The Mining Sector in Afghanistan: A picture in black and gold

September 2, 2025 Analytical articles

The mining sector has become one of the foremost drivers of Afghanistan’s beleaguered national economy in recent years. It offers the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) revenue from taxes, royalties and fees, but also the potential to boost the country’s scant diplomatic relations. However, while waiting for foreign actors to tap the fabled underground riches of metal ores, fossil fuels and rare earths, less glamorous types of mining are already thriving. Local companies are seizing the opportunity to exploit mineral resources such as coal and gold. In this themed report, AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini examines how better security and improvements in contracting and taxation have helped production grow. But, he also finds that under the surface, prospects for the mining sector are not all rosy. The IEA seems unable to resist the temptation to extract quick profits, rather than properly manage the national mineral wealth for the long term. Moreover, recent accusations of favouritism, land grabbing and violent suppression of resistance by locals in some areas remind one of bad practices seen under the previous government.

Mining is an industry of contrasts. For elites, it presents the potential for increasing their wealth and power, while for miners, the work is harsh and dangerous, often being the only alternative to subsistence farming. Afghanistan’s mineral wealth has long been viewed through the lens of its promise rather than the complex realities that come with exploiting the vast reserves of coal, gold, copper, iron ore and rare earth minerals believed to lie beneath its rugged mountains. Yet the hype about Afghanistan’s untapped riches masks a long history of mining, with the mountainous topography both a barrier to settlement and a source of mineral wealth. While these resources could be a driver for achieving economic independence, they have historically fuelled conflict, environmental damage and exploitation.

While the control of mines has shaped Afghan politics since the early Islamic era, modern industrial practices only emerged in the 1950s. However, they largely collapsed during the decades of conflict that followed. Only gem extraction – lapis lazuli in Badakhshan and emeralds in Panjshir – provided consistent exports, though often at the cost of fuelling local conflicts.

Under the Islamic Republic, contracts were plagued by corruption, elite capture and insecurity, with many projects collapsing before they could deliver tangible benefits. After the Taliban takeover in 2021, mining emerged as a top priority for the cash-strapped Islamic Emirate, seeking to generate revenue in the face of sanctions, the loss of aid and economic collapse. Contracts with foreign companies have also had an added benefit as a tool for international engagement for an isolated IEA hoping to win international recognition.

In the absence of the sort of international financial support enjoyed by the Republic and the emergence of mining as a key source of government revenue, there was an impetus for the IEA to standardise licensing and fees. It has also promoted large contracts with regional actors, particularly China, and turned coal exports into a critical revenue stream. However, risks remain. Substandard mining practices degrade mineral deposits, contaminate water resources and in general, significantly damage the environment. Outdated and hazardous mining practices continue to expose workers to longstanding risks. Finally, minerals are often exported in their raw form and illegally, with little in-country processing, and therefore little benefit to the national economy.

This report, based on interviews with miners and traders across Kabul, Sar-e Pul, Baghlan, Takhar and Badakhshan, provides an in-depth examination of coal and gold mining in particular. It explores contracts, production, trade and the lived experiences of miners and their communities, highlighting both the opportunities and the persistent risks shaping Afghanistan’s mining economy.

From afar, Afghanistan’s hidden mineral wealth can sound like a fabulous alchemic quest to create gold and solve all the country’s problems. But as in magic lore, when you look closely, the divide between a boon and a curse is often revealed to be a narrow one.

Edited by Kate Clark and Rachel Reid

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

20250830 Mining in Afghanistan FINAL Download

Authors:

Fabrizio Foschini

Don’t give up on Afghanistan

August 30, 2025 Analytical articles

by Melanne Verveer and Mariam Safi

Opinion contributor

The Hill

08/29/25

No school. No work. No speaking outside. No healthcare without an increasingly scarce female provider. No dissent. No justice.

This is the horrific reality for women and girls in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan four years ago. The Taliban’s assaults are making life increasingly unbearable. Since August 15, 2021, over 100 edicts have targeted women and girls’ fundamental rights, freedoms, and legal protections.

The Law for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice represents the most extreme form of gender-based oppression in modern history. Afghan women’s rights activists have described these laws and edicts as a form of imprisonment for women, driving an “epidemic of suicidal thoughts.” The situation is so dire that it meets the criteria of “gender apartheid.”

Sadly, the international community has turned its attention away from the systematic oppression of women in Afghanistan by failing to uphold its commitments, protect at-risk Afghans, and meet dire humanitarian needs. Confronted with the Taliban’s gender apartheid, many of the very same countries that for decades were stalwart defenders of the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan and supported their progress are disturbingly quiet. Instead of tying diplomatic engagement to measurable human rights benchmarks and enforceable consequences for violations, some countries have begun to treat the Taliban’s actions as normal and have quietly reopened embassies and consulates inside the country.As the need for international support increases, the international community is failing to step up. When it does provide funds, it is unpredictable and reactive. The global reduction in funding for humanitarian assistance is having devastating impacts on the 23.7 million Afghans in need.

The World Food Program reported recently that one in three Afghan children is stunted due to acute food insecurity. States should continue to provide funds for life-saving humanitarian assistance — including food and healthcare — and fund vital programs that support the rights of Afghan women and girls. In humanitarian settings, early marriage of girls is a common response to crises.

In Afghanistan, families facing acute economic hardship have sometimes married off or even sold their daughters to cope. One woman told us, “Families want their daughters to marry soon and in exchange for money … so they can meet the expenses of the rest of the family.”

The U.S. has a particular duty to the women of Afghanistan. During the 20-year war, the U.S. made a strong commitment to improving the well-being of women and girls. That commitment has now been abdicated, and the disastrous deal with the Taliban and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Now, the U.S. has also ended its Temporary Protective Status for Afghans in the country, eliminating a critical pathway for legal status in the U.S. This will de facto force many Afghans who stood with the U.S. and risked their lives fighting for the values we hold dear to leave the U.S., putting them in grave danger and exposing them to severe punishment.

Other nations, like the United Kingdom, are also terminating their Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy and the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme programs — key resettlement pathways.

These decisions and impending deportations place Afghans — many of whom are at risk because of their work to advance human rights or support the international coalition — in grave danger and expose them to severe punishment. Afghan women and girls are being abandoned to the most horrific fate.

The hard-won progress of the last 20 years has been lost. The Taliban would like us to think that these losses are irreversible, but many Afghan women and girls don’t believe this is true — they still have hope and continue working for a better future.

Despite reporting negative consequences from their work to strengthen peace and security — including community exclusion, mental health impacts, and loss of economic opportunity — women reported a continued commitment to this work and shared a range of priorities, including legal support, capacity building and the need for funding. The majority of women respondents also felt that their work to advance peace and security provided them with positive community impact personally. They are not giving up, despite the odds.

There are clear measures that the international community can and must take to improve conditions for women and girls. States must resist the normalization of the Taliban’s repressive regime. International actors must use a rights-based approach in all its engagements with the Taliban, while also restoring and increasing humanitarian assistance and reinstating and expanding resettlement pathways for at-risk Afghans.

For instance, the U.N.-led Doha Process should integrate Afghan women’s representation at all levels since their exclusion in past negotiations emboldened the Taliban’s regressive policies and undermined the international community’s leverage. And the international community must be firm, clear, and constantly communicating that the Taliban’s worsening attack on women and girls will not be tolerated.

The Taliban would like states to quietly retreat from the fight for a peaceful, equitable, and inclusive Afghanistan. Afghan women and girls refuse to accept that Afghanistan is a “lost cause.” The international community should rally behind them.

Even this old U.S. enemy shouldn’t be permanent

August 30, 2025 Analytical articles

Editorial Board

The Washington Post

August 30, 2025

Four years after the evacuation of Afghanistan, U.S. engagement could help combat terrorism and hunger.

The United States lost its longest war four years ago. Saturday marks the anniversary of the ignominious end to two decades in Afghanistan. A suicide bombing during the pullout killed 13 U.S. troops. America abandoned countless allies and billions of dollars in military hardware. President Joe Biden’s standing never recovered from the foreseeable and preventable disaster.

Just as the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021 invited comparisons to the fall of Saigon in April 1975, a related parallel is now worth considering. The departure of the last American helicopters from Vietnam 50 years ago brought a long period of diplomatic isolation and an economic embargo against the victorious Communist government in Vietnam. It took 20 years to establish diplomatic relations in 1995, when the U.S. opened its first liaison office in Hanoi. In the three decades that followed, Vietnam emerged as one of America’s most important trade and security partners in Southeast Asia — despite the country’s dire track record of internal repression.

It is still challenging to imagine the United States establishing formal diplomatic ties with the Taliban, a group that harbored Osama bin Laden and led an insurgency that killed more than 2,400 U.S. troops. The Treasury Department still lists the Taliban as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group. It is even harder to imagine Afghanistan becoming a strategic partner.

On the other hand, as President Donald Trump declared in May when he lifted sanctions on the Syrian government, the United States has no “permanent enemies.” According to that worldview, engaging with the Taliban is in the national interest. The alternative is to cede strategic influence to rivals while further abandoning the Afghan people who bought into promises that America would not cut and run.

