileges and – for some – a more lavish lifestyle. That attracts criticism, that they are manipulating state authority for personal gain, and also creates competition among the clerics themselves over privileges and influence. Furthermore, any shortcomings in governance are often attributed to the fact that this is a government of mullahs, which may erode the status of all as religious leaders.

Meanwhile, there are also new challenges to mullahs from within Afghan society, given the decades of comparative openness and connection with the broader world. As Afghans become increasingly more literate and gain access to religious education, mullahs are no longer the sole source of religious authority. Awareness of other interpretations of Islam, particularly amongst the younger generation, is growing. As one mullah explained:

In the past, no one would question a mullah on a religious issue because there were no other sources of information. But now, with access to the internet, religious books and scholars with different perspectives, things have changed. I remember once asking someone not to shave his beard, and he immediately showed me a video of an Arab mullah arguing that shaving your beard isn’t a problem.

Finally, some mullahs struggle to provide the younger generation with the guidance necessary for navigating the complexities of today’s world. Traditional madrasa education has not equipped them for addressing current issues. Many mullahs have also started to enrol in universities, pursuing studies in fields such as science, technology, international politics and diplomacy. It seems they now realise that traditional religious training is no longer sufficient to meet the challenges of contemporary life, but it is as yet unclear how and to what extent the Islamic Emirate government itself will adapt to the realities of the modern world.

Edited by Fabrizio Foschini, Letty Philips and Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 See Mohammad Kakar, Government and Society in Afghanistan: The reign of Amir Abdul Rahman, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1979, pp161-163.
↑2 Misbahullah Abdulbaqi, Madrassah in Afghanistan: Evolution and its future, Policy Perspectives 5, 2, 2008, pp130-159.
↑3 Kaja Borchgrevink, Beyond Borders: Diversity and Transnational Links in Afghan Religious Education, Oslo, Peace Research Institute Oslo, 2010.
↑4 Sana Haroon, ‘Religious Revivalism across the Durand Line’, in Shahzad Bashir and Robert D Crews (eds) Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2012.
↑5 Senzil K Nawid, Religious Response to Social Change in Afghanistan 1919-29: King Amanallah and the Afghan Ulema, California, Mazda Publishing, 1999, p10.
↑6 The findings in this research are based on 19 in-depth interviews carried out in August, September and December 2024 with mullahs from the provinces of Khost, Paktia, Paktika and Ghazni, as well as insights gained from conversations with community leaders and mullahs from these and other provinces between June and December 2024.
↑7 Anand Gopal and Alex Strick van Linschoten, Ideology in the Afghan Taliban, June 2017.
↑8 For a detailed account of the rise and role of madrasas in the 1980s see, International Crisis Group, Pakistan: Madrasas, Extremism and The Military, 2002.
↑9 For more details on Salafi education and case studies on the type of education provided in Pakistani madrasas, see Borchgrevink, Beyond Borders, footnote 4.
↑10 Information about the refugee schools came from a former director of an NGO in charge of provincial education for Afghan refugees in one of Pakistan’s provinces.
↑11 For more on this era, including the ban on girls’ education and the greater Islamification of the curriculum of schools and university, see Said Reza Kazemi and Kate Clark, Who Gets to Go to School? (2) The Taleban and education through time, 31 January 2022.
↑12 Abdulbaqi, ‘Madrasas in Afghanistan’, p133.
↑13 Mohammad Osman Tariq, Religious Institution Building in Afghanistan: An Exploration, Peace Research Institute Oslo, 2011.
↑14 Borchgrevink, Beyond Borders: Diversity and Transnational Links in Afghan Religious Education, pp 44-46
↑15 Similar demands were made in the early years of the Republic by Jamiat-e Islami and other mujahedin factions whose members had been fighting in the ‘resistance’ against the first Emirate and therefore, they said, lost their chance for an education. Their members were then discriminated against when it came to proving their suitability to enter university and if in government employment, to get the bonus that went along with a university education.
↑16 For a detailed analysis of the system see Sabrina al Faarsiyyah, The Nizami Curriculum: A historical glimpse and critical proposals, unpublished PhD diss, Dar ul-Uloom Birmingham, 2020.
↑17 Al-Hidayah fi Sharh Bidayat al-Mubtadi, commonly referred to as al-Hidayah, is a 12th-century legal manual by Burhan al-Din al-Marghinani and is among the most influential books of Hanafi jurisprudence. Radd al-Muhtar ila al-Durr al-Mukhtar (Diverting the Baffled to ‘The Chosen Pearl’) by the 18th century Syrian scholar, Ibn Abidin, is an annotative commentary on an earlier, voluminous work of Hanafi jurisprudence, Al-Durr al-Mukhtar (The Chosen Pearl) by Ala al-Din al-Haskafi. Radd al-Mukhtar is considered the central reference for fatwas by Hanafi scholars.
↑18 The Naqshbandiyya has, for centuries, been the most popular Sufi order in Afghanistan, although others, namely the Qadiriyya and the Chishtiyya, have also been present.
↑19 For more detail on bride prices, including a district-wide move to reduce them, see this 2016 AAN report by Fazl Rahman Muzhary: The Bride Price: The Afghan tradition of paying for wives.

 

Living a Mullah’s Life (2): The evolution of Islamic knowledge among village clerics
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This fiasco didn’t start when Britain leaked Afghans’ names, but when we invaded their country

July 18, 2025

The Guardian
Friday, 18 July 2025

Even after Tony Blair’s bungled war, UK leaders still yearned to dominate the world stage. With the lifting of the superinjunction, we can all see where that has led

What odds on a public inquiry into the Afghan superinjunction? Gold-plated, judge-led, three years of fun and games, that is how British politics normally kicks an embarrassment into the long grass. And what odds on who will get off scot free – Tony Blair?

The more we pick away at the stages of this fiasco, the more from the start one blunder seemed to follow inevitably from another. There was no reason for the British invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. If the US wanted revenge on the Kabul regime for harbouring al-Qaida after 9/11, it could have done what Donald Trump did last month to Iran. A savage retaliatory blow against the country’s rulers would have made the point.

The invocation of article 5 of the Nato treaty to justify an invasion of Afghanistan was ridiculous. America’s security was not remotely threatened by terrorism directed from Kabul, any more than was Britain’s. Other Nato powers, bullied into showing sympathy, limited themselves to minimal non-fighting roles. Once Kabul had been attacked and the Taliban had fled, caution and common sense indicated swift withdrawal. The US military command wanted no invasion.

Blair was insistent in pressing Bush for “nation-building”, against considerable US scepticism. He was desperate for Britain to punch above its weight. In his Chicago speech in 1999, he had advocated the new Blair “doctrine of international community”, that of altruistic intervention. It was basically a call for more wars. Clinton’s office described Blair’s intervention in Kosovo as the prime minister “sprinkling too much adrenaline on his cornflakes”. When war duly arrived, Blair was insistent that British submarines fire the first barrage of missiles on Kabul. He told the 2001 Labour conference: “We will not walk away from Afghanistan, as the outside world has done so many times before … There is only one outcome: our victory not theirs.”

There followed a full-scale British occupation that culminated, in 2006, in a reckless, failed attempt to suppress the Taliban in Helmand. One result was that for 20 years, a sizeable chunk of Afghanistan’s modest administrative class found themselves employed by western occupying powers, including Britain. As the Taliban filtered back, these people assumed, perhaps foolishly, that the good old British empire would not desert them.

When the list of 19,000 collaborators in the British occupation was leaked, the danger was obvious. The Ministry of Defence was alerted that an anonymous member of a Facebook group had said he had the database and was threatening to post it in full. Not knowing if the list had been shared with the Taliban, the government acted to protect those named.

The defence secretary at the time, Ben Wallace, understandably wanted to keep the fact a secret just in case. A judge understandably agreed, for a while. But neither decision would stand the test of time – or the mounting embarrassment. The Treasury cost of honouring the list was not millions but billions.

The bulk of the blame must lie with the fact of the invasion and subsequent departure. The effort of the House of Commons this week to make the leak issue partisan was pitiful. Neither the cabinet nor parliament tried to stop Blair’s original occupation. In 2010, after nine years, it still voted overwhelmingly in favour of Britain’s presence continuing. Parliament was equally in favour of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. When in 2021 Boris Johnson finally joined the US in cutting and running, parliament washed its hands of the whole affair.

In Afghanistan, 457 British soldiers died. The cost of the war to the UK taxpayer was £30bn. Some 200,000 Afghans also died and 29,700 were accepted for resettlement between 2021 and 2024. These figures are the bill for the outrage over 9/11 and were utterly unnecessary. No other European country joined the US on anything like the same scale as Britain. There has not been a word of inquiry into who should carry any degree of personal responsibility.

Britain attempted to withdraw from its empire with dignity over the course of the 20th century. It did not always succeed. Yet, ever since, its rulers have seemed in a state of lingering regret. Like Blair, they have harboured a tarnished yearning for a Britain still playing a role on the world stage, a violent one if need be.

Though Britain was never remotely threatened, Blair was almost always at war, in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. David Cameron was bitten with the same bug, intervening in Libya and trying to do so in Syria. He built two giant aircraft carriers, one of which Boris Johnson could not resist sending to the South China Sea. Why was never explained.

If Trump has any virtue it has been in telling Europe that the old global interventionism is over. The US is fed up with being Europe’s policeman. The continent should be realistic and look after its own business. But even he could not resist the machismo of bombing Iran.

The lesson of the leak is not that emails are never safe. That surely is known. The real lesson is that Britain should never have spent a quarter of a century trying to impose its rule on Afghanistan in the first place. Will it now learn?

  • Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

This fiasco didn’t start when Britain leaked Afghans’ names, but when we invaded their country
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Russia Recognized Taliban’s Apartheid Regime In Afghanistan

July 12, 2025
By
Eurasia Review
July 12, 2025

On July 3, Russia won itself the dubious distinction of becoming the world’s first nation to formally recognize the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” The same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin had an hour-long conversation with President Donald Trump. Although both leaders talked about a range of issues, the Taliban regime or its formal recognition didn’t feature among the topics discussed. Apparently, the Russian president thought it too insignificant an issue t0 interest President Trump. Russia, however, waited four long years to give the Taliban de jure recognition. The Taliban had the entire world united against them since they seized Kabul at gunpoint on August 15, 2021.

The Taliban desperately wanted to fracture the world’s coalition of the willing, which refused to recognize them as a legitimate national authority. Since 2021, no nation—rich or poor, large or small, progressive or conservative—found them worthy of governing Afghanistan. The global rationale behind this assessment was the Taliban’s draconian restrictions banning girls and women from getting an education and employment. In their zest to enforce this ban, the Taliban literally locked up Afghan women behind the walls of their homes. For more than half of its inhabitants, Afghanistan has become a prison like Alcatraz, where women cannot step outside their homes unchaperoned by male guardians. The Taliban have even enforced a law to ban women’s voices from being heard in public, because they believe that feminine speech is too erotic for young Muslim men.

The Taliban defend this misogyny in the name of Islamic Shariat and Afghan (Pashtun) culture. In projecting what the United Nations calls gender apartheid onto Islam and thousands of years of Afghan heritage, the Taliban darkly stain both. That’s why none of the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has indulged them with the long-sought national recognition. Russia is not a Muslim-majority country, but 20 percent of its population is Muslim, while its Muslim-majority republics now number seven, including Chechnya. Moscow has become “Europe’s largest Muslim city.”

President Putin often presents himself as an outspoken defender of Islamic icons. When the burning of Qurans was on the rise in Europe, Putin criminalized desecration of the Quran in all of Russia through a legislative measure. He rebuilt Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya, which was razed to the ground in a war with Moscow, and topped its skyline with what was billed Europe’s biggest mosque. In a meeting with the visiting Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain in 2016, Putin told him: “We are all Muslims” (not in the confessional sense, but as the victims of oppression). Since their seizure of Kabul in 2021, the Taliban have been playing to Putin’s Muslim-friendly inclinations to soften his view of their purging of the female gender from Afghan public spaces.

In this endeavor, they were greatly helped by former Taliban commanders and soldiers who defected from the Taliban movement to join a more virulent version that has become the Taliban’s sworn enemy, namely Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K). IS-K’s terrorist violence has shaken a region that spans south, central and west Asia, and extends to Eurasia. IS-K’s massacre at a concert in Moscow in 2024, in which 133 people were killed, forced Putin to reassess Afghanistan through the prism of terror. As IS-K has its bases in Afghanistan, it was ostensibly only natural for Putin to upgrade Russia’s relations with Afghanistan to blunt the gathering threat of IS-K’s violence.

The strength of the Taliban’s rivals, especially IS-K and Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP), can be gauged from the Taliban’s aversion to ever naming or condemning them for their atrocities. These militant outfits commit trans-border violence not just in Russia, but in Iran, Pakistan and the neighboring Central Asian Republics. Yet the Taliban are helpless to rein them in. As the wide swath of IS-K and TTP’s ranks are filled with former members of the Taliban movement, the leaders of the latter are kept up late at night because these defectors are former insiders who know their way around the Taliban.

Russia was already treating Taliban authorities as de facto rulers. While the rest of the world had abandoned Kabul since 2021, Moscow kept its embassy open and fully staffed at the highest level. In April this year, Russia even dropped the terrorist group designation for the Taliban, which it had enforced for two decades. By denying the Taliban regime the legitimacy of formal recognition, Moscow was in alignment with the rest of the world, and yet it was still benefiting from full diplomatic relations with Kabul.

Moscow seems most interested, with this recognition of the Taliban, in dissing the rest of the world, especially the West. In the West, any passion for human rights or women rights has already cooled. The State Department has shuttered its human rights offices at home and abroad. So, human rights diplomacy or the use of what Joseph Nye termed soft power to achieve moral advantage in international relations has slid way down in U.S. priorities. This is certainly good news for the Taliban. Yet President Trump is far from recognizing their regime any time soon, despite Trump’s interest in reclaiming Afghanistan’s largest air base at Bagram, which Americans built.

Splits in the Taliban’s ranks are now coming into the open. Dissidents like Abbas Stanikzai, who was initially presented as the Taliban’s favorite choice for prime minister and is still deputy minister for foreign affairs, earlier this year exiled himself to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He feared for his life because of his public advocacy for girls and women’s education and employment. The UAE is also home to Afghanistan’s former President Ashraf Ghani who immediately preceded the Taliban.