The Taliban’s human rights record is abysmal. Their treatment of women and girls remains abhorrent. Girls and women are prohibited from pursuing an education beyond primary school and banned from most jobs. Former Afghan government officials and members of the U.S.-trained security forces continue to be hunted down and killed.

As with Vietnam and other countries with which the United States has profound differences, engagement has often proved more effective than isolation, particularly in areas of common interest.

The main concern is counterterrorism. The largest threat now is the Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, which was responsible for the August 2021 suicide bombing and operates mostly out of eastern Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan. The Taliban and ISIS-K are sworn enemies, with the Islamic State offshoot seeing the country’s new rulers as insufficiently pure, or perhaps insufficiently brutal. ISIS-K carried out a concert siege in Moscow last year that left more than 140 dead and has been extending its reach into Europe, deftly using encrypted messaging apps and slickly produced videos for recruitment, while relying on cryptocurrencies to evade attempts to disrupt its financial networks. Engaging with the Taliban would allow for intelligence-sharing to disrupt ISIS-K command and control.

China and Pakistan have already held a series of trilateral talks with Afghanistan about fighting terrorism. China is interested in securing its 47-mile border with Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor to prevent infiltration by Uyghur militants into the neighboring Xinjiang region. So far, Russia is the only country to establish formal diplomatic relations with Afghanistan, but others have named ambassadors to the country, including China, Iran, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. A dozen other countries have missions led by a lower-level diplomat, including Turkey, India, Pakistan and the European Union. The U.S. need not cede that diplomatic ground.

Beyond strategic concerns, engaging the Taliban could facilitate the flow of humanitarian assistance. More than half the Afghan population needs help urgently. Most official U.S. aid was cut off this year, and the lack of American recognition of the government in Kabul, combined with sanctions, hampers the flow of other international aid to people in desperate need.

The United States is sitting on billions of dollars in frozen funds of the Afghanistan central bank, crippling the country’s banking system. The freeze is causing a liquidity crisis and a shortage of banknotes, deterring international investment. This gives Washington leverage.

There could also be cooperation on exploiting Afghanistan’s mineral deposits, which include potentially trillions of dollars in untapped reserves of rare earths as well as lithium, copper, iron and cobalt. The United States conducted extensive mapping during its 20-year military presence. Now, China is inking deals and reaping the benefits.

Finally, engaging the Taliban could also resolve the fate of missing Americans who are believed to still be held there.

The U.S. must be clear-eyed; engagement is unlikely to bring immediate change in the Taliban’s treatment of women or their barbaric use of sharia. But it could bolster more moderate factions within the Taliban. Recognition could be limited to start, with the carrot of full relations down the road.

Washington ignores Afghanistan at its peril. That happened after 1989 when the United States disengaged from the region after the Soviet Union’s withdrawal and collapse, which allowed Afghanistan to become a crucible for those who would attack America on Sept. 11, 2001.

The world is learning to live with the Taliban

August 27, 2025 Analytical articles, Current News Articles

The Economist

Aug 21st, 2025

Four years after the fall of Kabul, governments are quietly recognising the insurgents

Illustration of the shape of Afghanistan being revealed as the sand in an hourglass runs out

As insurgents, the Taliban spent 20 years wearing down the world’s most powerful army. As diplomats they needed just four to break out of their international isolation. Since seizing power in August 2021, most countries have refused to recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government, acknowledging them only as “de facto authorities”. That changed in July this year, when Russia officially recognised the group. The Taliban flag was raised at the Embassy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in Moscow. Unofficially, other governments are following suit. On August 20th the Taliban hosted a trilateral meeting with China and Pakistan.

The Taliban were supposed to remain in the diplomatic doghouse until they abandoned their abhorrent treatment of women and broadened their all-male Pashtun cabinet. Neither has happened. Girls are banned from secondary school, women from working for NGOs and going to parks. Vice-and-virtue police patrol Kabul, the capital, with increasing zeal to check that women are covered up and accompanied by a male relative, according to one of the city’s few remaining female corporate executives.

The front against the Taliban has nonetheless steadily cracked. At least 15 mostly regional countries have ambassadors in Kabul, including China, Russia, Iran and several Gulf states. Many more operate at a lower level of diplomatic representation. The thaw is accelerating: the United Arab Emirates accepted a Taliban ambassador in August 2024. China followed in January. Both China and Russia eye Afghan minerals while fretting about Islamic State spillover. Business is picking up, too. Chinese, Turkish and Iranian firms are cutting deals. As a Kabul-based diplomat notes, when the Taliban must choose between an Uzbekistan energy contract and “another Western lecture on girls’ education”, the choice is obvious.

Western states are performing diplomatic contortions to engage with the Taliban on multiple issues without conceding recognition, a process an American diplomat calls a “charade”. Britain is among the few to have acceded to Taliban demands that countries must withdraw recognition from the former regime’s diplomats. It has a special envoy who has met Taliban officials at least once since being appointed in June. The EU has an office in Kabul. Norway received a Taliban diplomat in January. In March Switzerland reopened its humanitarian office.

Migration is a factor. Germany accepted two Taliban diplomats in Berlin and Bonn in July to co-ordinate the deportation of convicted Afghan criminals. More than 100 have been flown to Kabul since August 2024, despite UN warnings that Afghanistan is unsafe. But, even so, the Taliban won’t agree to solve the West’s illegal refugee problem “for free”, notes one foreign diplomat.

Similarly, America has between 12,000 and 15,000 illegal Afghan migrants it would like to return, according to an American diplomat. In January, the Biden administration traded prisoners with the Taliban. America has also lifted $10m bounties on three top Talibs, including Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister, who orchestrated suicide-bombings against Western forces. Mr Haqqani remains on the terrorist list, but this barely matters: in 2022 sanctions were diluted to the point that businesses are free to deal with his ministry.

Until recently, Taliban officials met weekly with American diplomats in Qatar. Topics included human rights, drugs and counter-terrorism. The meetings ended when Mary Bischoping, an official hostile to engagement while the Taliban held American hostages, took charge. Her recent reassignment has been quietly celebrated by State Department pragmatists.

The Taliban’s trump card is the strength of their regime. In 2021 observers expected their support would crash along with the economy. Instead, they have cut corruption, halted poppy cultivation, ended 40 years of war and helped hammer the local Islamic State franchise (ISKP). Crucially, there is no credible opposition, in both Afghanistan and in exile. The Taliban feel so secure that they are slashing their bloated security apparatus to save money.

Things could still be destabilised by the cuts by Donald Trump’s administration to humanitarian aid, the pushback of refugees by Iran and drought. But the Taliban have endured worse. “You have the clocks, we have the time,” they told the occupying foreign powers. Now they have both.■

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “The power of patience”

A year of Propagating Virtue and Preventing Vice: Enforcers and ‘enforced’ speak about the Emirate’s morality law

August 21, 2025 Analytical articles

Kate Clark • AAN Team

Afghanistan Analysts Network

21 Aug 2025

It is a year since the Islamic Emirate issued a new law to propagate virtue and prevent vice. The goal, of changing Afghans’ dress and behaviour, has been an abiding mission of the Taliban’s since they first emerged as a movement in the 1990s. The law laid out not only the actions that the Emirate deems obligatory or forbidden for Afghan men and women, but also the duties and powers of those enforcing it. It gave them extensive powers to both police and punish wrongdoers, and one privilege to male enforcers – they are legally allowed to interact with unrelated women as part of their duties. This policing of women causes great fear and anxiety among Afghans, as Kate Clark and the AAN team found when they interviewed women and men about the law. However, three enforcers, also interviewed, all of whom work in Kabul, expressed not a desire to strike fear into the hearts of the people, but, rather, uneasiness and difficulty in policing the moral behaviour of Kabulis. They found the capital alien and alienating, many of its people disrespectful and women, in particular, hard to deal with.

This report is drawn from research which will be published in full as a thematic report.

You can read AAN’s short translation of the law here and a full version, with footnotes, here.

One of the first actions of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) on regaining power in August 2021 was a profoundly symbolic one – turning the Ministry of Women’s Affairs into the Ministry for Propagating Virtue and Preventing Vice.^[1] Then, a year ago, on 21 August 2024, the power of the ministry was amplified by a decree from Supreme Leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada. It consolidated and codified many of the Emirate’s existing rules, repeating some of those he had already issued as decrees, orders or instructions, broadening others and adding new types of behaviour or actions that became obligatory or forbidden.

The articles of the 45,000-word-long law which are most heavily policed are: men must grow beards that are at least as long as their fists and wear loose-fitting clothes, and pray on time and in a mosque; and women must wear what the Emirate calls ‘sharia hijab’, ie be fully covered, except for their eyes, with their voices also considered to be awra (a term used usually to refer to parts of the body that should be hidden). The stated rationale for the strict rules on women’s dress is to prevent fitna, meaning temptation, or social disorder that facilitates sin. Worth noting here is that interviewees sometimes refer to women as “not wearing hijab” (bi-hijab). This does not mean they are not covering their heads, but that they are wearing less bulky or less covering clothes than the speaker thinks is ‘proper’ or ‘permissible’.^[2]

The law also laid out the duties and powers of those policing it, the enforcers (muhtasibin), who are charged with amr bil-maruf wa nahi an il-munkar, ‘propagating virtue and preventing vice’. In this report, we refer to both this type of policing and its enforcers by the shorthand used by Afghans, amr bil-maruf, as well as ‘vice and virtue’.

We interviewed nine members of the public, six women and three men, from a variety of urban locations: Bamyan, Mazar-e Sharif in Balkh, Ghazni, Herat, Qalat, provincial capital of Zabul, one of the urban centres in Loya Paktia and Kabul. Some had travelled and could compare their experiences of amr bil-maruf in different provinces. We also spoke to three male enforcers, from Panjshir, Wardak and Paktia, who all now work in the capital.^[3] The names of all the interviewees have been changed to safeguard their anonymity. Any details that might identify them have also been omitted.

A climate of fear

Almost all of our non-enforcer interviewees were frightened of amr bil-maruf and had taken steps to change their behaviour or dress so as to avoid confrontations. For women, the threat is felt deeply. For example, Pari, a midwife working in Kabul, described how after three encounters with amr bil-maruf when outside, she now felt forced to cover her face – they had not accepted her excuse that she had difficulty breathing. She described the third occasion they stopped her in the street:

I was near Pul-e Surkh when suddenly, I was surrounded from all sides by these amr bil-maruf officers – about six of them. All six grabbed my arms and said, “We warned you the other day not to wear these clothes or show your face like this again. Why didn’t you obey?” I was so terrified by this that I couldn’t even speak and was shaking. Eventually, with tears in my eyes, I said, “Mawlawi Sahib, I apologise. My clothes are fine, but I can’t wear a niqab because I have difficulty breathing; it feels like my heart is constricting.” He replied that, if you feel your heart constricting, then don’t go outside. Now, should I call the police to take you to the station?

The men threatened to summon her family to the police station to guarantee she dressed ‘properly’ in the future. “Hearing their words,” Pari said, “my whole body began to tremble.” She said one of the enforcers took pity on her and let her go, but she was left in a state of “absolute terror,” and now either asks her father to walk her to work or takes a car. She also said that every time she leaves the house, her mother worries and calls her several times a day to check that she is OK, even when she is at work. This may seem like an overreaction, but, Pari said, amr bil-maruf also come to the hospital “two or three times a day” to make sure staff are segregated and that women are wearing full hijab, including covering their faces. If they do not, she said, they will be fired:

We are, thank God, Muslims, and we have always observed hijab in the past, but we did not wear long cloaks or Arabic-style hijab. … I’ve been working in hospitals for nearly eight years now and it’s impractical for [medical staff] to wear full hijab or traditional long dresses because [our] work environment differs from other workplaces.

Pari was not the only interviewee to be stopped on the street or at their place of work by the enforcers. Samira works as a teacher and a midwife – she switched careers after the Emirate stopped her progressing to her fifth year of medical training, when they banned women from higher education. She spoke about her experiences teaching in educational centres in Bamyan and Kabul:

In Bamyan, every Thursday, [the enforcers] would visit the centre to inspect the girls’ hijab. They’d train us on how to advise our students to wear niqab and hijab properly and how to comply with the amr bil-maruf law, instructing us to tell our students to wear long abayas, black scarves, black shoes, black socks, and, if possible, black gloves, and stressing that they should avoid white shoes and scarves.

Samira also described a raid on the Kabul educational institute where she taught:

Around 15 enforcers arrived in half a dozen vehicles. Suddenly, our institute’s guard started calling the girls to wear their scarves properly, warning that the enforcers would arrest anyone who didn’t comply. … There were 85 students in my class. When the enforcers arrived, they said our hijabs looked acceptable, but then they also stood near the gate, checking the girls’ hijabs again from head to toe. I witnessed girls fainting and some even hiding in the toilets out of fear. They did not have a single female enforcer with them. It was all men who checked our clothing. It was such a terrifying scene because they came in such force and with so many vehicles.

The first theme to emerge in these and other interviews, and the starkest, is the climate of fear engendered by amr bil-maruf. The threat to women of being spoken to, insulted or even arrested has had a strong deterrent effect. It ensures women not only keep to the Taliban’s dress code. Some of our interviewees also reported that they (or their female relatives) now rarely leave the house, or only with a man. The reason why the threats are so powerful was explained by Hasina, a worker with an NGO in Kabul, who relayed what her brothers had said: “They say that God doesn’t want any of us taken to the authorities, as it would bring shame on our family. If one of us were taken for not wearing hijab, people would not believe that was the actual reason. They would think of other, negative reasons for the arrest.” Parvez, a teacher from Ghazni, also explained: “In this traditional society, when amr bil-maruf arrests a woman or imprisons her, people will think badly of the woman. They don’t think she must have left her home because she had to.”

Families ‘self-policing’

The deterrent, then, goes beyond the individual. The threat of unrelated men admonishing or even arresting their wives, daughters or sisters has led many families to police their female relatives, even if they do not actually agree with the new rules. In Mazar-e Sharif, businesswoman Safira, for example, said she can no longer go out alone. Previously, her husband, “a broad-minded person,” was more relaxed, but since the new law, she said, “he has also become very conservative, meaning he doesn’t let me go out alone. He might accompany me or ask our son to do so. My husband has brought these restrictions as he’s frightened that the enforcers might stop, arrest and detain me. We heard they’d even arrested women who were wearing hijab. Even if you’re fully covered, they might still find a pretext to take you with them.”

The law thereby also infantilises women: Safira, who owns and runs a factory, has to rely on her husband or son when she goes out. Hasina, the NGO worker, who used to travel to different provinces for work, now has to take her brother or a 14-year-old nephew with her if she wants to leave the house.

Going beyond the law and a major paradox

Also emerging from our interviews is that enforcers go above and beyond even the tight restrictions of the current laws. Safira in Mazar, for example, was told she must wear a burqa and several women have been told to wear gloves. Many were told that they must have a mahram when they are outside. Yet, an earlier rule had specified that this is only obligatory if a woman is travelling more than 72 kilometres, while a law on women’s clothing issued in May 2022, as well as the vice and virtue law itself, acknowledges that women may have to leave the house if necessary. Neither specifies that this must be with a mahram.^[4]

What is striking as well is that although the law forbids unrelated men and women from looking at each other, amr bil-maruf are charged with just this task: scrutinising women, speaking to them and even detaining them. The three enforcers we interviewed (more from whom below) all said they were not comfortable dealing with unrelated women and would certainly rather not talk to them. Yet there appear to be enforcers who are not loathe to go into female-only classrooms or parts of a hospital.

Men’s experiences

One of the men we heard from, Parvez, the school teacher in Ghazni, when asked about the impact of the law, said restrictions on men were harsh, but far harsher for women. He described how his wife could no longer “go out freely due to fear of the enforcers.” A teacher herself, she is now unemployed because of Taliban restrictions and “can’t go out without a mahram and can’t dress how she wants to, but must wear black clothes, a niqab and even gloves: “This is what we don’t like,” he said. “We don’t want others to interfere in personal issues. We’re Muslim, so we know what sharia asks us to do, but the Taliban overdo it. They’re excessive [efrat mekonand].” Parvez had himself lost one job over beard and clothing violations, but managed to get another. He was still “very young,” he said, and liked to wear the latest fashions, but after being stopped twice, the second time with the threat of prison for trimming his beard a little, he now conformed to the demands of amr bil-maruf.

In Kandahar, businessman Ahmad Khan said he himself was not bothered by amr bil-maruf. His age, as well as his beard and clothes – similar to the enforcers’ – gave him some protection and in the upmarket part of Kandahar, “a civilised township,” where he lives, the enforcers were respectful. However, he said:

This law has robbed us of our freedom [as a family] to go to restaurants and eat a meal, or to an ice cream parlour. Women cannot go to restaurants even with a mahram. I can’t take my female family members with me on a picnic. I can’t even travel with my wife in my own car with my heart at ease.

He said the enforcers do stop and question the young men in his family if they are out driving with female family members: “My sons and I no longer go out with our wives unless it’s necessary,” he said. “We’re afraid they’ll beat us or threaten us in front of our wives.”

Only one of our interviewees reported an easier experience, Zarghuna, the principal of a girls’ primary school in one of the urban centres of the southeast. She explained that, because her province was “traditional,” the new law had made no difference to what women there wore. She and her fellow teachers also still walked to work without mahrams: all of them “are from the same area,” she said, “and so we don’t need a mahram.” Families could also still go out to recreational areas together.

Local women, she said, rarely go shopping – men generally do that – but sometimes, women without a mahram or a man at home do have to go to the market. There never used to be a problem, she said. However, they had started to see a clampdown. Shopkeepers – including pharmacists – had been told not to serve unaccompanied women and warned that if they were caught doing so, their pharmacy or shop would be closed and sealed. She said some shopkeepers in the market, out of fear of the Taliban, would not now sell anything to female customers, not even medicine. Also, for the last two years, women had been required to be accompanied to government offices and hospitals. Even women in need, if unchaperoned, would now be turned away from hospitals. Women who don’t have a mahram at home,” she said, “are really facing problems.”

Most of the interviewees described being stopped and questioned at checkpoints if they travelled out of town, but Zarghuna said that, when travelling to and from Kabul, amr bil maruf had never stopped the car. She had also seen women on that road travelling without a mahram. A woman alone would not be allowed to board a bus or a shared taxi to a distant place, she said, but they could travel in a group of three or four.