An even more lethal divide has opened up between the supreme leader of the Taliban and his potent rivals in the Haqqani Network. The Network’s leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, like Stanikzai, took a public stance in favor of girls and women’s education, and reprimanded the Taliban’s orthodox leadership for misinterpreting the faith. Early this year, Haqqani who is minister for the interior has absented himself from Kabul for months on an overseas trip to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where he has been reportedly lobbying for a planned parting of the ways with the misogynist Taliban leadership. He made similar but even stronger overtures to the United States, which recently lifted a $10 million bounty on his head. The New York Times described him as Afghanistan’s best hope for change.

Russia’s formal recognition of the Taliban regime may not go far enough to save the Taliban from collapsing under the weight of an ugly power struggle or their inhumane policies. Some nations may find it tempting follow Russia’s lead—for instance, Pakistan or India—but they will likely find their move stalled by progressive opposition within their own societies. Even if they remain an exception, Russia is nevertheless contributing to the orphaning of human rights and the undermining of the international order.

Tarique Niazi teaches environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.

Russia Recognized Taliban’s Apartheid Regime In Afghanistan
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Months, Years and Thousands of Afghanis Later… Stories of Afghans battling bureaucracy

July 8, 2025

Rohullah Sorush

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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Trying to get important documents from the state can be a maddening and expensive ordeal in Afghanistan. Many complain about the time-consuming and frustrating process of applying for a tazkira (ID card), passport, driving license, or a nikahkhat (marriage certificate). From government offices to courts to legal affairs departments, Afghans can get trapped in paperwork and corruption. If a clumsy official has made a mistake on a document – not an uncommon occurrence – it is the citizen who will pay the price, entering into a whole other layer of bureaucracy. AAN’s Rohullah Sorush has been hearing from people trying to get tazkiras, passports and marriage certificates to see how much time and money it takes to get these essential documents.

Getting a marriage certificate 

Traditionally, when people get married in Afghanistan, they do not get an official government document to certify the marriage. They either get a booklet from the mullah who performed the nikah (marriage), which is similar to an official nikahkhat, with photos of the spouses, their fingerprints and other details, or a more basic document, also from the mullah, that mentions the names of the spouses, the mullah and the amount of mahr, the gift given by the groom to the bride as stipulated in Islamic law.

For decades, successive Afghan governments from the communist era onwards have tried to make the use of marriage certificates mandatory.[1] Under the Islamic Republic, human rights and women’s rights groups hoped that an official nikahkhat could reduce child and forced marriages (see this 2007 report from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission) and there were also public awareness campaigns – but to limited effect (see this IWPR report from 2016). This has been echoed anecdotally to AAN, which asked more than a dozen people if they had registered their marriage at the time, and all simply said they did not.

However, since 2021, getting an official certificate – a nikahkhat – seems to have become more common. AAN interviews suggest the change has partly been driven by the surge in out-migration since 2021, with Afghan couples travelling to Europe or regional countries, where they need official documents, including a nikahkhat, or one spouse trying to bring the other to their new home country. A report by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in 2023 found that after the collapse of the Republic, for Afghans seeking to leave the country for various reasons, such as unemployment, poverty and instability, getting documentation – including a nikahkhat and a passport – became a priority. A defence lawyer in Balkh province, Amir Rasuli, gave another reason for the increased demand:

In the past, spouses were content to have [documents from the mullah who conducted the marriage], but recently, the demand for official marriage certificates has increased. Having an official marriage certificate guarantees women’s rights such as nafaqa [financial support, including food, clothes and housing], inheritance and mahr; it specifies the husband’s responsibilities towards his wife. 

However, getting a marriage certificate is not a straightforward process, as Khadija’s story illustrates.

Khadija’s story: the ultimate bureaucratic obstacle – state collapse

Khadija, who is 35 and lives in Kabul with her husband and two daughters, has experience of trying to get a nikahkhat under both the Republic and the current Islamic Emirate government. She began the process under the Republic:

We had a traditional nikahkhat, but then my husband said we should have an official one. He was very busy, so he asked me to take all our ID cards [mine, his and our daughters’] and go to apply for an official nikahkhat.

Khadija did not know where or how to begin:

I knew nothing about the procedure for obtaining a nikahkhat and didn’t even know the address of the court. So, I asked a relative and he told me to go to the court in Jangalak area in PD [police district] 6 … He said, first, I needed to go to a petition writer [ariza nawis] near the court to write an application for me, which I did.

When Khadija took the application to the court, she discovered there were two more steps, involving the religious and local authorities:

[The court] then gave me a form to take to the mullah imam of our mosque and the wakil-e guzar [neighbourhood representative] to confirm that I was living in Charqala-ye Chardi. My family knew the wakil-e guzar and the mullah imam, so it didn’t take much time for them to sign and stamp my form.

After that, Khadija’s relative told her there was yet another step:

I then had to take the form to the relevant municipality district so they could confirm that the wakil-e guzar was active. I didn’t know the address of the municipality office in District Six, so I asked my father-in-law to take it there.

He took her form to the municipality office in Kart-e se, but found out that another piece of documentation was needed:

They asked him to bring the safai [municipal tax] booklet of our house, but my father-in-law told them we lived in a rented house. They said if he could show them an electricity bill, it’d be alright. So he came home, got the last electricity bill and took it back. They accepted that and signed and stamped the form.

Khadija had now completed all the steps and was given a day to come to the court to finalise the document. However, events intervened:

I went to the court and submitted the form. It was so crowded I thought all the residents of Kabul had come to obtain their nikahkhats. A court employee took my application form and dated it and said, “Now your application is dated. You should come in the month of Sunbula [21 August to 20 September].” But then the Taliban came to power in August 2021, almost a month after I got the date for my application. As a result, I couldn’t get my nikahkhat at that time. 

Khadija could do nothing but wait for things to settle. It took a while for the courts to function again and then she tried again to get her nikahkhat:

After a few months, I was informed that the court had reopened and was processing the petitions and applications from the Republic era… The following day, I went to the court, but my name was among those marked ‘absent’ because they hadn’t appeared on the specified date. I talked to someone in the court who advised me to return another day, when they could provide a new date for my application. 

When Khadija returned, she faced more problems, including how soldiers behaved towards clients in the court:

It was 9 o’clock when I arrived at the court. It was very crowded. There were men and women, young and old. Some Taliban soldiers were trying to bring order there, but when they lost their patience, they beat people. I waited in a long line, but when it was my turn to submit my application, they said they wouldn’t collect it now. They told me they collected applications and petitions early in the morning. Around 300 to 400 people were in a line every morning, every day.

Khadija then asked her husband to take a day off work to go in her place:

He went to the court and they dated the application. Then we went to the court on the date to get our nikahkhat. We also brought two witnesses. We paid one thousand afghanis [USD14] and finally got our nikahkhat. It’d taken us nine months in total.

Steps for obtaining a marriage certificate

Drawing on our interviewees’ accounts, we have gleaned that these steps appear to be needed to obtain a nikahkhat:

Step one: Submit a formal petition to your local primary court’s registration department, with photos and IDs of the spouses.

Step two: Fill out a request form, which includes questions about the spouses’ first and last names, their residence and ahleyat (in this context, whether they are adults, of sound mind and in good health) and if there are any obstacles to the marriage. The form requires authorisation from the mosque’s imam, two neighbours, the wakil-e guzar and the district office. It is then returned to the relevant directorate or primary court for further processing.

Step three: Pay the marriage certificate fee using a payment slip provided by the court.

Step four: Return to the court to present two witnesses who can testify to the marriage and provide original IDdocuments, completed registration documents and photos. A return date is set.

Step five: One or both spouses go to the relevant court with their IDs and receive their marriage certificate.

For Afghans needing a nikakhat in Europe, there is an additional step: they must get a translated version, which has to be verified by the qazaya-ye dawlat (Government Affairs Office) in Kabul, or the provincial Department of Justice, and be approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Getting this additional layer of approval only makes the whole process even longer and more complicated, as Mansur Ahmadi found out.

Mansur Ahmadi’s story: the problem of being born in one province and moving to another

Mansour Ahmadi, who currently lives in Europe, travelled to Afghanistan in 2022, where he tried to get a nikahkhat. He also had to get an official translation so that the certificate could be used outside Afghanistan. This required visits to two ministerial departments in Balkh province: the Department of Justice and the Department of Foreign Affairs to verify the translation. That was before one of the bureaucrats noticed a tiny error on his nikahkhat over the amount of mahr he had paid to his wife:

I took my nikahkhat and its translated version to the Department of Justice for their confirmation. They saw that in the upper section, the amount of the mahr was written as 100,000 afghanis [around USD1,400], while in the lower section it was written as 90,000 afghanis. They objected to this and didn’t approve it. No matter how much I tried to explain that it was a mistake and that it should’ve said that the mahr was 100,000 afghanis, with 10,000 paid in cash and 90,000 remaining, they wouldn’t accept it. 

The judiciary gave Mansur a letter which he had to take to its district office in Sholgara, where he was last officially registered before he moved to Europe, so that they could correct the error and approve it.

But even after that, the process was still not over. As he needed an official nikahkhat in Europe, Mansur also had to take the translated version of the nikahkhat to the provincial Directorate of Foreign Affairs, to be signed and confirmed. Here, he faced another problem over a discrepancy between the address on his nikahkhat and the address on his ID:

The Directorate of Foreign Affairs was confused that my ID states my primary residence as Baghlan, and they asked why [ie, why it wasn’t Balkh]. I told them my ID had been issued several years ago in Baghlan, when I was still living there. Two years earlier, I’d moved to Sholgara, which was confirmed by the wakil-e guzar and the judge. But they didn’t accept this and said they’d give me another letter to take to Sholgara district so they could confirm I was living there.

Mansur said that getting a marriage certificate in Mazar-e Sharif meant not only bureaucracy but also corruption:

Everyone has problems with getting marriage certificates. They don’t issue them to anyone unless there’s an urgent need, such as being very ill, or if there’s an extraordinary matter brought by a [government] authority requiring them to issue it. For example, if someone has a serious illness that necessitates travel, they may issue a marriage certificate. In the city of Mazar, this is how it works. However, in the districts, if you pay a bribe, they’ll provide a guarantee and issue a marriage certificate. There, a local representative must confirm it, and you need to know someone who can confirm your residence, in exchange for money. 

Luckily for Mansur, his lawyer in Europe offered him advice:

I was very frustrated and disappointed. I’d have to go through the whole process again, which would be time-consuming. So, I didn’t do it. Instead, I contacted my lawyer in Europe and told him about the problems I was having. My lawyer said what I’d obtained was good enough and I shouldn’t worry about it, as they’d accept it without the approval of the Directorate of Foreign Affairs.

The defence lawyer in Balkh province, Amir Rasuli, was very critical of the amount of paperwork involved in getting a marriage certificate. Most steps, he said, were unnecessary and could be eliminated:

The whole process of obtaining a nikahkhat takes a lot of time. There are steps such as confirmation by two neighbours, going to the imam [mullah] of the mosque and the wakil-e guzar to confirm that a husband and wife live in a specific area of a province and then going to the municipality [office in the] district to confirm that the wakil-e guzar is still active – all of this is unnecessary. I believe that, when you have an ID card showing you are Afghan and a resident of Afghanistan, the relevant courts and other administrations should cut all the other paperwork and easily issue a nikahkhat for you.

It should be very simple. It should be that you apply, have your witnesses and your documents. Then the court should issue a nikahkhat for you based on your documents and the testimony of witnesses. This way, it won’t be time-consuming, and applicants won’t be tearing their hair out with frustration. 

It is not just the number of steps needed to get a document but also that it is not clear at the outset what is actually needed to obtain it. One of the threads running through our interviews is how information is given out ‘drip-by-drip’: interviewees think they have completed all the steps necessary, only to be told there is yet another step, which may require going back home to get other documents or getting signatures from relatives – who may not even be in the country. As well, people describe being told to go to one office, only to find that they had been sent to the wrong office and must go to another office instead, which may not even be in the same city or province and will certainly require more queuing and navigating the crowds. The lack of transparency and clear information about what steps are needed at the outset, is maddening. Interviewees end up exhausted, out of pocket and at their wits’ end.

Getting a passport or tazkira

Tazkiras and passports are even more essential than marriage certificates and just as difficult to obtain. They are necessary to work abroad, receive disability benefits, even getting a SIM card for your phone. Many Afghans have never had either a passport or an ID. According to a 2023 report by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, 86 per cent of the more than 70,000 households assessed reported a lack of such documents among their family members, especially women and girls. The following stories show how painful it can be to try to acquire these crucial documents, particularly when mistakes made by officials need fixing.

Leyaqat Ali’s story: the missing ‘Sayed’ 

Having failed to find a job in Afghanistan, Leyaqat Ali, an unemployed university graduate from Ghazni province, decided to travel abroad for work. For this, he needed a passport and a visa:

I needed to support my family, along with my brothers, as my father passed away during the Covid-19 pandemic. I just couldn’t find a job, so I decided to go to either Pakistan or Iran for work. I needed a passport and a visa though. I applied for a passport online at the beginning of 2024. Then, in August 2024, I got a message that I should go to Kabul for all the procedures, such as giving my biometrics and payment.

Leyaqat went to Kabul, where he stayed with a relative, and left at six in the morning for the passport office. When he arrived, it was already crowded:

I wanted to go in, but a guard stopped me. I told him I had come from a remote area, but he got angry and shouted at me. He said they couldn’t take on any more clients that day. He told me to come back the next day, but very early.

Leyaqat had no option but to go back to his relative’s home and try again the next day:

The following day, I left at four in the morning and went to the passport office. I was surprised to see many people had come much earlier than me. I stood in a line where there were already 15 to 20 people ahead of me. 

This time, his papers were collected and he was told to go to either Pashtani Bank or the Afghanistan National Bank to pay the fee, which he did. Next, he had to get his biometrics taken. At this point, however, an error with his name was discovered:

An officer asked for my tazkira. When he checked my name, it didn’t match what was in the database. In my tazkira, my name is Sayed Leyaqat Ali, but in the database, it didn’t have the word ‘Sayed’. So my biometrics weren’t taken and the officer told me, “Go and correct your name and then come for the biometrics.” He told me that, at the entrance gate of the passport office, there was an office that deals with such issues. 