Her comments shed some light on regional differences. Where amr bil-maruf rules on dress and behaviour are normal, there appears to be less friction between enforcers and the populace. Another interviewee, Rashid Khan in Zabul, for example, when asked about the impact of the law on his female family members, said it had not affected their freedom at all. They could “still go to the wedding parties of neighbours and relatives as in the past – they’re held in homes, not in wedding halls, which have been banned in other provinces^[5] – and there have never been parks or other entertainment places in Qalat city that women can go to.”

However, Zarghuna’s experience also points to possibly greater leeway in her ‘traditional’ province than a city like Kabul – or greater respect for the populace, or fear, if enforcers are concerned that male relatives might react badly if they challenge women over their behaviour, especially if it has always been deemed acceptable, such as the teachers walking to work unchaperoned. There are also fewer enforcers than in the major cities, like Kabul, Mazar and Herat, where, as well, women – and men – have had greater freedom, and the enforcers see more ‘wrongdoing’ that they want to correct – and come down more heavily. Our interviews with the three enforcers also shed some light on this. None are from Kabul, but all are now working there and they find it an alien and alienating city.

The enforcers’ experience

Mullah Hamdullah from Paktia and Mawlawi Niamatullah from Wardak both described joining amr bil-maruf in terms of getting a (well-paid) job. Our third enforcer interviewee, Qari Abdul Aziz from Panjshir, said he had always had a strong attraction to da’wa – inviting Muslims to strengthen their faith or non-believers to embrace Islam – and as a graduate of sharia, the job of amr bil-maruf was, for him, a calling. All three had found that the Afghan capital was rife with wrongdoing, as Mullah Hamdullah said:

It’s a hugely populated city, with people from all across Afghanistan and the amount of munkarat [wrongdoing] is high. Immorality is widespread. Hijab is a major issue, as many women don’t observe it. Many young people shave their beards, adopt Western-style haircuts and engage in drug use and other harmful behaviour. Extra-marital relationships are also a serious concern.

“The most common problem among men,” said Mawlawi Niamatullah, “is the use of drugs like tablet k.^[6] The other issue is flirting with girls. Among women, the major problems are not wearing proper hijab, and again, flirting with men.”

Qari Abdul Aziz said working in Kabul was far more difficult than in his home province, where he was familiar with the people and understood their culture:

It was easier to ‘invite’ women [in Panjshir] than in Kabul because I didn’t have to face women there. If a woman in the area was without hijab, I’d call her family, her father and brother, and the head of the village and tell them that she shouldn’t go outside without a hijab. Our job was easy there because I faced [only] the men and we knew the people. I’d convey my message to women through her family.

In Kabul, there are many women without hijab, but we can’t find their families. Nor do we have the courage to speak directly to an unrelated woman. However, we try to guide them through various means. We make them understand, so they realise they should observe hijab. This is extremely difficult because we can’t stop an unrelated woman and have a conversation with her.

He said that, most of the time, it was good to seek help from the local elders, the wakil-e guzar (neighbourhood head) or the imam from the mosque, or they informed the residents of the area that women must observe “full sharia-compliant hijab.” However, in the markets, he said, they encountered all kinds of people, and sometimes a woman, asked politely to observe hijab or maintain her distance from men, would “respond rudely and we’re obliged to remain silent and leave the area because we don’t use force – we only speak to them gently.”

All three enforcers felt disrespected, even wary of the people they had to deal with, especially Kabuli women, as Mawlawi Niamatullah explained:

Women in Kabul are not like women. They’re actually men, or even more than men. When we ask them why they don’t wear hijab, they argue and behave very rudely. I personally try to avoid them as much as possible and tell others to deal with them.

In the past, I was in Logar. There was also wrongdoing there, but not as much. People there had some sense of shame. When you told or warned them once, they’d stop. Here, people don’t care about shame and do whatever they want. We therefore had a good time, as people would listen and cooperate. But not here. People neither listen to us nor respect us.

Mullah Hamdullah said they were instructed to deal with people respectfully and to try to persuade them in “a kind, convincing manner to abandon their wrongdoing,” as sharia instructs. He believes this approach is failing:

For the past four years, we’ve taken a soft approach, but we haven’t seen much change. To be honest, there’s very little difference compared to the time of the previous government. Markets are still full of women, men are clean-shaven and copying female styles, and hijab is barely observed. I believe this is the result of our soft approach. We just say, “Do this,” and “Don’t do that,” and that’s all. But it’s not enough. When we try to enforce something, or use a stricter method, people complain, and then we get questioned by the authorities about our actions.

Qari Abdul Aziz had a more balanced view of the populace:

The people’s attitude toward the enforcers isn’t very good. They view them quite negatively because they believe we disrupt their lives and that makes them bitter. The majority of the youth are dissatisfied with our work. But there are also good people in the community who regard us positively and treat us as the ulema. They’re satisfied with our efforts. Even so, in Kabul, we treat everyone equally. We don’t compromise with anyone, and no one has told us to compromise with the people. But because we’re all religious scholars, we enforcers are always gentle. Perhaps some enforcers sometimes deal with people seriously and harshly. But where I work and where my colleagues are, we haven’t been serious with anyone yet. We’ve always been gentle.

How the enforcers are viewed

The interviews reveal a mismatch between how the enforcers see their jobs and how the interviewees viewed them. For example, small businesswoman Aisha in Herat said: “They’re all the same, very cruel. At least, that’s the case in Herat. I haven’t seen any differences among them. Whenever I go out – out of necessity – I see them in different parts of the city and they all appear frightening.” Overall, she said, they do not consider women to be “human beings.” NGO worker Hasina also said she did not, in any way, trust the amr bil-maruf:

These morality enforcers undermine religion and present a distorted and inhumane image of Islam, which is unacceptable to me because our Islam is not defined in the way the Taliban portray it. They implement everything according to their own desires, not based on sharia or Afghan culture. … Essentially, they impose their own interpretation of Islam on people. Whatever they want, they force people to accept – sometimes by coercion, sometimes by persuasion. In my opinion, Islam is not what they claim it to be; Islam is not this harsh. After all, we’re all Muslims – whether they enforce it or not. Most women observe hijab. However, it must be said that, among them, there are good and bad. Some speak to people with kindness and gentle words, while others behave harshly, especially when dealing with what they consider a ‘crime’ – although we may not call it a crime. In our view, a crime is when someone commits a shameful act that harms society, not when a bit of hair is visible.

The one interviewee with a more favourable view of amr bil-maruf – although not of other aspects of Emirate rule – was Zarghuna, the school principal from Loya Paktia:

I trust the enforcers because they seem to be good people. Most of them are religious scholars and preach the truth. No one’s been bothered by them yet. The only thing that bothers me, and most people, is the restriction on girls’ education. Hijab is a religious requirement, whether the Taliban say it or not. We are, thank God, Muslims and we respect the hijab.

However, as she has travelled to Kabul, she could also comment on how different things were in the capital, including the many more enforcers. “I believe,” she said, “they act more strictly in Kabul than in [my province] because Kabul is home to diverse people with different cultures and women move around more freely than in rural areas. Their style of clothing is also different – many girls in Kabul wear Punjabi-style clothes^[7] or don’t observe hijab, which is why the enforcers are stricter in Kabul than in the provinces. Perhaps [the enforcers’] behaviour towards people also differs.”

A year of fear and deterrence

The Emirate’s law to propagate virtue and prevent vice has undoubtedly had a profound impact on the lives of many Afghans. It is the vehicle by which the state seeks to ensure compliance with its dress code and various aspects of behaviour, especially that men should pray in the mosque and women stay hidden at home. As Hasina said, this law is not so much about propagating virtue, as seeking outward conformity and compliance. It is explicitly aimed at public behaviour, not, as it says, “prying into people’s private sins” (article 10). Yet Hasina was not alone in feeling the state is now intruding into Afghans’ personal lives.

In a February 2023 AAN report about five Taliban who had come to live and work in Kabul, what was fascinating was how their view of the city and its people changed once they lived there. They had understood it to have been degraded by Western ways, but found men going to the mosque and “unlike villages where a lot of people go to the mosque to impress others,” said one, “[p]eople in Kabul go there just for the sake of Allah.” You could also see, he said, an Uzbek, a Pashtun and a Tajik going to the same mosque and living in a single building.” They were alarmed by the number of women outside and not ‘properly’ dressed, but one of the interviewees, enrolling on a computer course and finding one of his fellow students was female (when that was still allowed), discovered that all hell did not break loose. The five missed the freedom of the jihad and hated the nine-to-five routine of office work, but so much of what they encountered in the capital was positive that all but one planned to move his family there.

That report was somehow hopeful, suggesting that human interaction could increase knowledge and respect for ‘the other’. This research on amr bil-maruf has suggested otherwise, with both enforcers and enforced feeling alienated and uneasy, or even frightened. The law is certainly proving a success for the Emirate, forcing compliance directly or through deterrence, and for women, using their families and the fear of scandal to impel self-policing. Many Afghans have changed their behaviour and dress, albeit out of fear. However, that fear may actually be an additional benefit of the amr bil-maruf system for the Emirate, given its belief in the absolute authority of the leader and the necessity of obedience to him, a characteristic familiar in authoritarian states everywhere. Significantly, as well, the drive to further induce conformity has, as yet, no end in sight. Mullah Hamdullah, the enforcer from Paktia, summed up the continuing mission of amr bil-maruf – to reform Afghans, even if that takes time:

I believe that if someone is truly a Muslim, a real Afghan with dignity, they should support what we do. Amr bil-maruf is a central pillar of Islam and of any Islamic system. I understand there may be problems in how we implement it, but people’s resistance to it is mostly due to the moral decay in society. For twenty years, a secular government ruled with the direct support of non-believers. They tried to distance people from Islam and Afghan values. So now, when we try to reverse that, naturally, some people are offended. That’s to be expected, but in time, things will change.