Leyaqat did as he was instructed, but after waiting in another crowd, he was turned away:

The employee checked my tazkira and told me, “Your name can’t be corrected here. You have to go to the General Directorate of Civil Registration Services at the National Statistics and Information Authority [NSIA] in Sara-ye Shamali.” I was very upset and hopeless, but I had to go. However, unfortunately, in Sara-ye Shamali, I was again told that it was impossible to correct my name there and that I had to go to my home province, Ghazni, to correct my name in my tazkira.

So Leyaqat went back to Ghazni, where he found yet another convoluted process:

I travelled to Ghazni and visited the statistics department. They kept sending me from one office to another and there was a lot of paperwork involved. It took me two days to complete the necessary forms. After that, I had to wait for a whole month to be notified that my name’d been corrected. Next, I needed to apply for an electronic ID, which took two months to get printed in Kabul and sent to Ghazni.

In total, he said, correcting his name on the tazkira and obtaining the electronic tazkira took three months. “Now that my tazkira is correct,” Leyaqat said, “and I have the electronic version, I need to go back to the passport office in Kabul for them to take my biometrics before I can obtain my passport.”

Having to correct a name in a tazkira is a common problem, which people complain is both time-consuming and costly to amend. Applicants accuse Taliban-appointed officials of sloppiness, of making mistakes in writing their names (in this Zawia News article, for example, officials wrote ‘Saqi’ instead of ‘Safi’). Sometimes, they even get the gender wrong. However, it is a problem familiar from the Republic and, indeed, earlier eras. There are also even bigger errors: it took Sayed Ali from Charolak district of Balkh almost a year to resolve the mistake that was preventing him getting an electronic ID.

Sayed Ali’s story: disabled, and made to wait for treatment for a year

Sayed Ali has a disability in one leg, which he wanted to get treated. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) informed him that he needed an electronic ID card to get treatment at their clinic. However, when he applied for it, he encountered inefficiency, delays, technical problems and blunders, all made worse by the fact of his disability: “First, I needed to correct an error in my tazkira,” he said, “because they’d swapped my father and grandfather’s names around. I had to pay money as a bribe to get that done so that I wouldn’t have to travel all the way to Kabul to correct it.” Then, once he’d registered, Sayed Ali had to wait for his tazkira to be issued at the National Statistics and Information Authority (NSIA) in Kabul and sent to Mazar-e Sharif:

I waited for four months. I was waiting for a message from the statistics department [in Mazar], but nothing happened. I had to go there, in person, as I really needed the tazkira for my treatment. They told me, “Your tazkira hasn’t been published in Kabul, so come again in a month’s time.”

Because of his disability, Sayed Ali asked his nephew to go to NSIA on his behalf:

[My nephew] went there, not once, not twice, but three times, each time after a month. Then, they said my electronic tazkira had come… But when they entered the serial number and searched their database, they said the tazkira wasn’t there. Over the next seven months, my nephew went back [to NISA] seven times and my tazkira still hadn’t come from Kabul. Then, I went with him and I told the people in NSIA that: “You see, I am disabled and I need to be treated for the injuries in my leg.” 

But, he said, they sent him away again:

After ten days, I visited that centre again with my nephew. His friend [at NISA] said that the tazkira had arrived. He showed us a tazkira and said, “Look! It is your tazkira. Your father’s name is Sayed Hussain.” However, it wasn’t mine. The photo in the tazkira looked like me and it had the same father’s name as mine, but it was not my tazkira. 

On the twelfth or thirteenth visit, the bureaucrats decided to start from scratch:

It was finally decided that we should pay 1,500 afghanis for a duplicate [al-musanna]. We paid again, and I was told the duplicate would be ready in three months. I went back four or five times to get the duplicate, and finally, it arrived.

By the time Sayed Ali’s duplicate tazkira came from Kabul, the mystery of the original missing tazkira was finally resolved:

NSIA employees had mistakenly given my tazkira to someone else, who had poor eyesight and couldn’t see that it wasn’t his tazkira. He took it home, but when he went to withdraw the money that his son in Europe had sent, the bank told him that the tazkira he’d brought as proof of his identity wasn’t his. 

Sayed Ali eventually got his ID card and was able to get medical treatment, but only after the best part of a year of stress and wasted time.

For Afghans in rural areas, getting documents means travelling and incurring additional expenses. The cost, both in lost work and money spent, may be something they can ill afford, but they deem it necessary because of all the services that now require documentation.

Screenshot of video showing families waiting at the Directorate of Population Registration Services’ outdoor reception centre to apply for identity documents and birth certificates. Photo: National Institute of National Statistics and Information Authority (NSIA), undated
Farid Agha’s story: countless days, nights and afghanis wasted

“You can end up waiting for hours, or even days and nights, yet still can’t get an ID because there are too many crowds and too little organisation,” said Farid Agha, from Zurmat district of Paktia province. He needed an electronic ID because the government had made everything dependent on it. “Without it,” he said, “your SIM card would be blocked and you wouldn’t be able to get anything done in government offices.” What was even worse, Farid Agha needed documentation for his whole family. Since his daughter was going abroad, he needed to get a passport for her. Additionally, his son had passed the university entrance exam and needed to enrol, where an electronic ID was also required. There were no electronic ID services in his home district, so he had to travel to the provincial capital:

We made the trip to Gardez city to obtain the electronic ID. We registered at one of the photography shops there. I took my entire family with me – it’s more than two hours away – because I’d heard that all family members needed to be present for the ID process to proceed and the registration to be completed.

Farid Agha and his family had to wait in Gardez, where they knew no one, and the expenses built up:

I took the forms to the civil registration office. When we arrived, the office was extremely crowded and disorganised, making the wait for our forms to be checked very frustrating. We stood in line for two consecutive days, but our turn never came. Eventually, I had to send my family members back to the village because we didn’t have anyone to stay with in Gardez. We’d spent two nights in a hotel, but I could no longer afford to stay there. Travelling back and forth every day wasn’t feasible either, as the fare from our area to the centre is 500 afghanis per person [USD 7].

Farid Agha also had to return to his village and come back again to the civil registration office, but this time, he did not take his family with him. “They checked my paper documents, but only me and my two sons, who are at school, had the documents. The others [another son, two daughters and his wife] didn’t have any,” he said:

The officer told me that I needed to obtain confirmation from the head of the village and the relevant district office to verify that these are indeed my children. I also needed to bring my wife’s father’s ID to get a document for her as well. My wife’s family lives in Pakistan. 

He said the situation was very frustrating because, having waited for two weeks, he still could not obtain the ID. It was, he said, “a big headache.”

Farid Agha eventually managed to secure all the documentation, which took over a month, as they had to wait for some of the documents to come from Pakistan. When it was all in order, his family paid for the electronic IDs and had their biometrics taken. But there was one more problem:

I received my ID without any issue. However, there was a mistake in my son’s ID: his grandfather’s name was incorrectly written. The names of all my other children were correct, but my eldest son’s grandfather’s name was wrong. I hadn’t noticed it at the time, but when we got home, my son pointed it out, saying, “Dad, my ID has an error.” 

Farid Agha went back to Gardez to get the error in his son’s tazkira corrected, but officials told him he had to go to Kabul to fix it. He said that he had explained to them that it was their mistake, not his or his family’s, and questioned why he should have to go to Kabul. In response, they said that they did not have the authority to correct the name in the province:

I had no choice but to go to Kabul because all my son’s documents were at risk of becoming invalid. The information on his paper tazkira was different from what was on the electronic tazkira, which meant that all his educational documents could become invalid due to a single incorrect name. 

Farid Agha spent a lot of time in Kabul trying to correct his son’s name. It took a week of waiting at the civil registration office in Sara-ye Shamali before he got to speak to someone:

When it was my turn, the electronic tazkira department referred me to the Ministry of Interior. Upon arrival, I found it chaotic and overcrowded, making it impossible to secure a turn there. Only the general director of civil registration has the authority to issue orders. I ended up waiting for two days.

Finally, he was told he would need to bring his father’s or brother’s ID to correct the mistake. So he had to travel back to Paktia to retrieve both his father’s and brother’s tazkiras. After returning to the tazkira office, they had taken the documents and told him to come back in two days. When he went to collect his son’s tazkira, the manager at the electronic tazkera department surprised him with another problem:

He challenged me on the reported age of my son, claiming that he appeared older than what I’d indicated in the ID. This added to my frustration. I explained that I’d been trying to obtain the ID for three months and that the only issue was the name, which was an error made by one of his employees. I insisted that I know my son’s age since I am his father. Unfortunately, he refused to accept my explanation and ended up kicking me out of his office, instructing me to correct the age.

Through the help of a family friend, he eventually persuaded the manager to make the correction. But overall, obtaining electronic ID cards for his family cost Farid Agha a lot of money and trouble. He also complained that the price of tazkiras had increased under the Emirate:

During my travels, I ended up spending over 50,000 afghanis [USD 700] on hotel stays and car rentals, both to and from my destination. … The cost is prohibitively high, particularly for ordinary people like farmers. The price for the electronic ID is 500 afghanis [USD 7], and if any corrections are needed, the cost increases to 1,200 afghanis [USD 17].

During the Republic, an electronic ID card only cost 100 afghanis [USD 1.40], and corrections cost 500 afghanis. Now, however, the prices have changed drastically, making it a significant financial burden, especially in a country struggling with poverty.

Despite these challenges and the difficult circumstances of everyday life, hundreds of people still attempt to secure an electronic ID card. Unfortunately, when faced with these obstacles, many ultimately abandon their efforts.

These problems can be even worse for those forced to return to Afghanistan from Pakistan and Iran, especially those who have spent most or all of their lives outside the country. One aid worker told Human Rights Watch in a March 2025 report on deportations from Pakistan that the Emirate should open mobile tazkira-issuing centres at the border. If returning Afghans cannot obtain tazkiras, they cannot register their children for school or buy mobile phones or SIM cards.

Conclusion 

When Afghan citizens try to get electronic IDs, passports or marriage certificates, they face inefficiency, endless paperwork, exhausting waits in queues and in crowds and, for many, the need to travel. The convoluted bureaucracyadds to the expense of getting documentation, not only the money spent on fees, but also travel and hotel bills, and the opportunity cost of days wasted in government offices, when they could be working.

These are not new problems, but comparing the situation with the Republic, our interviews suggest there is now greater demand for documents, but not enough staff to deal with that demand. Indeed, there is some evidence that matters may have become even worse since the 20 per cent cut in public sector jobs (Amu), that were announced (Tolonews) in April 2025. In general, since before the fall of the Republic, access to documentation services has become better for men living in previously conflict-ridden areas, but worse for women because public offices are now so much more male-dominated spaces.

As to costs, prices for the documents themselves have gone up under the Emirate. Demands for bribes appear to be less prevalent than under the Republic, although several of our interviews mentioned that a bribe had ‘oiled the wheel’ of getting through one of the many steps in obtaining a document. The potential for unscrupulous officials to make money is clear and indeed, the many steps and different signatures needed create multiple ‘rent-seeking’ opportunities. An environment that is open to corruption is also encouraged by the lack of transparency, the fact that information about procedures is hard to obtain and there is uncertainty over regulations. As our interviewees’ stories show, mistakes by officials only compound the chaos and difficulty, with the burden of fixing administrative errors falling on citizens.

Given that the state not only demands various documents to access certain services but also makes money from issuing them, it could at least ensure that it keeps bureaucratic and procedural hurdles to a minimum. Yet the government shows little sign of recognising this problem, let alone addressing it, despite the acute hardships that most Afghans are facing.

Edited by Kate Clark and Rachel Reid

References

References
↑1 Article two of the 1971 Marriage Law made having a nikahkhat an requirement: see Martin Lau, Islamic Law and the Afghan Legal System, 2003. A 2005 report by Max Planck Institute said that in the communist era, every marriage had to be registered in every district, though this did not happen in practice. In 2007, the Supreme Court issued an order to require marriage certificates, in order to reduce the risk of child marriages, although implementation was low (New Humanitarian).

Months, Years and Thousands of Afghanis Later… Stories of Afghans battling bureaucracy
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The Daily Hustle: Afghans flee the Iran-Israel war

July 2, 2025

Nur Khan Himmat • Roxanna Shapour 

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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As the conflict between Israel and Iran escalated, many Afghans who had been living in Iran opted to return to Afghanistan, fearing for their safety. The Iranian government’s current drive to deport Afghans had already accelerated the pace of ‘returns’. However, for Afghans who had lived through years of conflict in their own country, the ominous drums of war served as a powerful catalyst to flee Iran. AAN’s Nur Khan Himmat has heard from one man who left his home in Tehran and returned to Afghanistan with his family. He spoke from a camp for returnees in Herat before they headed back to their home in Balkh province.

I’m from the Kishenda district in Balkh province. Seven years ago, I left for Iran with my family because I couldn’t find work in Afghanistan. I have an 11-year-old daughter and two sons – one is seven and the other is four, both born in Iran. We settled in the Javadiyeh area of Tehran. It has a reputation for being dangerous. But in reality, it’s just a down-on-its-heels neighbourhood where many Afghan families live because housing is affordable and the landlords aren’t picky about who they rent to, as long as they get the rent on time. Luckily, I’m an expert welder. It’s an in-demand profession and it was easy for me to pick up welding jobs on construction sites. I worked hard and made decent money. We were also able to get temporary residence permits called bargeh-ye sarshomari [census registration document]. It wasn’t long before I’d saved enough money for a down payment on a house – about USD 3,600. I got an informal mortgage from the man who owned the property and we bought our own house. This was the home we left behind when the bombs started falling from the sky in Tehran.

When it rains bombs

Life was good. I had steady work and the two children who were old enough were going to school. Everything had already changed, just weeks before the war, when we were given an ikhraji [deportation order] and told to leave Iran and return to Afghanistan. I went to the office and told the government that I owned a house and needed to settle my financial affairs before I could leave. The officer there agreed to give me time to sort things out. But the tensions between Israel and Iran escalated and finally Israel started bombing Iran. I thought it would stop soon – like when there are brief flare-ups between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and after a few airstrikes or missiles, they stop. But this was different; it went on for days, and it was still ongoing when we left.

Israel was targeting Javadiyeh, where we lived, because there’s a military base nearby. Our home shook from the blasts and we were worried that the windows would shatter and injure us or our children. They were afraid all the time and my younger son wouldn’t stop crying. So, we ended up sleeping outside in an open field near the house every night. Ultimately, we made the difficult decision to return to our country. We hoped things would settle down quickly, but after a week, when there was no end in sight and there was even talk of America getting involved, we decided to go back to Afghanistan.

Leaving our home behind

I asked the man who held our mortgage if he’d buy the house back and give us our money. But he said he didn’t have the money. He was shaken, worried about what the war meant for his family – and for Iran’s future. He was sympathetic to my situation, but he looked up at the sky and said: “How can I get the money when missiles are raining down from the sky?” He wished us good luck on our journey and said we could come back if and when the war ended to settle things with him. Luckily, I had my savings at home and we’d invested in some gold that my wife and daughter could wear as jewellery. We left everything else behind – our home, our belongings – and escaped with just our savings, the clothes on our backs and our lives.”

From Tehran to Islam Qala

It took us three days to get to the urdugah [camp for returnees] in Mashhad. People who are going back to Afghanistan go there to register before being sent home. The camp was overrun with families who were either being deported or fleeing the bombs, or both. The Iranians who ran the camp were quick and efficient. We’d heard that people sometimes spend up to a week there, waiting to be sent back to Afghanistan. But we only spent one night, and thank God for that, because there were few facilities, the heat was unbearable and there was no food to be had.

In the morning, the Iranian government arranged for us to go to Islam Qala on the Afghan side of the border. But we had to pay for the bus fare ourselves. I was shocked by how much the bus fare had soared. In the past, children under six travelled for free, but now everyone had to pay and the fare had more than tripled. In situations like these, there are always unscrupulous people who see an opportunity to profit. Still, we had no choice. We had to pay up and get ourselves to Afghanistan.

From Islam Qala, the Taliban brought us here, to this camp for returnees. I don’t know the name, but many Afghans returning from Iran come here first, before continuing their journey to their home provinces. Here, each person gets 2,000 afghani [USD 28] and three meals.

By the time we arrived here, my youngest son was ill from the heat and exhausted from the journey. I told the people in charge of the camp about him and they immediately called an ambulance, which took us to a nearby clinic. Thankfully, he’s fine now. But the children are shaken. They don’t understand what’s going on. They want to go back to Tehran – to their friends, their toys, the little vegetable garden my wife keeps. They want to go home. They want things to be normal again.

We’ve been told that we’ll get a card that will cover the cost of our transport to our place of origin. This is what we’re waiting for now. Once we get that, we’ll go back to Balkh, where we have a house in our own district. I’ve been told that it’s fallen into disrepair since we left for Iran. So, once we get there, I’ll have to get moving on making repairs and making it comfortable for my family. This is my top priority. I need to make things as normal as possible very quickly, so that the sudden move doesn’t leave my children l hard done by. In Tehran, we had a home, I had steady work, there was school for the children and life felt normal. Overnight, we went from owning a house to a dusty camp, waiting for someone to give us a card that would pay for the bus fare to take us to Balkh. My wife and I know how quickly things can fall apart when war comes, but it wasn’t something I’d ever wanted my children to experience.

A future in Afghanistan

We heard that the US dropped a big bomb on an Iranian nuclear facility and now the war is over and there’s peace. But I don’t know if it’s true. One thing is for sure: when the war ends, I have to go back to Iran to get my money. But I won’t take my family with me this time. These days, it’s nearly impossible for Afghans to live in Iran. Most of us can no longer get residence permits and my family and I were getting deported anyway – it was only a matter of time.

I’ll go back alone and try to get my money from the man who sold us the house. He promised we could work something out later. I hope he’s still alive when I get back and that he’ll keep his promise. Even in the best of times, many Afghans get cheated out of their salaries by unscrupulous employers or lose their money when the person who holds their mortgage refuses to honour their agreement. I’m worried that the war might make this situation even worse.

But I won’t stay in Iran. Even if things calm down. We lived there for seven years and we’re grateful for the work and the safe place to live, but in the end we’re still outsiders – always guests, always temporary and always could be told to leave at a moment’s notice.

Between a rock and a hard place

On the road back to Afghanistan, and later in the two camps, I spoke to many Afghans. Their stories were a lot like mine – they’d gone to Iran to make a living. The ones who’d gone with their families wanted a better life for their children – safety, security, education for their daughters. The ones who’d gone alone wanted to send money home to their families and try to put some away – a nest egg for the future.

Some people, mostly men travelling alone, didn’t even bother to go to the camps, they just headed straight home to their families. Others, with families, were either being deported or were fleeing the war. Most said they didn’t want to go back to Iran. I talked to a few people who’d also left behind homes they’d bought on informal mortgages. Like me, they were planning to go back, get their finances in order and get the money for the house from the owners, but they said they wouldn’t take their families along this time. Even the people who said they’d go back to Iran for work once things had settled said they wouldn’t take their families along. They’d go alone, just to earn money and send it home to their families.

People who are poor always live between a rock and a hard place. [We’re back] in a country where there are no jobs, but there’s still the need to put food on the table.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark

The Daily Hustle: Afghans flee the Iran-Israel war
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America owes its Afghan partners more than this

July 2, 2025
By Thomas Warrick and Douglas Lute

Douglas Lute is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and a former U.S. ambassador to NATO. Thomas Warrick is a former Department of Homeland Security deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy and a senior fellow for the Future of DHS Project at the Atlantic Council.

June 30, 2025

Those who fought alongside U.S. soldiers face deportation or years of punishing fees.

Thousands of these brave Afghans were relocated to the United States when Afghanistan fell in August 2021 to protect them from death, torture or imprisonment by the Taliban. Today, more than 9,600 Afghans in the U.S. face deportation due to termination of the temporary protected status that allows them to live and work here. Even Afghans who can legally stay in the U.S. until their asylum cases or Special Immigrant Visas are processed will be required to pay the government thousands of dollars a year in fees if the Senate accepts the bill as passed by the House.

Many Afghans were paroled hastily into the United States after August 2021 because the U.S. government failed to properly resource the back-office work necessary to process Special Immigrant Visas and also failed to find these Afghans permanent homes here or elsewhere in the two decades since 2001. Bureaucracy and politics, not security concerns, are why thousands remain in limbo in temporary status.

On May 12, the Department of Homeland Security said protected status for Afghans could end because Afghanistan’s economy was “stabilizing” and its security had “improved.” The World Bank, however, reports that Afghanistan’s economy remains a basket case where “poverty and food insecurity remain pressing challenges, exacerbated by high unemployment and restrictions on women’s economic participation.”

Notably, Iran is now forcing thousands of Afghan refugees to leave or face arrest, fines and deportation. Such an act is in the Iranian regime’s character, not America’s. The suicide in May of Mohammad Amir Tawasoli, a former Afghan pilot, when he received an order from Iranian authorities to leave vividly illustrates the grim reality of what lies in store for others under the Taliban.

For those Afghans not subject to deportation by the end of TPS, language in the House bill imposes a severe burden. Subtitle VII.A would force everyone seeking asylum, protected status, or work permits to pay $2,000 to $4,000 a year in fees until their claims are finally adjudicated — which could take years. Many of our Afghan partners work hard in low-paying jobs, the same honorable way many of our forebears did when they came to America. If our Afghan partners are permittedto stay, the overwhelming majority will contribute just as our families did.

Before this bill reaches the president’s desk, the Senate can set this issue right by granting lawful status to Afghans who pass security vetting (as those here already have) and dropping the crippling fees on those who are qualified to become American citizens. To do otherwise would stain our nation’s character, dishonor our own veterans and compromise our future national security interests.

America owes its Afghan partners more than this
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The Fourth Year of the Opium Ban: An update from two of Afghanistan’s major poppy-growing areas

June 27, 2025

Fabrizio Foschini • Jelena Bjelica 

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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The Islamic Emirate’s ban on opium cultivation has entered its fourth year and apart from the first harvest of opium poppies in spring 2022, when farmers were allowed to harvest their standing crop, the authorities have enforced it, with one notable exception – Badakhshan. Farmers there have been better able to avoid the ban, both because of the province’s remoteness from the centre of government and its rugged terrain, and also its unique political landscape. Fabrizio Foschini and Jelena Bjelica have been hearing about this year’s harvest from locals both in the northeast and the most important opium-growing region, historically, the southwest. They found that, although the ban on cultivating poppy still holds in most of the country, high opium prices and a lack of alternatives are driving more farmers to take the risky decision to break the ban. 
It is still not clear how much opium Afghanistan will harvest in 2025 – no estimates are available yet.[1] In 2024, the amount of poppy-cultivated land increased by about 19 per cent countrywide: across 14 of Afghanistan’s provinces, farmers sowed an estimated 12,800 hectares of poppy, compared to 2023, when they cultivated an estimated 10,800 hectares in 15 provinces (UNDOC). Nevertheless, this was still a fraction of the 2022 cultivation, the last before the ban was enforced, when poppy was grown in 23 provinces on an estimated 233,000 hectares of land (see AAN reporting here and here).
Last November, AAN wrote about the autumn sowing season in Badakhshan; it is those poppies that are now being harvested. This northeastern province was, in previous years, less directly touched by enforcement of the ban for various reasons. It was never a Taliban stronghold despite the insurgency making inroads there in terms of recruitment and military control. After 2021, for a while the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) took a lighter approach regarding appointments and local resources, possibly to avoid antagonising the locals whom the Taliban were still trying to co-opt (AAN). This also implied a limited implementation of the opium ban. Also, major drug traders from across the country – and especially the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, where the ban on cultivation had been implemented thoroughly but where drug kingpins held major stocks and still ruled the trade at the national level – have been involved in buying Badakhshan’s opium and bringing it to international markets.

Things took a different turn last year when the lax application of the poppy growing ban in Badakhshan became too obvious for the IEA to continue to turn a blind eye to. By then, the province had become the runaway leader in opium production, with nearly 60 per cent of the area under cultivation. An eradication campaign, launched there in the spring-summer of 2024, met with strong resistance by locals and resulted in several casualties on both sides. Despite this, the example of Badakhshan had already been noted by many impoverished farmers across Afghanistan and the ongoing economic crisis has rekindled interest in a cash crop that is of unique value to farmers.[2] This is the case for the province traditionally at the centre of Afghanistan’s opiate production, Helmand in the southwest.

Long established as the country’s major producer, from the 1990s onwards, Helmand has seen its agricultural, economic and even political features mainly shaped by the production of opiates. It has been synonymous with the opium industry for most of Afghanistan’s recent history, and its political leaders – whether supporting or opposing the Taliban – have primarily issued from a milieu involved in the illicit economy. Afghan farmers in the south have also devised new ways to circumvent the ban. For example, as recently documented by AAN, there is a trend of farmers from the south of Afghanistan moving to Pakistani Baluchistan to grow poppy there.[3]

AAN spoke to locals in the southwest and northeast regions between late March and early June. Interviewees confirmed that poppy cultivation continues, due to the inability or unwillingness of local IEA authorities to completely stop it. However, to lower the risk of encountering government eradication efforts, some farmers have pursued more secretive methods of cultivation. These include hiding the poppy amidst other crops or inside walled plots of land, as well as moving to new, remoter areas and renting land there to cultivate poppies or have locals work the land as sharecroppers. Interviewees thought some officials, aware of the economic importance of poppy locally, turned a blind eye to such cultivation. A major factor behind poppy cultivation and opiate production might also be the unprecedented post-ban increase in prices – driven by the ban on cultivation – which makes poppy an ever-profitable business.

Location of the districts, towns and other places mentioned in the report. Map: Roger Helms for AAN, 2025
The northeast

Badakhshan has been at the centre of opium cultivation and production since the IEA began enforcing its ban. After the deadly clashes and widespread media attention last summer, the province was expected to become the main battleground this year if the IEA was to become serious about enforcing the ban nationwide. Indeed, at the end of May, some eradication attempts led to clashes between IEA forces and local farmers, such as in Jorm district (Azadi Radio).

AAN conducted five interviews with farmers and others in Badakhshan in early May, just before the start of the harvest. This mountainous province typically sows opium poppy in autumn and harvests it in June and July, depending on the specific area. Rainfed fields located at higher altitudes are usually sown in early spring. In the past, they comprised a relatively small part of the crop compared to those at lower altitudes, but things may be changing now, due to the need to safeguard poppy fields from the threat of eradication.

The interviewees were clear that hard-pressed Badakhshi farmers were neither willing nor able to give up poppy cultivation and comply with the IEA ban. Also, they reported that the Taliban authorities, at least at the local level, were not keen to enforce it. A local Taliban commander from Argu district, one of the hotspots of opium production in the province, gave this sober overview:

[This year], land located along the roads and near the main Takhar-Badakhshan highways has largely not been cultivated with poppy. However, in more secluded areas – such as gardens, inside private compounds, or house yards – poppy has been grown. In areas farther from the roads, cultivation continued as usual. In some parts, it’s slightly decreased, while in others it’s increased. Overall, there’s been no decrease in the level of cultivation. 

He said that people in his district “do not trust the promises made by the Taliban,” namely, they do not trust that they will receive the aid that was promised if they did not sell poppy:

Last year, they were told that alternative crops would be supported, but this never happened and the community now sees it as a deception. This year, the Taliban said there was no foreign aid, the Islamic Emirate was facing a budget deficit and there would be no support for alternatives. 

The commander’s words were echoed by Shafiqullah, a landowner from Khash district:

In response [to the provincial IEA authorities’ exhortations to comply with the ban], the people explained that Khash district has very little agricultural land, no mines, no alternative economic activity like livestock or poultry farms, no government aid or public services. They said that marijuana and poppy cultivation are their only means of survival. They also said that if an alternative is provided, they’d stop growing poppy. The governor promised to pass this message on to the leadership in Kabul, saying support would be arranged. But after waiting a full year, no help or response came, so people have continued cultivating poppy as before.