Edited by Jelena Bjelica and Roxanna Shapour

References

References
↑1	The full name of the ministry is the Ministry of Propagation of Virtue, Prevention of Vice and Hearing of Complaints (wazarat-e amr bil-maruf wa nahi an il-munkar wa sam-e shekayat). As we reported, in June 2022, there were more moderate and more hardline factions within the ministry in its first months, although there was consensus within the movement that it was an Islamic state’s duty to police the behaviour of its citizens. This is not the view in most Muslim countries, but it has precedents in Afghanistan.
↑2	The enforcers interviewed used ‘bi-hijab’ to refer to women not adhering to the Taliban’s conception of ‘sharia hijab’, as outlined above. However, the term is used more widely in Afghanistan. See, for example, this June 2021 AAN report from Herat about some young women choosing not to wear the chador, a large, black, head-to-foot covering, in favour of the shaal, a large headscarf that covers a woman’s head and upper body. Both leave the face exposed. Reza Kazemi, “A Future of One’s Own”: One young woman’s struggle to thrive in modern Herat.
↑3	As of the end of March 2025, according to UNAMA, the vice and virtue ministry was employing 3,300 male enforcers around the country, albeit with many more in some provinces than others, eg 14 in Paktia and Paktika, compared to 540 in Kabul. UNAMA could only find female enforcers employed in Baghlan’s provincial capital, Pul-e Khumri, but said that, in some provinces, the ministry deploys female volunteers (students and teachers from madrasas) or policewomen or unofficially pays women “to monitor and report on compliance.”
↑4	In December 2021, it was reported that the Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice had ordered that women travelling more than 45 miles (72km) should be accompanied by a mahram (BBC). This rule was also referred to by an enforcer in this June 2022 AAN report. The May 2022 order about women’s clothing required women to wear ‘sharia hijab’, defined as the burqa, or “customary black clothing and shawl,” with the face also covered, although the eyes could be left exposed. It also said: “Not venturing out without cause is the first and best type of adherence to sharia hijab.” See AAN reporting here.
↑5	Wedding halls are not banned in all provinces, although they may be restricted in terms of playing music and what women can wear.
↑6	Tablet k is a cocktail of methamphetamine, heroin and MDMA/Ecstasy; its name derives from the Russian word for a pill, tabletka.
↑7	‘Punjabi-style’ here refers to piran tomban, also known as shalwar kameez, a long tunic and light, loose, pleated trousers, worn, in Afghanistan, with a headscarf.

Author Interviews< Journalist and author Jon Lee Anderson discusses his book 'To Lose a War'

August 20, 2025 Analytical articles

National Public Radio

August 18, 20255:12 AM ET

STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: Jon Lee Anderson is 68 and has seen a lot of the world, which is his job as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker magazine.

JON LEE ANDERSON: For me, the world is an adventure. I’m amazed by, you know, the tapestry of humankind in all of its variations. I feel like a kid, thrilled and delighted, when I get the chance to go somewhere I’ve never been.

INSKEEP: Readers find Anderson in some of the most hazardous places on Earth. And for decades, that has included Afghanistan.

ANDERSON: Here’s a country that, you know, I’ve known since I was a young man.

INSKEEP: He visited in the 1980s, as rebels were driving an occupying force of the Soviet Union out of the country. Later, Afghanistan fell into civil war. The Taliban took over and hosted Osama bin Laden. Anderson returned just after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, which is when I met him there – an American in a war zone, walking around in an Afghan hat called a pakol and seeming entirely comfortable in his surroundings. Anderson covered a 20-year American occupation and its disastrous end. He’s collected his writings in a new book called “To Lose A War: The Fall And Rise Of The Taliban.” It includes his visit in late 2021, soon after the last Americans had evacuated.

ANDERSON: After 20 years of Western international presence there, I found myself back in the capital city of this country, virtually the only foreigner. I mean, there were probably a handful of others, but I didn’t see them. And the authorities on the street were the Taliban – the people who’d been in the hills all these years, fighting that international coalition and the modern ways of life that it had brought about and tried to instill in the capital. It was bewildering because they looked like Taliban. They were Taliban. They really didn’t know the modern world. And yet they had access, like kids and young people and people everywhere, to smartphones. And they were the new authorities. And the people of Kabul, by and large, had tried to forestall punishment by the Taliban by, say, painting over faces if they had them on ads on their shop windows. Or the girls now who hadn’t been wearing burkas.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

ANDERSON: …Still weren’t wearing burkas, but they had put on veils. They were trying to be a little more conservative, just in case. And there was a kind of sidelong glances. There was no really overt repression yet, but you had a sense that the shoe was going to drop at any minute.

INSKEEP: Instead, it’s been this step-by-step process. Girls were banned from lower grades, then banned from high schools. And a little time passed, and then they were kept out of universities. It’s step by step.

ANDERSON: That’s right. And in one of the last edicts, one of the most mind-numbing of all, which is that they’re – they were – they had already been banned, as you know, from leaving their homes, many of which are like fortresses – right? – unless they were accompanied by a male relative. And now they were banned from speaking out loud. They cannot speak.

INSKEEP: What is life like for people, male or female, who in some way cooperated with the U.S.-led government and then did not make it out of Afghanistan in 2021?

ANDERSON: It’s become increasingly more difficult. So one of the world’s poorest countries – with, I think, half the population in need of food assistance – is now in a situation where it’s not only been cut off from all international credits, President Trump has cut off humanitarian assistance. It’s not in a good place at all.

INSKEEP: I try to think of what remains of the decades-old U.S. presence in Afghanistan. And listening to you, I hear some of the things are military uniforms, vehicles, weapons and smartphones.

ANDERSON: Yeah.

INSKEEP: Is there anything else that remains?

ANDERSON: The memory of what was, briefly. I have to say, I never expected to find myself thinking this, much less saying it. But the Soviets, the Russians – when they were there, they killed a lot of Afghans, many more than the 20 years of the American and NATO presence did. At least 2 million, they say. In my travels through the countryside of Afghanistan back in those days, I didn’t see an intact house. Bombs were everywhere, exploded or unexploded. It was a devastated country. And yet Kabul itself under the Soviets flourished. And they actually did social housing construction, and they educated tens of thousands of Afghans. The Americans didn’t build anything. They built their own bases. They brought the free market.

So Kabul today looks very different to how it looked in 2001. There’s all these gaudy wedding palaces. There was the narco mansions of the drug lords – who were, frankly speaking, allowed to flourish in the first part of the involvement there because they sided with the West in fighting the Taliban – and plenty of cars. But there’s not really a group of buildings, housing, hospitals or much else in the way of infrastructure – modern infrastructure – that people can point to and say the Americans did that. It’s quite sad, I think.

INSKEEP: Are you saying the Soviets, as awful as they were for Afghanistan, left a more lasting impression than the Americans did?

ANDERSON: I would say the jury’s out, but they left behind an educated class of people and infrastructure that we did not leave. I mean, extraordinary expenditures, but it kind of went back to our own businesses and to the contractors. And all of these bases were almost – I sometimes felt that I was visiting a – kind of, like, a Battleship America that was floating just above the Afghan ground, but never quite touching it.

INSKEEP: When you travel to some of the radically different places that you travel, you report one day from Venezuela, say, and another day from Afghanistan and another day from Chechnya or any number of other places. Are there themes that emerge about war, about conflict, about government or about human nature?

ANDERSON: What I see as a symmetry around the world in all these places that you mentioned is that at any time, in any place and in every culture, if there is a group of people with – let’s call it a nation state or a society that feels itself to be, rightly or wrongly, discriminated against, ostracized, marginalized, repressed, and they have no recourse legally through civic expression to redeem themselves or feel freer. They will eventually resort to violence. To me, that is a maxim of humankind.

INSKEEP: The latest book by Jon Lee Anderson is “To Lose A War: The Fall And Rise Of The Taliban.” Thanks so much.

ANDERSON: Thank you. Thanks a lot for having me.

Taliban Rule is Not Authoritarian but Despotic Totalitarianism

August 15, 2025 Analytical articles

By Atal Ahmadzai

Foreign Policy in Focus

August 11, 2025

Like any totalitarian regime, the Taliban aims to moralize its ideology to such an extent that domestic opposition becomes highly improbable — but not impossible

Four years after returning to power, the Taliban regime has become a model of totalitarian rule, using the state as an instrument of total control, promoting a radical ideological agenda, and centralizing authority around a singular leader with a cult of personality. The regime pushes for a utopian society in which women are stripped of their agency, political violence is glorified, modern education is discouraged, and cultural expression is suppressed. Despite this oppression, Afghan society exhibits resilience in various forms, including survival, subtle resistance, and covert defiance, which require support from the international community.

In Afghanistan today, the Taliban has effectively enforced a gender apartheid, where women are not only banished from public life but are also legally confined to their homes and windowless rooms. The regime has even outlawed and prohibited women’s voices. Girls’ education has been banned, and fundamental human rights are being violated. Thousands of new madrassas (religious seminaries) have opened, promoting indoctrination that fosters radicalization.

The media faces a total blackout. Only regime-approved books and literature are published and circulated. The state has transformed into a moral entity with the mission of enforcing “true” or “pure” theocratic rule. Through its morality law, the regime has effectively eliminated any personal space. Without a constitution, the state operates on the decrees of the Taliban supreme leader, the Amir ul Momineen, who is seen as the ultimate arbiter of “divine rule.” The state and its bureaucratic machinery operate to enforce the regime’s ideological agenda, where resistance and dissent are swiftly and brutally suppressed.

Since reclaiming power in Kabul four years ago, the Taliban regime has been relentlessly pursuing a dystopian social transformation. Its ideological aspirations, combined with the full mobilization of the state to enforce a harsh social order, have led to a systematic descent into totalitarianism. These actions by the regime necessitate an active response from the international community. The first step should be to recognize the regime not merely as authoritarian, but as a dystopian totalitarian one.

Totalitarianism in the Twenty-First Century

By the end of the twentieth century, the relevance of examining totalitarianism had lessened due to the decline of communism and the globalization of a norm-based international order. However, as the contemporary crisis of this norm-based international order deepens, tendencies and aspirations towards totalitarianism have emerged in various regions. Amid this crisis, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan stands out as a notable example of totalitarianism.

Although the regime is often depicted as authoritarian, its ideological and political contours align more closely with those of totalitarianism. The conceptual distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian rule has often remained blurred. Although both are non-democratic, they embody fundamentally different dynamics between the state and society.

Totalitarianism is the most extreme version of the subordination of people to the state and a questionable homogeneous societal structure. Classic literature, including intellectual work by Carl Friedrich and Hannah Arendt, characterizes totalitarianism as a ruling ideology seeking to create a utopian or perfect society, governed by a centralized power structure led by a singular figure. It employs an oppressive state apparatus, including bureaucratic machinery, to enforce social transformation.

Totalitarian regimes maintain a monopoly on information and communication, using fear and violence as tools of total control of people and their lives. Although such subordination may seem remote from the political realities and normative standards of the twenty-first century, it is essentially occurring under Taliban rule.

How is the Taliban Rule Totalitarian?

Under the Taliban, Afghanistan has emerged as one of the most oppressed nations in the world. The regime has transformed the state into an instrument of total domination, closely aligning with its ideological mission, and it has waged a war against fundamental human rights, freedoms, and agency. The relationship between the state and society under Taliban rule is characterized by total submission.

Since regaining power, the Taliban has begun to establish a system in which the entire state apparatus exerts control over citizens and their lives, and is dedicated to serving the interests of the regime, grounded in an all-encompassing ideology centered around a singular paternalistic figure. This process involves dismantling institutions that traditionally maintain a balance of power among different branches of government and provide essential checks on government authority, such as the media, legislative bodies, independent judiciary, human rights and electoral commissions, and civil society.

Moving toward totalitarian rule, the Taliban has implemented a centralized system of oppression marked by extrajudicial violence, executions, and the brutal suppression of dissent and resistance. This system is defined by a pervasive ideological orientation led by the Taliban clergy, who direct and lead all state institutions, including technical and bureaucratic apparatus.

The regime has shifted the state orientation toward a wholly paternalistic model, reliant on the whims of the supreme leader, who positions himself as the ultimate arbiter of divine rule. For the regime, the state is viewed as a moral entity with a divine mandate, where politics is not merely a mechanism for serving the populace or defining the relationship between the state and its citizens; rather, it is used as a tool to establish self-proclaimed “divine rule.”

The head of the Taliban’s supreme court claims that the state’s mandate is to implement “divine rule.” He characterizes the regime as a “government of guidance,” whose functions include establishing a “pure Islamic order,” continuing jihad, and eradicating vice. This understanding of the state’s role influences the relationship between the state and society.

The regime prioritizes its ideological goal of total social transformation over the rights-holder and duty-bearer dynamic between society and the state. It obliges the state to seek the salvation of the society on the “righteous path,” which makes the right-based contract with the society irrelevant and secondary to the overarching ideological goal of the regime. To promote its ideological agenda, the regime justifies its actions as “the rule of the divine,” ultimately guided by the supreme leader.

The regime’s supreme leader wields unmatched moral authority, directing politics toward the ultimate goal of establishing the “rule of the divine.” The Taliban supreme leader argues that the regime’s mission is to guide the people in following God’s rule while criticizing modern politics for prioritizing self-interest and materialism. In 2023, he abolished the Attorney General’s Office, creating a high directorate to enforce his directives, effectively positioning himself as the regime’s constitution and ultimate authority. This realignment aims to make mundane politics serve the state’s divine mission, positioning Amir ul Momineen as its ultimate arbiter. The move has blurred the lines between the regime, the state, and society, undermining institutional independence, including the judiciary, which now prioritizes the regime’s ideological mission over justice.

Totalitarianism is defined by the blurring of lines between the state and society, with the aim of unifying the populace under a single ideology. The Taliban aims to fundamentally transform Afghan society by enforcing its moral directives. Although religion is deeply ingrained in Afghan culture, the regime undermines traditional religious institutions and scholars critical of the regime’s radical ideology, making them unable to resist the prevailing totalitarianism without facing brutality and violence.

Like any totalitarian regime, the Taliban aims to moralize its ideology to such an extent that domestic opposition becomes highly improbable. The moral framing of its mission demonizes political dissent, resistance, and differing ideologies, portraying them as corrupt and justifying violence against them.

Resistance to the Taliban

Although the regime’s brutality may have stifled popular revolt, the character of perseverance and resilience within Afghan society is slowly but surely emerging. Afghan resistance may differ from Western notions of revolt and protest; instead, it manifests through survival, subtle resistance, and covert defiance.

Resistance through survival means valuing and living life as people desire, within the limits of what is possible. Subtle resistance manifests in various forms, including art, activism, and social media. A dynamic Afghan diaspora is organizing, including Afghan scholars. Traditional religious scholars, often at great personal risk, are opposing the regime’s interpretation and ideological stance. Meanwhile, women are challenging the regime’s rules by engaging in income-generating activities and small businesses to support their families. Additionally, society mobilizes covert defiance in various ways, such as establishing not only hidden schools for girls but secret beauty salons.

While Afghan society resists the totalitarianism of the Taliban in a brutally oppressive context, the international community has both a political and moral obligation to oppose the regime. The first step is to recognize the Taliban regime as a totalitarian entity, as it meets all the criteria associated with such a rule.

The political history of the twentieth century demonstrates that normalizing a totalitarian regime for strategic or self-interest can contribute to the spread of totalitarian ideologies in other regions. As liberal democracies in the West grapple with their own authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies among certain political groups, legitimizing Taliban-style totalitarianism could empower similar paternalistic and dystopian narratives elsewhere.

Atal Ahmadzai is a research fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI) at Lund University in Sweden. His research, concentrated on human and environmental security, primarily explores the relationships between political and civil rights and climate adaptability.

The Daily Hustle: Building a business in Kabul one stitch at a time

August 15, 2025 Analytical articles

Hamid Pakteen • Roxanna Shapour

10 Aug 2025

Afghanistan Analysts Network print sharing button

In Kabul’s Timur Shahi area, tailoring is serious business. Rows of shopfronts compete for customers. One marvels at how so many tailors, offering basically the same service, stay in business in such close proximity. But they do. Each tailor has his own loyal customers who have been with him for years, even generations. In this instalment of the Daily Hustle, Hamid Pakteen hears from Nangialai, a 40-year-old tailor who first learned his trade in Peshawar, Pakistan. When his family moved back to Afghanistan, he set up shop in Kabul with the tools he had saved up to buy. Today, his business makes traditional clothes and sells fabrics, employing around ten people. Demand for his work peaks in the lead-up to the two Eids, when Afghans traditionally make or buy new clothes for the holiday. Nangialai talks about his journey – from his childhood dreams of being a tailor to building his business from the ground up in Kabul – and why passing his skills to the next generation is so important to him.

My origin story

My name is Nangialai. I’m 40 years old. I own a tailoring and clothing store in Timur Shahi, Kabul. My family is originally from Nangrahar, but we lived in Pakistan for many years. This is where I learned my craft more than 25 years ago. Even as a boy, I was interested in tailoring. I remember going to the bazaar in Peshawar with my father. I would stand outside the shops and watch the tailors at work. I’d tell my father: “One day I’ll be a tailor and make beautiful clothes.” But every time I mentioned it, my father would get upset. He didn’t want me going into a trade. He wanted me in school, getting a proper education. But I didn’t care much for school.

Eventually, he gave in and arranged for me to become an apprentice in a tailoring workshop. Although I had a passion for sewing, I didn’t have any skills. I started with the basics – sewing buttons on clothes – and then I progressed to ironing. I worked hard and made an effort to learn. Little by little, the master tailor I was apprenticed to began giving me children’s clothes to sew, but I still made mistakes. He was a kind and patient teacher who was very supportive, as he could see that I was trying hard. It took me years to learn tailoring, progressing from one stage to the next, with my boss entrusting me with more complex tasks.