Many locals were, however, expecting a tougher stance on eradication from the IEA this year, if for no other reason than the great media attention and the very credibility of the ban being at stake. Some farmers decided to act more cautiously and sought to hide their crops, such as Azizullah, a landowner from Yaftal-e Payen district, which is close to the provincial capital, Faizabad:

Last year, I cultivated about three acres [1 acre = 2 jeribs = 0.4 hectares] of poppy. Although my land wasn’t targeted for eradication, I decided to reduce my cultivation this year out of caution. I sowed poppy on less than two acres, which includes a large garden area, a yard and a compound surrounded by walls. In the compound, I recently planted fruit trees, which are still young, and in between them, I sowed poppy. The local Taliban commanders’ affiliates don’t bother us, and the likelihood of interference from Taliban outside the area is low. Other landowners in the area have followed a similar approach, reducing their cultivation slightly this year.

Reducing the risk of eradication by spatially limiting cultivation has meant that remote areas are now being sought. While it is difficult to envisage that opium production hotspots, such as Argu or Darayem districts, will cease cultivation, poppy growing has now expanded to districts where it was previously only marginally practised. One such place is Shahr-e Bozorg district on the border with Takhar province and Tajikistan, where cultivation increased. In this district, eradication has never taken place – neither during the Republic nor under the Taliban – mainly because of the area’s mountainous terrain, lack of proper roads and difficult access, according to local farmer Zamanullah: “Only recently, this year, was a new road built – for the purpose of gold extraction.” He said that some areas near or along the new road had been cultivated, but most of the villages where poppy is grown are in remote places that are difficult to access:

The amount of opium cultivation depends on how much land a person owns. Some people have cultivated three to four acres, while others have sown less. Most of the cultivation happens on non-irrigated, rainfed land, while a smaller portion is grown on irrigated fields. Shahr-e Bozorg has less agricultural land compared to other districts like Argu, Darayem, Keshm, Teshkan and Yaftal. Because of this and the lack of road access, eradication is still very unlikely.

Shahr-e Bozorg was, for a long time, a forgotten spot off the main road, but has recently been the target of IEA attention because of the presence of gold mines there, the exploitation of which triggered competition between pre-existing local networks and new players more connected to the central IEA. The penetration of external economic interests and political control, said Zamanullah, may have exacerbated the tensions over poppy eradication:

In these [remoter areas of Shahr-e Bozorg], there are only a few local Taliban and they aren’t even considered fully loyal to the main Taliban leadership. These local Taliban generally support the people. They are unhappy with the central Taliban, especially in matters like opium cultivation, mineral extraction and other local issues. They are standing with the people on these matters. Across many districts, local Taliban have instructed and advised people to arm themselves. … If the pressure grows further, if mines are taken over and poppy eradicated, there’s a strong possibility of an armed uprising across the province.

This was confirmed by the local Taliban commander from Argu: “All the local Taliban in Badakhshan province are against the eradication efforts and aren’t supporting them, except the managers of the Counter-Narcotics departments at the provincial and district levels.”

The IEA recently deployed security forces from other provinces to Badakhshan. “Around 800 armed personnel from other provinces have been deployed, 400 from Kandahar and Helmand and another 400 from Kunduz and Takhar,” the Argu Taliban commander said. Many of them, especially those from Helmand and Kandahar provinces, do not speak the local language and are unfamiliar with the region’s culture. He said: “They use force and violence against the locals.” According to him, about “two hundred outsiders” sent to Qochi and Antin Jilaw villages of Argu district for eradication operations “have faced strong resistance from the local population and haven’t succeeded in destroying the poppy fields. However, they arrested around thirty local landowners and residents and took them to the provincial centre.” He also said that local people across the province were expecting the worst and bracing for a new round of protests, conflict and negotiation with the IEA authorities. “Many people across the districts,” he said, “have acquired weapons; if force is used against them, there’s a strong possibility of armed resistance. The Taliban leadership, particularly the provincial leadership, is aware of this local resistance.”

Badakhshan is undoubtedly now playing a central role in the ‘new’ opium economy of Afghanistan, at least as regards the production of raw opium. All interviewees claimed that members of the Taliban were involved in the opium economy locally, either by protecting crops at the time of eradication in exchange for compensation or by taking direct part in the trade of opiates out of the province. Some interviewees alleged that the top provincial authorities were themselves facilitating the smuggling of opiates out of the province, to Tajikistan and, especially to Kabul and further on to the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. The trade itself, they said, is mainly in the hands of drug traders from these two provinces, who retain not only the international contacts and capital to carry on the trade  but also benefit from political and tribal connections to the top echelons of the IEA. This was something Shafiqullah from Khash commented on:

In the past four years, we haven’t faced any problems related to cultivation, selling or transport. During the Republic era, there were issues with transporting the drug, but under the Taliban, the pressure is mostly on the farmers who cultivate it. Those involved in buying or transferring the opium don’t face any difficulties.

The disappearance of heroin-processing laboratories – once numerous in Argu and Darayem – could also be playing a role in the direction of greater profits for the traders, who will get a second cut from the transformation of raw opium, now the main produce to exit Badakhshan, into more profitable narcotic substances.

The southwest

Helmand lies at the centre of a region known as the Taliban’s heartland. Ideological support for and personal or family connections and identification with the IEA run deep. No wonder then that despite the importance of the opium economy, the 2022 ban in the province was, to a large extent, obeyed. Cultivation in southern Afghanistan has remained patchy after the IEA began enforcing the ban, as shown in the table below:

Province 2022 2023 2024
Helmand 122,045 142 757
Kandahar 29,229 3,544 884
Uruzgan 14,557 647 115
Zabul 1,531 882 118
Nimruz 2,429 102 Poppy free
Cultivation in the southwest provinces (in hectares) where ‘poppy free’ is less than 100 ha. Data source: UNDOC’s 2024 Afghanistan Drug Insight, Volume 1. Table by AAN. 

One farmer in Gereshk district (aka Nahr-e Saraj) interviewed at the end of March, Abdul Rahim, said he cultivated opium in 2024 and 2025, partly on the small patch of land he owns, partly as a sharecropper on other people’s land:

Currently, poppies are blossoming in these areas and in a week’s time, the opium will be ready to harvest and still, there’s no news of the government’s presence or plans to destroy the opium. In Nahr-e-Siraj [district], the government destroyed several areas where opium was cultivated along the roadside, but the land that had been fenced off has been treated like a home and no one would enter it to destroy the opium.

Large tracts of what was officially state-owned, barren land in the Gereshk district of Helmand have been developed into poppy-growing areas by digging deep wells for irrigation managed through solar power and fencing plots of ten to twenty thousand square metres with brick walls of two-three metres in height.[4] This is the land, referred to by Abdul Rahman and interviewees, that, within a fenced area, no matter how large, is considered by the authorities to be within the boundaries of someone’s home and the police must present a court order to enter it, protecting any poppy growing inside it to a great extent.

On the left, a poppy field in the ‘cabbage stage’ of growth, enclosed by walls and a rocky slope, so considered within a home, in southern Afghanistan. On the right, a close-up of the same field. Photo by AAN, 2025

Another farmer from the same district described another way of hiding poppy: those not growing it inside walls, he said, could sow wheat and poppy seed, mixed together, instead:

First, they harvest the opium crop and then the wheat. From one acre of land planted with wheat and opium, they harvest more than 4.5 kilos of opium sap and between 50 and 70 kilos of wheat. Because a lot of chemical fertilizers are used, both the opium and wheat give good yields. People are very satisfied with the harvest.

Other interviewees from Helmand confirmed that this year’s opium harvest has largely gone unscathed by the IEA eradication campaigns. A Nurzai elder from Naw Zad district interviewed in early April described efforts at eradication so far this year as milder than in 2024:

The people of Musa Qala cultivated a lot of opium last year. The police chief of Helmand province, Mawlawi Mubarak, was from the Alizai tribe and hailed from Musa Qala. He cooperated a lot with his tribe [to protect their crops] at the time of the destruction of opium cultivation and therefore the Commander of the Faithful [Amir Hibatullah] learned of his actions and replaced him. This year, people in Naw Zad district have grown a lot of opium and the government is gently eradicating it in a few places where the quality of opium is bad, filming this, and then showing the video to foreigners. They’ve actually had no dealings with anyone cultivating opium – I grew opium myself last year and have done so again, this year. [Laughing] If there’s no opium, the people of Helmand cannot make a living and so opium must be grown!

A resident of Khakrez district of Kandahar province, interviewed in early June, reported a more pro-active approach in the fight against poppy cultivation by the IEA. However, he cast doubts on the probable results:

This year, almost all the people in the district … cultivated opium in varying degrees and the government arrested a number of them and detained them in the district police headquarters for a few days or a week. The local authorities have taken a pledge from them not to cultivate opium next year, but no one has gone to court for cultivating opium and those who’ve made a pledge and were released say that maybe this district governor won’t be there next year. … Buying and selling in the neighbourhood and village markets is carried out as usual.”

Farmers from the south have also found other ways to grow poppies beyond the reach of the IEA’s authority, including moving to Pakistan, as described by Asmat Khan, an opium farmer and trader who also lives in Musa Qala district:

I know many opium traders who have cultivated opium in the areas between Chaman and Quetta, in Pakistan, both last year and this year. [Once they’ve harvested it] they transport the opium to Helmand through Bahramcha district and process it into heroin in Afghanistan, where other narcotic substances like meth and crystal meth are also processed. But opium is also cultivated in large quantities in the northern areas of Helmand: Musa Qala, Kajaki, Sangin, Dasht-e Semiran in Gereshk, Naw Zad, Washer, Baghni, Baghran and Nawamish.

Other Helmandis have sought to escape police scrutiny or prosecution by renting land in remote valleys of neighbouring provinces, such as Ghor and Daikundi, sowing poppies and paying locals to work the fields. Locals who rented out their land and/or worked it would then be the ones to face police violence if the eradication campaigns began. Akbar, a teacher in Pasaband district of Ghor province, on the border with northern Helmand, said that opium cultivation in his area had increased this year: in the areas of Talmastan, Rauf, Dahan Rauf, Pitab and Dara Korkchak, which are Hazara-majority areas, about 90 per cent of the lands had been leased to opium traders from Baghran and Musa Qala of Helmand province and used to grow poppies. He also said that the land in Kurum, Sini and Sangan valleys, which are part of the Aimaq-inhabited areas of Pasaband district and border Baghran district of Helmand, has also been leased to Pashtun opium traders from Musa Qala and Baghran. “On 23 March 2025, the local authorities of Pasaband district arrested ten landowners from some of these areas and destroyed their crops,” he said, adding that already last year, there had been clashes between the local people and the IEA authorities in the Sini and Sangan valleys over opium cultivation, which resulted in injuries to several women, children and men.

Another interviewee from Pasaband, a small opium trader, updated AAN on the situation in the district by mid-June: “This year,” he claimed, “the people of the area eventually reached an understanding with the district police chief: after harvesting the opium crop, they informed the government that they could destroy the poppies and get the video they needed. This way, no problems arose: the government fulfilled its duty and the locals weren’t harmed.”

Kabir, a driver from Sang-e Takht district of Daikundi province, told of similar developments in his province in the month of April:

In areas and villages far from the district centres, opium traders from Uruzgan province have rented land from people and started spring cultivation. In cold regions, poppy cultivation begins in the month of Hamal [21 March to 20 April] and the sap is ready to be harvested in Saratan [21 June to 20 July]. Local people cannot dare [to grow poppy] on their own, but the Pashtun traders assure them they have connections with powerful people in the government and that the locals will face no problems. Therefore, people are starting to cultivate opium on at least part of their lands, with or without getting a rent [from external traders]. The local government has been silent about opium cultivation so far.

When the drugs ban was announced in 2022, it was largely implemented in the south because, as AAN reported, farmers abided by the new law and the local authorities were steadfast in enforcing it. Another important factor was that the major ‘poppy barons’ of the region, together with many well-to-do farmers, were able to draw down opium stocks they had accumulated during the unprecedented period of over-production between 2017 and 2022. UNODC, in its Afghanistan Drug Insight Volume 4, published recently, estimated that at the end of 2022, opiate stocks in Afghanistan had totalled 13,200 tons, which, it said, could satisfy demand for Afghan opiates until 2027. The ban drove up prices, meaning those opium stocks increased dramatically in value and, as the ban on trade was only weakly enforced, anyone with stocks to sell has benefitted from the cut in production.

High prices as an incentive and as political factor

Currently, the price of opium is falling because of greater production, although it is still high by historical standards. The price climbed from a pre-ban average of USD 100/kg to unprecedented peaks in December 2023 of more than 1,000 USD/kg (AAN) – as high as USD 1,112 per kilogramme in the south and USD 1,088 in Nangrahar, according to Afghan opiates expert David Mansfield. In early February 2024, prices started to decline and in June 2024, they were down to an average of USD 730, which is still far higher than before the ban or before the Taliban capture of power. In 2025, prices have continued to plunge.

According to AAN sources in Helmand, last year, opium reached the record price of USD 1,270 per kilo for one day in mid-2024 and then remained between USD 640 and USD 950 during the summer, before falling back around sowing season. This year, thanks to increased production and availability of opium, prices have fallen markedly, so much so that, according to AAN interviewees, in the northern districts of Helmand, such as Musa Qala, Sangin and Baghran, the price is currently between USD 275 and 400 per kilo. That is down significantly, but still higher than before the ban. However, further fluctuations could be forthcoming. One opium trader from Musa Qala told AAN: “After the Eid ul-Adha holidays and the start of the Iran-Israel war, the opium market has come to a standstill. No one is buying or selling at the moment.”

In contrast to the south, where prices have been declining since the 2023-24 hike, Badakhshan is currently experiencing a slight price increase. The cost of opium in Badakhshan has traditionally been lower than in Helmand, but things may now be changing. Possibly, its dominance in post-ban cultivation has boosted its clout within the internal market. Moreover, opium from Badakhshan is considered to be high quality and unadulterated, especially that coming from rainfed land. A wealthy landowner from Argu, Haji Karim, summed the dynamics up:

Compared to last year, cultivation [in Argu] has decreased slightly, but the price has gone up significantly, by nearly AFN 10,000 per kilo (USD 140). Last year, it sold for around AFN 30,000 per kilo (USD 420), but this year, it’s being sold for about AFN 40,000 (USD 570), despite the slight decrease in cultivation. Some traders and smugglers paid in advance, expecting the price to rise. Those who sold early at AFN 30,000 (USD 420) did not benefit much, while those who waited are now selling at a higher price.