The most challenging part of tailoring is cutting – the scissor work. I struggled to learn it at first, but after three long years, I got the hang of it. Slowly, my boss started giving me customer orders to sew from start to finish – measuring, cutting, sewing and adding those little fine touches that make the difference between adequate tailoring and quality work. He still kept an eye on me and checked my work at every stage “One mistake can ruin the whole piece,” he’d say.

Once he was satisfied that I’d learned the trade, he started paying me 5,000 Pakistani rupees (USD 18) a month. It was far too little for how hard I worked, but I stayed. I worked for him for quite a while, despite the low pay, because he was one of the most respected master tailors in Peshawar and I was learning the fine skills of tailoring from him. Eventually, with his blessing, I opened my own shop and started building a name. Business was good, customers were loyal. But then my family decided to move back to Afghanistan.

Making a go of it in Kabul

We arrived in Kabul twenty years ago, me with my tailoring kit in tow – sewing machine, scissors, tape measure, needle and thread, pencil and chalk – the essential sewing tools. I had bought those tools with money I had put away from my meagre apprentice’s wages. A sewing machine is a huge investment; a new professional-grade one can cost as much as 30,000 afghanis (USD 500).

I rented my first shop in a back alley in the Kart-e-Naw area of Kabul. In the beginning, business was very slow. People didn’t know me and the competition was stiff. I had to start making a name for myself. So I set my prices lower than other tailors and my work was top quality – even if I do say so myself. My customers, impressed with my work, started referring their friends and family to me and in time, my business grew. I spent a year working out of that shop in the back alley, but once I was more established in Kabul, I moved to the hub of tailors, Timur Shahi.

There, I partnered with someone else and we expanded the business. Alongside tailoring, we also started selling fabric. People’s interest in traditional clothes has grown over the years, and with it, the demand for good fabrics. We keep both affordable and high-end options — Indian and Pakistani — so everyone can find something in their budget.

Over time, we’ve grown the shop. I handle the sewing. My partner runs the fabric sales. We also have ten people working for us. Imagine going from a little boy dreaming of becoming a tailor to owning a thriving tailor business that supports several families.

The season for tailors

In Afghanistan, our busiest times are the two Eids — Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Adha. It’s tradition to have new clothes made for these occasions. Although people are struggling financially, they still find a way to get new outfits for themselves and their children for Eid. I’m lucky. I have many customers with large families, so they come to my shop and have several outfits made. In the weeks and days leading up to these two holidays, we do a brisk business. The number of orders increases by 80 per cent compared to a normal month and we can hardly keep up. But we don’t want to disappoint any of our customers whose custom over the years has made our business flourish, so we don’t turn anyone away. I take their orders, even up to the night before Eid. In the few days before Eid, we work well into the night – all night even – only taking a break to go to the mosque for the morning prayer. We even eat standing up while we work. We keep our shop open on the first day of Eid so that our customer can pick up their clothes.

We get all kinds of orders. Some people buy ready-made clothes, while others want us to sew outfits according to their specific requirements. Some customers want very simple clothes, while others prefer embroidery (yakhandozi) or appliqué designs (goldozi), especially if they are ordering clothes for Eid. On those occasions, they ask for elaborate traditional embroideries – delicate khamkdozi designs fashioned out of white silk thread, the multicolour silk chamkdozi, the beautiful sunddozi designs that have been handed down through the generations and the most intricate of all, the yakhandozis that adorn collars, yokes and sometimes even the cuffs of shirts. This craft is fast disappearing, being replaced by less expensive (and less time-consuming) machine-stitched version. But in our shop, we have skilled craftsmen with expertise in all types of embroidery. I’m proud that I’m playing a small part in keeping this heritage alive. We also have a catalogue that we show to customers, but most of the time, customers come with their own designs and we follow them exactly.

Each type of design requires its own specialised machine and a tailor with specific skills. For example, nowadays, I only do the fabric cutting, which is the most important and difficult task in tailoring. We have another tailor who sews plain clothes, and yet another who specialises in embroidered and appliqué garments – each with their own machines. For plain clothes, we use one type of machine, while embroidery and appliqué work require completely different equipment.

These days, modern sewing machines make our work much easier. In the past, sewing machines were mostly manual. All the work had to be done by hand and it was time-consuming. But now it’s easier; the machines are electric and have better speed and functionality. This past Eid, I accepted and prepared 30 to 50 orders every day. This wouldn’t have been possible in the past. The old manual machines were constantly breaking down and we could only manage 20 outfits – if we were lucky. But now, the advanced and multi-functional machines are making tailoring easier and faster compared to the past.

How much does it cost to get a suit made?

The price for tailoring men’s clothes varies and, in general, is set by the Kabul municipality – adult clothes are 400 afghani (USD 6), and children’s clothes under the age of twelve are 250 to 300 afghani (a little over USD 3). That’s for a basic pirhan tonban (traditional long shirt and trousers) and if the customer brings the fabric himself. If he buys the fabric from us, then the cost goes up to 1,500 to 3,000 afghani (USD 22 to 45), depending on the fabric. Hand-stitched clothes are more expensive, whereas machine-stitched ones are cheaper – some machine-made shirts can cost as little as 300 Afghanis (USD 4). However, people don’t like them much because their quality is poor. They prefer handmade shirts.

Waistcoats cost between 1,200 and 2,500 Afghanis (USD 17 to 37), depending on the stitching and fabric, which affects the cost. Hand-stitched embroideries, particularly the Herati yakhan (Herati-style embroidered collars) and the Kandahari yakhan (Kandahari-style embroidered collars), are very fashionable these days. Prices for the Herati collars start at 1,500 Afghanis and go up to 3,000 Afghanis (USD 17 to 45), while the Kandahari ones, which require less hand-embroidery, range from 600 to 1,700 Afghanis (USD 9 to 25).

Every customer who comes to us to order or tailor clothes inevitably spends 20 minutes to half an hour bargaining. We understand that people are facing economic difficulties, so we have no choice but to compromise. We even give some customers a price that is below our own cost, when we understand that paying for the clothes is a struggle for them.

Paying it forward

Still, I can’t complain. For now, business is good and we are content. We haven’t had to reduce our staff and we can keep up with our practice of taking on paid apprentices. This is important to me because I remember the opportunities my first boss, the master tailor in Peshawar, gave me. Without his guidance and patience, I wouldn’t have been able to realise my dream of becoming a tailor. Now, it’s my turn to give young people who are interested in tailoring the chance to learn the trade and hopefully make a go of a shop themselves.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

Afghanistan: Authorities must reinstate formal legal frameworks, rule of law and end four years of injustice and impunity

August 15, 2025 Analytical articles

Amnesty International

15 August 2025

The Taliban de-facto authorities must immediately put an end to the arbitrary and unfair delivery of justice by reinstating a formal constitutional and legal framework and the rule of law in accordance with Afghanistan’s international human rights obligations, Amnesty International said today.

Since the Taliban took power in August 2021, Afghanistan’s legal framework has been entirely dismantled and replaced with a religiously grounded system shaped by the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law. The system is riddled with inconsistency, pervasive impunity and unaccountability; arbitrary, unfair and closed trials; and personal biases in the meting out of punishments such as public flogging and other forms of torture and other ill-treatment.

“After four years of Taliban rule, what remains is a deeply opaque, coercive legal order that prioritizes obedience over rights, and silence over truth,” said Samira Hamidi, Amnesty International’s regional campaigner for South Asia.

“The Taliban’s justice system is causing blatant miscarriages of justice. The justice system has not only stepped away from international human rights standards but has reversed nearly two decades of progress.”

After four years of Taliban rule, what remains is a deeply opaque, coercive legal order that prioritizes obedience over rights, and silence over truth.

Samira Hamidi, Amnesty International’s regional campaigner for South Asia

“There is no law to refer to”

Prior to August 2021, Afghan laws were grounded in a written constitution and passed by elected legislative bodies after reforms from 2001 led to several improvements in the country. Courts functioned at multiple levels (Primary, Appeal and Supreme Courts) and were supported by independent prosecutors and legal defence structures. Court decisions were generally documented, open to appeal and subject to public oversight.

Under the Taliban, court proceedings are generally conducted by a single judge (Qazi) accompanied by a religious legal expert (Mufti) who advises on the issuance of religious verdicts (Fatwas) based on their personal interpretation of religious texts.

Speaking with Amnesty International, a former judge in Afghanistan explained the wide discrepancies in judgements due to the use of different guidance of Islamic thought (fiqh) and jurisprudence: “In some districts, rulings are based on Bada’i al-Sana’i while in others, they refer to Fatawa-i Qazi Khan. The same crime might result in two completely different verdicts.” For a criminal charge such as theft, the penalties can range from public flogging to short-term detention based on individual interpretations.

This lack of legal uniformity has made the system uncertain, unpredictable and arbitrary. A former prosecutor said that in some rural Afghan courts, judges were seen browsing religious texts during trials to find suitable references, leading to long delays and inconsistent outcomes. The absence of codified national laws has stripped people, including citizens and legal professionals, of any clarity or certainty about their rights and responsibilities.