He said that in his area, most of the land is “organic and rainfed” and that opium grown there is particularly valued:

Opium grown on rainfed land tends to fetch a higher price due to its perceived quality and purity. … Last year, it was sold at around AFN 25,000 (USD 350) per kilo. This year, including leftover stock from last year, prices have risen to about AFN 38,000 (USD 540) per kilo for non-irrigated, high-quality opium. 

For opium grown with chemical fertilisers and on irrigated land, Haji Karim said, the price ranges from AFN 25,000 to 28,000 (USD 350 – 400) per kilo.

The high prices undoubtedly continue to be a major incentive for farmers to venture into opium cultivation. In the balance of risk versus reward, high prices outweigh the danger of crop eradication, so long as any eradication is not total: farmers and landowners need to be able to save at least part of the harvest by, for example, varying where they cultivate it, or reaching a compromise with the local authorities. Moreover, high prices create their own incentives for officials to ‘share’ in the benefits of opium cultivation.

The variable enforcement of the ban on poppy cultivation, especially given that trade in opiates is ongoing, could foster discontent in regions where opium has been a mainstay of livelihoods, but has not been grown since 2022. A further increase in opium production could also spur competition among rival networks for access to the profits. The opium conflict in Badakhshan, for example, must be seen in the context of broader tensions within the province. As explored in an AAN paper from last year, in contrast to the early years of the IEA, Badakhshan has recently seen a more direct and ruthless management by the Taliban’s central leadership, aimed at replacing local officials with more trusted core members and exploiting more directly the province’s resources, especially its minerals. In Badakhshan, such a trend easily feeds into a narrative, common to many northern provinces, of a Pashtun-dominated IEA central leadership progressively replacing non-Pashtun Taliban locally. However, economic interests might blur the boundaries of political and ethnic divides.

The opium industry, however diminished, remains an important factor in the overall Afghan economy. The lack of real agricultural alternatives, depleting stockpiles and rapid demise of foreign aid may yet drive a resurgence of opium cultivation to pre-ban levels. However, that would surely entail a public renouncement of the ban. So far, that has not been forthcoming. Indeed, in his sermon to mark Eid ul-Adha on 7 June,  Amir Hibatullah referred to the ongoing ban: “Narcotics are prohibited in Afghanistan,” he said, “not for gaining leverage with the world, but based on the command of Islamic law,” (listen here to the RTA report, between 3:45 and 4:30). However hard the ban is hitting Afghanistan’s farmers, any let-up in official policy seems, as yet, unlikely.

Edited by Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 The IEA ban, announced in April 2022, concerns not only the cultivation and production of opium, but also the use, trade and transport of all illegal narcotic drugs. While the cultivation ban has been enforced rigorously, the processing and trading of narcotics has been far less vigorously/not enforced, as AAN documented in its earlier reports (see here, for example).
↑2 Opium poppy is more lucrative than almost any other crop and far more so than the main alternative, wheat. It also grows well in dry conditions, an advantage in a country seeing more climate crisis-induced droughts. Opium paste stores well and so can be used for credit and savings over the medium term. Poppy is also one of the best crops for labourers, as it requires weeding during the growing season and is labour-intensive to harvest.
↑3 In February 2025, AAN reported on how Afghans bringing capital, manpower and expertise to poppy farming in Pakistani Baluchistan. Recent analysis by opium expert David Mansfield has also shown a dramatic increase in poppy cultivation in Baluchistan, with the crop occupying as much as seventy per cent of agricultural land in some areas, and making the total area of poppy cultivation in Pakistan now larger than that in Afghanistan (Alcis).
↑4 See AAN reporting from April 2022 by Fazl Rahman Muzhary, One Land, Two Rules (10): Three case studies on Taleban sales of state land.

 

The Fourth Year of the Opium Ban: An update from two of Afghanistan’s major poppy-growing areas
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The Fourth Year of the Opium Ban: An update from two of Afghanistan’s major poppy-growing areas

June 23, 2025

Fabrizio Foschini • Jelena Bjelica

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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The Islamic Emirate’s ban on opium cultivation has entered its fourth year and apart from the first harvest of opium poppies in spring 2022, when farmers were allowed to harvest their standing crop, the authorities have enforced it, with one notable exception – Badakhshan. Farmers there have been better able to avoid the ban, both because of the province’s remoteness from the centre of government and its rugged terrain, and also its unique political landscape. Fabrizio Foschini and Jelena Bjelica have been hearing about this year’s harvest from locals both in the northeast and the most important opium-growing region, historically, the southwest. They found that, although the ban on cultivating poppy still holds in most of the country, high opium prices and a lack of alternatives are driving more farmers to take the risky decision to break the ban. 
It is still not clear how much opium Afghanistan will harvest in 2025 – no estimates are available yet.[1] In 2024, the amount of poppy-cultivated land increased by about 19 per cent countrywide: across 14 of Afghanistan’s provinces, farmers sowed an estimated 12,800 hectares of poppy, compared to 2023, when they cultivated an estimated 10,800 hectares in 15 provinces (UNDOC). Nevertheless, this was still a fraction of the 2022 cultivation, the last before the ban was enforced, when poppy was grown in 23 provinces on an estimated 233,000 hectares of land (see AAN reporting here and here).

Last November, AAN wrote about the autumn sowing season in Badakhshan; it is those poppies that are now being harvested. This northeastern province was, in previous years, less directly touched by enforcement of the ban for various reasons. It was never a Taliban stronghold despite the insurgency making inroads there in terms of recruitment and military control. After 2021, for a while the IEA took a lighter approach regarding appointments and local resources, possibly to avoid antagonising the locals whom the Taliban were still trying to co-opt (AAN). This also implied a limited implementation of the opium ban. Also, major drug traders from across the country – and especially the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, where the ban on cultivation had been implemented thoroughly but where drug kingpins held major stocks and still ruled the trade at the national level – have been involved in buying Badakhshan’s opium and bringing it to international markets.

Things took a different turn last year when the lax application of the poppy growing ban in Badakhshan became too obvious for the IEA to continue to turn a blind eye to. By then, the province had become the runaway leader in opium production, with nearly 60 per cent of the area under cultivation. An eradication campaign, launched there in the spring-summer of 2024, met with strong resistance by locals and resulted in several casualties on both sides. Despite this, the example of Badakhshan had already been noted by many impoverished farmers across Afghanistan and the ongoing economic crisis has rekindled interest in a cash crop that is of unique value to farmers.[2] This is the case for the province traditionally at the centre of Afghanistan’s opiate production, Helmand in the southwest.

Long established as the country’s major producer, from the 1990s onwards, Helmand has seen its agricultural, economic and even political features mainly shaped by the production of opiates. It has been synonymous with the opium industry for most of Afghanistan’s recent history, and its political leaders – whether supporting or opposing the Taliban – have primarily issued from a milieu involved in the illicit economy. Afghan farmers in the south have also devised new ways to circumvent the ban. For example, as recently documented by AAN, there is a trend of farmers from the south of Afghanistan moving to Pakistani Baluchistan to grow poppy there.[3]

AAN spoke to locals in the southwest and northeast regions between late March and early May. Interviewees confirmed that poppy cultivation continues, due to the inability or unwillingness of local IEA authorities to completely stop it. However, to lower the risk of encountering government eradication efforts, some farmers have pursued more secretive methods of cultivation. These include hiding the poppy amidst other crops or inside walled plots of land, as well as moving to new, remoter areas and renting land there to cultivate poppies or have locals work the land as sharecroppers. Interviewees thought some officials, aware of the economic importance of poppy locally, turned a blind eye to such cultivation. A major factor behind poppy cultivation and opiate production might also be the unprecedented post-ban increase in prices – driven by the ban on cultivation – which makes poppy an ever-profitable business.

Location of the districts, towns and other places mentioned in the report. Map: Roger Helms for AAN, 2025
The northeast

Badakhshan has been at the centre of opium cultivation and production since the IEA began enforcing its ban. After the deadly clashes and widespread media attention last summer, the province was expected to become the main battleground this year if the IEA was to become serious about enforcing the ban nationwide. Indeed, at the end of May, some eradication attempts led to clashes between IEA forces and local farmers, such as in Jorm district (Azadi Radio).

AAN conducted five interviews with farmers and others in Badakhshan in early May, just before the start of the harvest. This mountainous province typically sows opium poppy in autumn and harvests it in June and July, depending on the specific area. Rainfed fields located at higher altitudes are usually sowed in early spring. In the past, they comprised a relatively small part of the crop compared to those at lower altitudes, but things may be changing now, due to the need to safeguard poppy fields from the threat of eradication.

The interviewees were clear that hard-pressed Badakhshi farmers were neither willing nor able to give up poppy cultivation and comply with the IEA ban. Also, they reported that the Taliban authorities, at least at the local level, were not keen to enforce it. A local Taliban commander from Argu district, one of the hotspots of opium production in the province, gave this sober overview:

[This year], land located along the roads and near the main Takhar-Badakhshan highways has largely not been cultivated with poppy. However, in more secluded areas – such as gardens, inside private compounds, or house yards – poppy has been grown. In areas farther from the roads, cultivation continued as usual. In some parts, it’s slightly decreased, while in others it’s increased. Overall, there’s been no decrease in the level of cultivation. 

He said that people in his district “do not trust the promises made by the Taliban,” namely, they do not trust that they will receive the aid that was promised if they did not sell poppy:

Last year, they were told that alternative crops would be supported, but this never happened and the community now sees it as a deception. This year, the Taliban said there was no foreign aid, the Islamic Emirate was facing a budget deficit and there would be no support for alternatives. 

The commander’s words were echoed by Shafiqullah, a landowner from Khash district:

In response [to the provincial IEA authorities’ exhortations to comply with the ban], the people explained that Khash district has very little agricultural land, no mines, no alternative economic activity like livestock or poultry farms, no government aid or public services. They said that marijuana and poppy cultivation are their only means of survival. They also said that if an alternative is provided, they’d stop growing poppy. The governor promised to pass this message on to the leadership in Kabul, saying support would be arranged. But after waiting a full year, no help or response came, so people have continued cultivating poppy as before.

Many locals were, however, expecting a tougher stance on eradication from the IEA this year, if for no other reason than the great media attention and the very credibility of the ban being at stake. Some farmers decided to act more cautiously and sought to hide their crops, such as Azizullah, a landowner from Yaftal-e Payen district, which is close to the provincial capital, Faizabad:

Last year, I cultivated about three acres [1 acre = 2 jeribs = 0.4 hectares] of poppy. Although my land wasn’t targeted for eradication, I decided to reduce my cultivation this year out of caution. I sowed poppy on less than two acres, which includes a large garden area, a yard and a compound surrounded by walls. In the compound, I recently planted fruit trees, which are still young, and in between them, I sowed poppy. The local Taliban commanders’ affiliates don’t bother us, and the likelihood of interference from Taliban outside the area is low. Other landowners in the area have followed a similar approach, reducing their cultivation slightly this year.

Reducing the risk of eradication by spatially limiting cultivation has meant that remote areas are now being sought. While it is difficult to envisage that opium production hotspots, such as Argu or Darayem districts, will cease cultivation, poppy growing has now expanded to districts where it was previously only marginally practised. One such place is Shahr-e Bozorg district on the border with Takhar province and Tajikistan, where cultivation increased. In this district, eradication has never taken place – neither during the Republic nor under the Taliban – mainly because of the area’s mountainous terrain, lack of proper roads and difficult access, according to local farmer Zamanullah: “Only recently, this year, was a new road built – for the purpose of gold extraction.” He said that some areas near or along the new road had been cultivated, but most of the villages where poppy is grown are in remote places that are difficult to access:

The amount of opium cultivation depends on how much land a person owns. Some people have cultivated three to four acres, while others have sown less. Most of the cultivation happens on non-irrigated/rainfed land, while a smaller portion is grown on irrigated fields. Shahr-e Bozorg has less agricultural land compared to other districts like Argu, Darayem, Keshm, Teshkan and Yaftal. Because of this and the lack of road access, eradication is still very unlikely.

Shahr-e Bozorg was, for a long time, a forgotten spot off the main road, but has recently been the target of IEA attention because of the presence of gold mines there, the exploitation of which triggered competition between pre-existing local networks and new players more connected to the central IEA. The penetration of external economic interests and political control, said Zamanullah, may have exacerbated the tensions over poppy eradication:

In these [remoter areas of Shahr-e Bozorg], there are only a few local Taliban and they aren’t even considered fully loyal to the main Taliban leadership. These local Taliban generally support the people. They are unhappy with the central Taliban, especially in matters like opium cultivation, mineral extraction and other local issues. They are standing with the people on these matters. Across many districts, local Taliban have instructed and advised people to arm themselves. … If the pressure grows further, if mines are taken over and poppy eradicated, there’s a strong possibility of an armed uprising across the province.

This was confirmed by the local Taliban commander from Argu: “All the local Taliban in Badakhshan province are against the eradication efforts and aren’t supporting them, except the managers of the Counter-Narcotics departments at the provincial and district levels.”

The IEA recently deployed security forces from other provinces to Badakhshan. “Around 800 armed personnel from other provinces have been deployed, 400 from Kandahar and Helmand and another 400 from Kunduz and Takhar,” the Argu Taliban commander said. Many of them, especially those from Helmand and Kandahar provinces, do not speak the local language and are unfamiliar with the region’s culture. He said: “They use force and violence against the locals.” According to him, about “two hundred outsiders” sent to Qochi and Antin Jilaw villages of Argu district for eradication operations “have faced strong resistance from the local population and haven’t succeeded in destroying the poppy fields. However, they arrested around thirty local landowners and residents and took them to the provincial centre.” He also said that local people across the province were expecting the worst and bracing for a new round of protests, conflict and negotiation with the IEA authorities. “Many people across the districts,” he said, “have acquired weapons; if force is used against them, there’s a strong possibility of armed resistance. The Taliban leadership, particularly the provincial leadership, is aware of this local resistance.”

Badakhshan is undoubtedly now playing a central role in the ‘new’ opium economy of Afghanistan, at least as regards the production of raw opium. All interviewees claimed that members of the Taliban were involved in the opium economy locally, either by protecting crops at the time of eradication in exchange for compensation or by taking direct part in the trade of opiates out of the province. Some interviewees alleged that the top provincial authorities were themselves facilitating the smuggling of opiates out of the province, to Tajikistan and, especially to Kabul and further on to the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. The trade itself, they said, is mainly in the hands of drug traders from these two provinces, who retain not only the international contacts and capital to carry on the trade  but also benefit from political and tribal connections to the top echelons of the IEA. This was something Shafiqullah from Khash commented on:

In the past four years, we haven’t faced any problems related to cultivation, selling or transport. During the Republic era, there were issues with transporting the drug, but under the Taliban, the pressure is mostly on the farmers who cultivate it. Those involved in buying or transferring the opium don’t face any difficulties.

The disappearance of heroin-processing laboratories – once numerous in Argu and Darayem – could also be playing a role in the direction of greater profits for the traders, who will get a second cut from the transformation of raw opium, now the main produce to exit Badakhshan, into more profitable narcotic substances.

The southwest

Helmand lies at the centre of a region known as the Taliban’s core stronghold. Ideological support for and personal or family connections and identification with the IEA run deep. No wonder then that despite the importance of the opium economy, the 2022 ban in the province was, to a large extent, obeyed. Cultivation in southern Afghanistan has remained patchy after the IEA began enforcing the ban, as shown in the table below:

Province 2022 2023 2024
Helmand 122,045 142 757
Kandahar 29,229 3,544 884
Uruzgan 14,557 647 115
Zabul 1,531 882 118
Nimroz 2,429 102 Poppy free
Cultivation in the southwest provinces (in hectares) where ‘poppy free’ is less than 100 ha. Data source: UNDOC’s 2024 Afghanistan Drug Insight, Volume 1. Table by AAN. 

One farmer in Gereshk district (aka Nahr-e Saraj) interviewed at the end of March, Abdul Rahim, said he cultivated opium in 2024 and 2025, partly on the small patch of land he owns, partly as a sharecropper on other people’s land:

Currently, poppies are blossoming in these areas and in a week’s time, the opium will be ready to harvest and still, there’s no news of the government’s presence or plans to destroy the opium. In Nahr-e-Siraj [district], the government destroyed several areas where opium was cultivated along the roadside, but the land that had been fenced off has been treated like a home and no one would enter it to destroy the opium.

Large tracts of what was officially state-owned, barren land in the Gereshk district of Helmand have been developed into poppy-growing areas by digging deep wells for irrigation managed through solar power and fencing plots of ten to twenty thousand square metres with brick walls of two-three metres in height.[4] This is the land, referred to by Abdul Rahman and interviewees, that, within a fenced area, no matter how large, is considered by the authorities to be within the boundaries of someone’s home and the police must present a court order to enter it, protecting any poppy growing inside it to a great extent.

On the left, a poppy field in the ‘cabbage stage’ of growth, enclosed by walls and a rocky slope, so considered within a home, in southern Afghanistan. On the right, a close-up of the same field. Photo by AAN, 2025

Other interviewees from Helmand confirmed that this year’s opium harvest has largely gone unscathed by the IEA eradication campaigns. A Nurzai elder from Naw Zad district interviewed in early April described efforts at eradication so far this year as milder than in 2024:

The people of Musa Qala cultivated a lot of opium last year. The police chief of Helmand province, Mawlawi Mubarak, was from the Alizai tribe and hailed from Musa Qala. He cooperated a lot with his tribe [to protect their crops] at the time of the destruction of opium cultivation and therefore the Commander of the Faithful [Amir Hibatullah] learned of his actions and replaced him. This year, people in Naw Zad district have grown a lot of opium and the government is gently eradicating it in a few places where the quality of opium is bad, filming this, and then showing the video to foreigners. They’ve actually had no dealings with anyone cultivating opium – I grew opium myself last year and have done so again, this year. [Laughing] If there’s no opium, the people of Helmand cannot make a living and so opium must be grown!

Farmers from the south have also found other ways to grow poppies beyond the reach of the IEA’s authority, including moving to Pakistan, as described by Asmat Khan, an opium farmer and trader who also lives in Musa Qala district:

I know many opium traders who have cultivated opium in the areas between Chaman and Quetta, in Pakistan, both last year and this year. [Once they’ve harvested it] they transport the opium to Helmand through Bahramcha district and process it into heroin in Afghanistan, where other narcotic substances like meth and crystal meth are also processed. But opium is also cultivated in large quantities in the northern areas of Helmand: Musa Qala, Kajaki, Sangin, Dasht-e Semiran in Gereshk, Naw Zad, Washer, Baghni, Baghran and Nawamish.

Other Helmandis have sought to escape police scrutiny or prosecution by renting land in remote valleys of neighbouring provinces, such as Ghor and Daikundi, sowing poppies and paying locals to work the fields. Locals who rented out their land and/or worked it would then be the ones to face police violence if the eradication campaigns began. Akbar, a teacher in Pasaband district of Ghor province, on the border with northern Helmand, said that opium cultivation in his area had increased this year: in the areas of Talmastan, Rauf, Dahan Rauf, Pitab and Dara Korkchak, which are Hazara-majority areas, about 90 per cent of the lands had been leased to opium traders from Baghran and Musa Qala of Helmand province and used to grow poppies. He also said that the land in Kurum, Sini and Sangan valleys, which are part of the Aimaq-inhabited areas of Pasaband district and border Baghran district of Helmand, has also been leased to Pashtun opium traders from Musa Qala and Baghran. “On 23 March 2025, the local authorities of Pasaband district arrested ten landowners from some of these areas and destroyed their crops,” he said, adding that already last year, there had been clashes between the local people and the IEA authorities in the Sini and Sangan valleys over opium cultivation, which resulted in injuries to several women, children and men.

Kabir, a driver from Sang-e Takht district of Daikundi province, told of similar developments in his province in the month of April:

In areas and villages far from the district centres, opium traders from Uruzgan province have rented land from people and started spring cultivation. In cold regions, poppy cultivation begins in the month of Hamal [21 March to 20 April] and the sap is ready to be harvested in Saratan [21 June to 20 July]. Local people cannot dare [to grow poppy] on their own, but the Pashtun traders assure them they have connections with powerful people in the government and that the locals will face no problems. Therefore, people are starting to cultivate opium on at least part of their lands, with or without getting a rent [from external traders]. The local government has been silent about opium cultivation so far.

When the drugs ban was announced in 2022, it was largely implemented in the south because, as AAN reported, farmers abided by the new law and the local authorities were steadfast in enforcing it. Another important factor was that the major ‘poppy barons’ of the region, together with many well-to-do farmers, were able to draw down opium stocks they had accumulated during the unprecedented period of over-production between 2017 and 2022. UNODC, in its Afghanistan Drug Insight Volume 4, published recently, estimated that at the end of 2022, opiate stocks in Afghanistan had totalled 13,200 tons, which, it said, could satisfy demand for Afghan opiates until 2027. The ban drove up prices, meaning those opium stocks increased dramatically in value and, as the ban on trade was only weakly enforced, anyone with stocks to sell has benefitted from the cut in production.

High prices as an incentive and as political factor

Currently, the price of opium is falling because of greater production, although it is still high by historical standards. The price climbed from a pre-ban average of USD 100/kg to unprecedented peaks in December 2023 of more than 1,000 USD/kg (AAN) – as high as USD 1,112 per kilogramme in the south and USD 1,088 in Nangrahar, according to Afghan opiates expert David Mansfield. In early February 2024, prices started to decline and in June 2024, they were down to an average of USD 730, which is still far higher than before the ban or before the Taliban capture of power. In 2025, prices have continued to plunge.

According to AAN sources in Helmand, last year, opium reached the record price of USD 1,270 per kilo for one day in mid-2024 and then remained between USD 640 and USD 950 during the summer, before decreasing further around sowing season. This year, thanks to increased production and availability of opium, prices have fallen markedly, so much so that, according to AAN interviewees, in the northern districts of Helmand, such as Musa Qala and Sangin, the price is currently around USD 240 per kilo. That is down significantly, but still higher than before the ban.

In contrast to the south, where prices have been declining since the 2023-24 hike, Badakhshan is currently experiencing a slight price increase. The cost of opium in Badakhshan has traditionally been lower than in Helmand, but things may now be changing. Possibly, its dominance in post-ban cultivation has boosted its clout within the internal market. Moreover, opium from Badakhshan is considered to be high quality and unadulterated, especially that coming from rainfed land. A wealthy landowner from Argu, Haji Karim, summed the dynamics up:

Compared to last year, cultivation [in Argu] has decreased slightly, but the price has gone up significantly, by nearly AFN 10,000 per kilo (USD 140). Last year, it sold for around AFN 30,000 per kilo (USD 420), but this year, it’s being sold for about AFN 40,000 (USD 570), despite the slight decrease in cultivation. Some traders and smugglers paid in advance, expecting the price to rise. Those who sold early at AFN 30,000 (USD 420) did not benefit much, while those who waited are now selling at a higher price.

He said that in his area, most of the land is “organic and rainfed” and that opium grown there is particularly valued:

Opium grown on rainfed land tends to fetch a higher price due to its perceived quality and purity. … Last year, it was sold at around AFN 25,000 (USD 350) per kilo. This year, including leftover stock from last year, prices have risen to about AFN 38,000 (USD 540) per kilo for non-irrigated, high-quality opium. 

For opium grown with chemical fertilisers and on irrigated land, Haji Karim said, the price ranges from AFN 25,000 to 28,000 (USD 350 – 400) per kilo.

The high prices undoubtedly continue to be a major incentive for farmers to venture into opium cultivation. In the balance of risk versus reward, high prices outweigh the danger of crop eradication, so long as any eradication is not total: farmers and landowners need to be able to save at least part of the harvest by, for example, varying where they cultivate it, or reaching a compromise with the local authorities. Moreover, high prices create their own incentives for officials to ‘share’ in the benefits of opium cultivation.

The variable enforcement of the ban on poppy cultivation, especially given that trade in opiates is ongoing, could foster discontent in regions where opium has been a mainstay of livelihoods, but has not been grown since 2022. A further increase in opium production could also spur competition among rival networks for access to the profits. The opium conflict in Badakhshan, for example, must be seen in the context of broader tensions within the province. As explored in an AAN paper from last year, in contrast to the early years of the IEA, Badakhshan has recently seen a more direct and ruthless management by the Taliban’s central leadership, aimed at replacing local officials with more trusted core members and exploiting more directly the province’s resources, especially its minerals. In Badakhshan, such a trend easily feeds into a narrative, common to many northern provinces, of a Pashtun-dominated IEA central leadership progressively replacing non-Pashtun Taliban locally. However, economic interests might blur the boundaries of political and ethnic divides.

The opium industry, however diminished, remains an important factor in the overall Afghan economy. The lack of real agricultural alternatives, depleting stockpiles and rapid demise of foreign aid may yet drive a resurgence of opium cultivation to pre-ban levels. However, that would surely entail a public renouncement of the ban. So far, that has not been forthcoming. Indeed, in his sermon to mark Eid ul-Adha on 7 June,  Amir Hibatullah referred to the ongoing ban: “Narcotics are prohibited in Afghanistan,” he said, “not for gaining leverage with the world, but based on the command of Islamic law,” (listen here to the RTA report, between 3:45 and 4:30). However hard the ban is hitting Afghanistan’s farmers, any let-up in official policy seems, as yet, unlikely.

Edited by Kate Clark

 

References

References
↑1 The IEA ban, announced in April 2022, concerns not only the cultivation and production of opium, but also the use, trade and transport of all illegal narcotic drugs. While the cultivation ban has been enforced rigorously, the processing and trading of narcotics has been far less vigorously/not enforced, as AAN documented in its earlier reports (see here, for example).
↑2 Opium poppy is more lucrative than almost any other crop and far more so than the main alternative, wheat. It also grows well in dry conditions, an advantage in a country seeing more climate crisis-induced droughts. Opium paste stores well and so can be used for credit and savings over the medium term. Poppy is also one of the best crops for labourers, as it requires weeding during the growing season and is labour-intensive to harvest.
↑3 In February 2025, AAN reported on how Afghans bringing capital, manpower and expertise to poppy farming in Pakistani Baluchistan. Recent analysis by opium expert David Mansfield has also shown a dramatic increase in poppy cultivation in Baluchistan, with the crop occupying as much as seventy per cent of agricultural land in some areas, and making the total area of poppy cultivation in Pakistan now larger than that in Afghanistan (Alcis).
↑4 See AAN reporting from April 2022 by Fazl Rahman Muzhary, One Land, Two Rules (10): Three case studies on Taleban sales of state land.

 

The Fourth Year of the Opium Ban: An update from two of Afghanistan’s major poppy-growing areas
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Manoeuvring Through the Cracks: The Afghan human rights movement under the Islamic Emirate

June 16, 2025

Rachel Reid

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The end of the Islamic Republic was a catastrophe for Afghanistan’s human rights movement, with nearly all human rights defenders thrown into exile, fearing for their lives. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) combines an austere interpretation of Islam with ultra-conservative social mores, resulting in a highly authoritarian state with strict laws and practices. While the Islamic Republic had a deeply authoritarian streak, silencing criticism of its human rights abuses and corruption, it was relatively permissive compared to the Emirate. For most Afghan human rights defenders, working openly in Afghanistan is no longer possible. Many have continued their work from abroad, but the country’s new rulers seem impervious to change. Despite this, a new wave of women’s rights defenders emerged in spontaneous protests around the country, while other Afghans have found more clandestine or creative ways to work. AAN’s Rachel Reid has been speaking to human rights defenders about adaptation and survival in the new era. 
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.

The victory of the Taliban insurgency in 2021 triggered a great rupture in Afghanistan’s human rights movement. Almost overnight, nearly all the prominent human rights defenders were forced into exile. The repression and authoritarianism of the Emirate has shrunk the space available for human rights work, making it more difficult – but not impossible.

This AAN thematic report looks at the state of the Afghan human rights movement before and after the Taliban takeover in 2021. It highlights how the operating environment for civil society has been flattened by a host of repressive policy edicts and laws which are rigorously implemented by the IEA, its intelligence agency, police and enforcers from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Freedom of expression and assembly have all but evaporated. Women’s lives are subject to the greatest control, with diktats even proscribing them speaking in loud voices or singing.