Erasure of women in the judicial system

Before the Taliban’s take-over, women were actively serving as judges, prosecutors, and lawyers.

They made up between 8% and 10% of the judiciary, and nearly 1,500 women were registered as lawyers and legal advocates with the Afghanistan Independent Bar Association (AIBA), comprising about a quarter of its total membership. Today, most of them have been forced into hiding or exile after being dismissed from their positions following the Taliban’s take-over.

Institutions that once served to protect women’s rights, such as Family Courts, Juvenile Justice Units, and Violence Against Women Units, have been dismantled, leaving women with almost no access to justice and effective remedies. As one former judge said: “In Taliban courts, the voice of a woman is not heard, not because she has nothing to say, but because there is no one left to hear her.”

“We all live in fear”

A former female judge, who had served on a family court in Kabul and is now in exile, said: “There is no judicial independence, no fair trial procedures, and no access to defence lawyers. We had built a legal system with rules, and overnight [the Taliban] turned it into something frightening and unpredictable.”

Under Taliban rule, court proceedings are often held in secret. There is no system of public oversight, and legal decisions are neither documented nor explained. People are arrested without warrants, detained without trial, and in some cases, simply forcibly disappeared. A former prosecutor said: “We used to have to justify every arrest with paperwork and investigation before August 2021 but now, someone can be picked up for their clothes or for speaking out, and no one will ask why.”

Sentences handed down without fair trial or proper legal review often result in public punishments—including flogging and executions—carried out in city squares and sports stadiums. These acts violate the right to dignity and protection from torture and extra-judicial executions. Several witnesses recalled seeing young men flogged in public for listening to music or women detained for not being fully covered. These spectacles are not just punishments; they are tools of fear and control. The former prosecutor added: “we all live in fear of becoming the next example.”

“Taliban’s justice system undermines basic principles of fairness, transparency, accountability, and dignity. It is not built on the protection of human rights but on fear and control. For many Afghans, especially women, justice is no longer something they can seek. It is something they must survive without,” said Samira Hamidi.

For many Afghans, especially women, justice is no longer something they can seek. It is something they must survive without.

Samira Hamidi

The Taliban must immediately reverse their draconian edicts, end corporal punishments, and uphold the human rights of everyone in the country. The Taliban must also actively and effectively respect, protect and uphold judicial independence and the rule of law including by reforming the justice system and ensuring that judges, lawyers, prosecutors and other legal experts are able to provide services to the Afghan population in accordance with the country’s international human rights obligations.

Amnesty International is calling on the international community to take immediate action, through diplomatic pressure and principled engagement with the Taliban de-facto authorities, to demand the reinstatement of a formal legal system, protection of human rights and the rule of law in Afghanistan.

Dispatches From Afghanistan Show How the U.S. Lost Its Way — and the War

August 12, 2025 Analytical articles

By Elliot Ackerman

Elliot Ackerman, a Marine veteran of the war in Afghanistan, is the author, most recently, of the novel “Sheepdogs.”

New York Times

Aug. 12, 2025

A new book by the veteran correspondent Jon Lee Anderson captures a long war’s noble goals and crippling missteps.

TO LOSE A WAR: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, by Jon Lee Anderson

In one of the final scenes of Mike Nichols’s 2007 movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” Representative Charlie Wilson of Texas, played by Tom Hanks, pleads with his colleagues to approve reconstruction money for Afghanistan. The country’s mujahedeen, backed by the C.I.A., had by this point defeated the Soviets after a long and bloody war over the course of the 1980s.

American policymakers were ready to move on and Wilson, begging for one one-thousandth of the sum the U.S. government had recently appropriated to fight its secret war, says: “This is what we always do. We always go in with our ideals and we change the world and then we leave. We always leave. But that ball though, it keeps on bouncing.”

Jon Lee Anderson’s “To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban” follows the bouncing ball. One of this country’s pre-eminent war correspondents, Anderson covered Afghanistan for more than two decades as a reporter for The New Yorker; this collection of his dispatches, all but one published in the magazine, spans that time, beginning in 2001, shortly after the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the U.S.-affiliated Northern Alliance, and ending in late 2021, with a grim portrait of Afghanistan’s myriad challenges — from crippling drought and economic collapse to political feuds — in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal.

In his preface, Anderson characterizes Afghanistan as “more of a battleground of history” than “a nation.” The early chapters deal with the rise of American power in Afghanistan in the aughts, as well as the Taliban’s precipitate fall in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Weeks after those attacks, Anderson traveled to Kabul at an inflection point. The Taliban were on the run. Osama bin Laden was on the loose. And the country stood on the cusp of a promising future unimaginable only weeks before.

In those heady days, Anderson interviewed Ghulam Sarwar Akbari, a former Afghan communist who, like Wilson in Nichols’s movie, blames U.S. disengagement after the Soviet defeat for Afghanistan becoming a terrorist haven: “After the Soviets left, and the mujahedeen were victorious, America, instead of helping them to create a good government, forgot about Afghanistan. America shouldn’t have done this.”

Reading Anderson’s early dispatches is like stepping into a time capsule. His Afghan and American subjects give voice to the conventional wisdom of a period nearly 25 years behind us. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, he meets with Jack Idema, a private security contractor, who cites the urgent need for a large American military presence, without which “we’re gonna be right back to where we were five years from now.” That interview took place in 2001. One of the remarkable aspects of Anderson’s reporting is its scope of perspective as well as time. In his telling, the war — and, with it, Afghanistan’s promising future — deteriorates before our eyes, page by page.

In a 2010 dispatch from Maiwand, in the country’s south, Anderson writes: “The situation that the U.S. military finds itself in in Afghanistan is an odd one. Formally speaking, it has been deployed in Afghanistan since the autumn of 2001, and yet, in areas like Maiwand, it is essentially a newcomer.” In the same chapter, he embeds with the U.S. Army’s Third “Wolfpack” Squadron of the Second Cavalry as its soldiers struggle to contain the Taliban insurgency. Already, American military deaths are beginning to mount. This chapter begins with the death of Joseph T. Prentler, a young U.S. soldier killed in an I.E.D. strike. Slowly, the dream of a quick American victory fades as the casualties — both American and Afghan — add up.

One of those casualties is the clarity of purpose with which the United States entered the war after 9/11. Afghanistan was supposed to be the “good” war, fought for a righteous cause: the destruction of Al Qaeda and the dismantling of the Taliban regime that offered the group a haven. This was a government that inflicted human rights abuses on its own people, enforced a barbaric form of Shariah law and refused to allow girls to attend school, making Afghanistan the worst place in the world to be a woman.

In one of his later chapters, Anderson follows Lt. Col. Stephen Lutsky as he wages a failing counterinsurgency campaign in the restive Khost Province. Lutsky describes how many Afghans were willing to cut deals that often undermined American efforts, saying: “For Americans, it’s black or white — it’s either good guys or bad guys. For Afghans, it’s not. There are good Taliban and bad Taliban, and some of them are willing to do deals with each other. It’s just beyond us.”

Ultimately, the tragic U.S. withdrawal in August 2021 proved Lutsky’s point: The war was “just beyond us.” Today, the conventional wisdom from the end of the 1980s, when Tom Hanks’s Charlie Wilson was pleading for reconstruction funds, has been turned on its head. Ideas like “nation-building” and “regime change” have become politically toxic on both sides of the aisle.

Maybe that’s sound policy. Or maybe those policymakers should read Anderson’s reporting. If they do, they will find a book that is as deeply humane and profoundly rendered as any I’ve read about Afghanistan, or any other war. “To Lose a War” is a monument to both good intentions and folly, a humbling reminder that the ball keeps on bouncing.

TO LOSE A WAR: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban | By Jon Lee Anderson | Penguin Press | 371 pp. | $30

Authors:

Fabrizio Foschini

The Washington Post

August 30, 2025

Washington ignores Afghanistan at its peril. That happened after 1989 when the United States disengaged from the region after the Soviet Union’s withdrawal and collapse, which allowed Afghanistan to become a crucible for those who would attack America on Sept. 11, 2001.

The Economist

Aug 21st, 2025

Four years after the fall of Kabul, governments are quietly recognising the insurgents

Things could still be destabilised by the cuts by Donald Trump’s administration to humanitarian aid, the pushback of refugees by Iran and drought. But the Taliban have endured worse. “You have the clocks, we have the time,” they told the occupying foreign powers. Now they have both.■

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “The power of patience”

A climate of fear

Families ‘self-policing’

Going beyond the law and a major paradox

Men’s experiences

The enforcers’ experience

How the enforcers are viewed

A year of fear and deterrence

By Atal Ahmadzai

Foreign Policy in Focus

August 11, 2025

Like any totalitarian regime, the Taliban aims to moralize its ideology to such an extent that domestic opposition becomes highly improbable — but not impossible

Totalitarianism in the Twenty-First Century

How is the Taliban Rule Totalitarian?

Resistance to the Taliban

My origin story

Making a go of it in Kabul

The season for tailors

How much does it cost to get a suit made?

Paying it forward

“There is no law to refer to”

Erasure of women in the judicial system

“We all live in fear”

A new book by the veteran correspondent Jon Lee Anderson captures a long war’s noble goals and crippling missteps.

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