The IEA’s repressive tendencies combine religious and cultural conservativism imbued with very hierarchical authoritarianism. For human rights defenders, this mix is a catastrophe. From their current vantage point, it would be easy to idealise the Republic era, which was far from ideal – rife with corruption, high levels of risks and obstruction – it did nevertheless allow some room for legal reform, public advocacy and international support. The Emirate has codified its most patriarchal and authoritarian impulses into law, enforcing them through an effective apparatus of surveillance and punishment. For most human rights defenders, this meant that direct advocacy with the authorities, visible forms of documentation and traditional campaigning have largely disappeared.

In the face of this, some human rights defenders have found new networks and new ways of working both inside Afghanistan and from exile, building digital campaigns, lobbying to hold back the ‘normalisation’ of the Islamic Emirateand pursuing accountability through universal jurisdiction and institutions like the International Criminal Court. Others have found crevices in an authoritarian façade where work can be done, sometimes under the radar, often at the local level, sometimes through interlocutors. New voices have emerged, including from the spontaneous eruption of female protestors from diverse backgrounds with a clear political message, exemplified by the slogan: Nan, Kar, Azadi (Bread, Work, Freedom). Despite the risks, they chose resistance and disruption and are still making their presence felt, even if their ability to take to the streets has been forcibly blocked.

The Afghan human rights movement has been battered since the fall of the Republic, but human rights work is often an act of hope against the odds. The defenders featured in this report are adjusting their expectations, recognising that the path to justice will be long, uneven, and marked by painful setbacks. Yet they continue, not because victory is assured, but because the alternative –silence and surrender – is unthinkable. This report sheds light on their continuing struggle – and their enduring hope.

Edited by Kate Clark and Roxanna Shapour

You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.

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Manoeuvring Through the Cracks: The Afghan human rights movement under the Islamic Emirate
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Learning the Right Lessons from Afghanistan

June 10, 2025

By: Ronald Neumann

The National Interest

June 6, 2025

The conventional explanations for America’s failure to stabilize Afghanistan provide little help for future policymaking.

The American memory of Afghanistan is receding in the rearview mirror. Increasingly, the potential to learn lessons from the twenty-year campaign is being wasted, replaced instead by bumper stickers and slogans that pass for knowledge but are either incorrect or largely useless without a great deal of further reflection.

Three of the most common bumper sticker lessons are “don’t do democracy,” “don’t build an army in our own image,” and “don’t do nation-building.” The problems with each of these suggest the need for deeper reflection if we are to profit from the past and get beyond slogans for future policy decisions.

Democracy in Afghanistan

The debate over how actively the United States should promote democracy abroad is nearly as old as the Republic itself. It first emerged in the early 1800s during debates over whether or how actively the United States should support liberation movements in Latin America. It is likely to continue.

The problem with using the case of Afghanistan to argue against democracy promotion as a policy goal is that it rests on the false premise that spreading democracy to Afghanistan was the principal goal of the US campaign there. In fact, the real aim throughout the Bush, Obama, and first Trump administrations was how to withdraw from Afghanistan militarily while leaving a more or less stable country behind where terrorism could not return. To do so required a basis of legitimacy on which the government could be organized. Short of returning to civil war, which had previously characterized the country, some form of peaceful allocation of power was necessary. Hence, democracy was a practical, rather than an ideological, necessity if the country was to be governed by consensus rather than bullets.

There were numerous problems in building Afghan democracy, including the time needed to establish a supporting culture and institutions, the incorrect choice of electoral system, and the difficulty of holding elections in insecure conditions. However, the problem with Afghanistan was not that democracy promotion was an unrealistic goal but rather that there were few alternatives to it.

In any case, policymakers did not frame the problem in these terms; leaving soon was a goal, but democracy was a sort of default reaction on how to achieve this. Whether that was the right choice is debatable—if one has an alternative governance model. But to conclude that the case of Afghanistan proves that the United States should refrain from democracy-building is to refuse to think about the options that were, or were not, available at the time.

No Model Army

The problems of constructing a foreign army in our own image have bedeviled US policy since the Vietnam War. Scholars have long documented how US-trained armies were not well suited to their purposes. In Vietnam, the South Vietnamese force was designed for a conventional war with the North rather than a demanding counterinsurgency.

In Afghanistan, the United States constructed a force so dependent on foreign support that it could not function without it. To take only one example, the supply system we built in Afghanistan was sophisticated, digitized, and heavily dependent on foreign expatriates, all of whom we removed at the end. However, the problem is not the truth of the slogan but rather the need for an alternative.

One cannot send large numbers of US military personnel to train the army of another country without having an organizing doctrine for training. We have no such doctrine for training a force radically different from our own, with large limitations on literacy and education. Building an army in a different model will require extensive thought and development. Without undertaking such thinking, we will be left either unable to assist in building a foreign army when one is needed or to repeat past mistakes. Thus, the phrase by itself is no help for future decisions.

State-Building, Not Nation-Building

“Don’t do nation-building” is arguably the most problematic “lesson” to emerge from recent American history. Firstly, the phrase “state-building” would be more accurate, as Afghanistan has existed as a defined state since 1747. The first Bush administration, and particularly Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had drawn the lesson from the Balkans that nation-building was a mistake.

The result was a resistance to any commitment to institutional strengthening in Afghanistan immediately after the 2001 war when the Taliban was essentially defeated and security problems less acute. This opportune period, when foreign influence was at its peak, was largely wasted. No attention was given to building institutions. American assistance was limited to humanitarian aid only, and the first, very inadequate, developmental assistance did not begin until 2004.

In Iraq, there was an assumption that when the Saddam Hussein government was removed, Iraq would simply evolve into a democracy with very little help. The disaster of this belief has been amply documented. But the notion of not doing nation-building continued to bedevil the United States. The long-lasting second Afghanistan policy review in the Obama administration concluded that the United States would limit its goals to destroying the Taliban and not do nation-building (or state strengthening).

The problem with this formulation was that the Taliban was a regenerative movement. To keep it suppressed would require an army. But armies are part of a state, and a state needs a functioning economy and infrastructure. All of these considerations led to an enormous increase in the development budget, deployment of districts and provincial reconstruction teams, and a massive effort to increase the civilian advisory presence. The logic of these steps was unmistakable, and they unquestionably amounted to state-building, even as the administration declared it would not do so. The contradiction was not helpful to policy, to say the least. 

The Real Lessons

Twenty years of warfare leave an almost endless number of decisions for debate. Tactical issues, basic governance concerns, strategies for defeating the Taliban, and shifting policies of different administrations all provide food for thought. However, there is also room to reflect on whether there are more fundamental lessons worth considering. Three recurring problems in American policymaking arise: building a learning organization, creating reasonable timelines, and identifying local partners.

Building a Learning Organization.

One important problem that is rarely, if ever, addressed is the need to build a “learning organization.” An interesting book by Georgetown professor Lise Moraj Howard compares relatively successful United Nations peacekeeping operations to search for common lessons. One lesson she drew from the successful UN missions is the need to build an institution that develops enough knowledge of the local culture and politics to implement its policies effectively.

Building a learning organization requires certain key components. The first is long-term leadership. An organization needs enough time and leadership continuity to make mistakes and climb the learning curve. In Afghanistan, the rapid turnover of ambassadors and generals, along with the deployment of a new division every year or two, was the antithesis of building a learning organization. Similarly, short tours, generally limited to one year, were also common among most military and civilian personnel.

The result was frequent changes in operational policy on the ground, in addition to the broad policy changes that came from Washington. Afghan officials grew cautious about investing too much effort in new approaches, as it was likely that, within a few months or a year, a new US official would alter the approach. When this problem is repeated over and over, it becomes increasingly difficult to get full support for any policy from the locals.

US policymakers should reconsider the length of service, particularly for generals and ambassadors, as well as the frequency of rotations for major troop units and subordinate units. Rapid rotations tend to emphasize short-term goals. Structuring organizations around the attainment of long-term goals should have been the first step in US Afghan policy.

Expedient vs. Realistic Timelines

It is essential to consider the time required for policy success. This is particularly true when establishing a new form of government or rebuilding a society after a civil war. Unfortunately, this has not been the case with US policy, which tends to be driven by “politically feasible” timelines rather than ones designed to solve the problems at hand. The gap between these timelines needs to be examined and policy modified accordingly. Timelines considered politically inexpedient should not be rejected outright.

There are examples of successful change from corrupt autocracies into functioning democracies with strong armies. South Korea is an example of a country that moved from a corrupt, kleptocratic government to the democratic, economically successful one it is today. Taiwan is another such example. These cases suggest that decades are necessary for such change. While the United States spent 20 years in Afghanistan, it never had policy thresholds that extended beyond one administration. The result was, as John Paul Vann famously said in Vietnam, “We don’t have 12 years’ experience. We have one year’s experience 12 times.” In Afghanistan’s case, the US presence had one year’s experience 20 times.

A realistic understanding of the time needed for social change, anti-corruption measures, and democracy to take root could have led to commitments over a much longer period, perhaps with expenditures more drawn out and less concentrated in a year or two. Such a policy would have required very different public policies to explain the timelines and to build appropriate expectations for the pace of progress. Instead, the constant demand for rapid progress and the pretense that it was happening had the result of undercutting policy support over time.

Alternatively, if such commitment was not possible, a realistic understanding of essential timelines might have led to a variety of different ways to leave earlier, even if what we left behind was unsatisfactory. In any event, the refusal to look realistically at the time requirement meant that we were trapped in unrealistic policies over and over. This lesson is worth learning because a realistic appraisal of the time required for operational success will be necessary in the future.

The Importance of Local Leadership

In Afghanistan, as in Iraq and Vietnam, the United States found itself with local partners who were not up to the requirements of the situation. They could neither address the seeping corruption nor control infighting among their supporters. Consequently, the field was wide open to insurgents. Two potential lessons can be drawn from this problem.

One is that we will need to be realistic in judging whether we have local partners who are up to the broad requirements of whatever policy we are engaged in. They may exist—President Ramon Magsaysay in the Philippines was such a leader, and the result was a successful counterinsurgency and nation-building. In the absence of such leadership, the United States has a long record of trying to compensate by either making policy in Washington or deposing the leader. We attempted both in Vietnam and Afghanistan but failed in both places.

Many examples of the problem with local partners not meeting the needs of the situation are found in the book Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and Counterinsurgency. Over and over again, American officials identified problems and devised policies to address them but were unable to obtain lasting local buy-in. Whenever American officials rotated, funding ran out, or a particular local partner was killed or transferred, the situation returned to square one.

The same pattern repeated itself in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama surge in Afghanistan produced not only Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) but also District Support Teams (DSTs) and a significant effort to increase the number of civilian advisors. This was intended to produce a significant change in governance within a very short time. As observers noted at the time, the Afghan government lacked the institutional capacity to capitalize on the progress achieved.

The underlying problem was not only the lack of time but also the willingness of the political leadership in Afghanistan or Vietnam to make necessary changes on their own. The problem was aptly captured in the famous, leaked “NODIS” telegram from then-US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, who observed that the basic problem with the proposed strategy was that we had no local partner.

Without adequate partners on the ground, policy frequently fails. Equally consistent has been our reaction to the lack of local partners. Either we try to build our own policies, as described above, or we change the leadership. In South Vietnam, the United States supported a coup that resulted in President Ngo Dinh Diem’s murder in 1963. In Afghanistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke tried to remove President Hamid Karzai, an effort that failed and further alienated the Afghan president. The US approach is not only arrogant and mechanistic but also completely unsuccessful. After 70 years of consistent failure, it is time for policymakers and academics to understand that foreign policy cannot be made without regard to foreigners.

There will not be a single solution to this problem in the future. It may not even be clear that the problem exists until the United States is deeply immersed in a country and its choices are limited. However, addressing the issue will require acknowledging that the problem exists and debating solutions in both academic and policy forums. Discussing policy failure without examining the underlying attitudes and approaches of local leaders has been a repeated phenomenon in many different administrations and countries, yielding the same poor results. There are underlying problems like these that extend beyond individual policy choices. Recognizing the importance of local leadership would be a starting point for making better choices in the future.

Policing: Paramilitary or Civil?

Building an effective police force has been a key issue in the insurgencies America has confronted. Professor Howard’s book also noted that police training is among the most challenging problems across various UN missions. When a problem recurs repeatedly, it is time to consider whether there is a deeper issue beyond the operational or organizational decisions in a particular country.

Several key points must be understood to develop a new approach to police training. One is that the United States is particularly badly placed for police training. We have no national police force. We have no national doctrine for police training. We have no established source of recruitment for police trainers, except for a limited number of retired police officers. Most active police forces do not want to give up their personnel to foreign missions.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the debilities were exacerbated by the argument over whether the police force should be more along paramilitary or civilian lines. Of course, the answer was that both were necessary. Without proper law enforcement training, the police force could not act as a source of justice or public safety. However, the Afghan police still had to face large, heavily armed insurgent groups.

Mixed civil and paramilitary forces do exist in France, Italy, and Spain, but not in the United States. But these examples never made it into police training in Afghanistan. The international training mission drew Italy and France into training the Afghan border police, but not for regular police training.

The time given for police training was also too brief. In the United States, the average time for police training is 21 weeks, and this training is typically provided to at least high school graduates in established police forces who are not involved in counterinsurgency operations. In Afghanistan, training rarely exceeded several months, with recruits who were frequently illiterate and unable to perform basic reporting or record-keeping tasks.

There are some examples of comparatively successful police training. Robert Perito’s book The American Experience with Police in Peace Operations notes the necessity of an adequate ratio of police trainers to police recruits. Nothing in the length of time US and international forces devoted to police training in Afghanistan (or Iraq, for that matter) suggests that we learned this lesson.

The need to strengthen a local police force may arise in many cases that do not involve counterinsurgency or state-building efforts. Hence, Afghanistan’s lessons still matter. The resort to an outmatched Kenyan police force in Haiti, a country overrun by armed gangs, does not suggest we have even tried to take this history to heart.

No doubt there are other important lessons to be learned from Afghanistan. To profit from them, academics, as well as policymakers, need to go beyond catchphrases. They will need to consider that repeated failures reflect deeper, structural problems in our approach. If we cannot solve the problems of local leadership quality or the need for realistic time horizons, we must at least begin by acknowledging that these problems exist and recur. Only then will we be able to formulate better approaches for the future.

Ronald E Neumann was the US Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, as well as Ambassador to Algeria and Bahrain. He served as an infantry officer in Vietnam and a senior officer in Iraq (2004–2005).

Learning the Right Lessons from Afghanistan
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