Pakistan is working to shift the global narrative in its favour amid ongoing tensions with Afghanistan and uncertainty regarding peace negotiations with the interim Taliban government. To achieve this, Islamabad is portraying itself as a victim of cross-border terrorism, calling the Taliban uncooperative, seeking external support from Western and friendly Islamic nations on the issue, justifying aggressive military actions in Afghanistan, and blaming India for the rift with the Taliban. All these factors also contribute to Pakistan’s attempts to hide its “strategic depth” policy failure in Afghanistan and coerce the Taliban leadership to fall in line or face consequences. Riding high on renewed ties with the United States and a growing diplomatic role in the Middle East, Pakistan believes it can reshape the perception about Afghanistan. While this tactic may work in the short term, Islamabad risks alienating the Taliban in the long run.
Pak Plays Victim
First, Pakistan is presenting itself internationally as the victim of cross-terrorism allegedly originating from Afghan territory. Islamabad has repeatedly accused the Taliban-led interim government of harbouring the Tehrik‑i‑Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other militant groups that attack Pakistani armed forces. In the most recent round of talks in Istanbul (with mediation from Turkey and Qatar), Pakistan initially declared: “The dialogue…ended without any workable solution” and accused the Afghan side of being “indifferent to Pakistan’s losses”. However, the recent negotiations were extended due to third-party mediation efforts and finally concluded on October 30, with plans to hold the next round on November 6 in Istanbul. By emphasising its own sufferings and sacrifices, Pakistan is now portraying itself as a responsible, peace-seeking neighbour whose diplomatic overtures have been rejected due to the Taliban’s intransigence. This victim narrative gives Islamabad moral cover in international forums.
A ‘Peace Warrior’
Second, by pointing the finger at the Taliban and declaring its own peaceful credentials, Pakistan can claim the role of the peace warrior. The Pakistani side has claimed that the country had “always desired, advocated and immensely sacrificed for peace and prosperity for the people of Afghanistan” and warned that “Pakistan’s patience has run its course”. Whereas Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, warned the Afghan Taliban to choose between “peace and chaos”, and stated in January 2024, “when it comes to the safety and security of every single Pakistani, the whole of Afghanistan can be damned”. In doing so, Pakistan presents itself as both a willing negotiator and a powerful military force that reserves the right to act. This matters because the international community generally favours diplomatic negotiations over military solutions. Therefore, Pakistan’s argument that it engaged with the Taliban in Doha and Istanbul, but that the latter allegedly backtracked on commitments, gives Islamabad a diplomatic advantage and allows it to shift the blame away from itself and onto Kabul for bilateral tensions.
Look At What It Says To The World
Third, the failure of negotiations helps Pakistan mobilise external support from the West and some Islamic countries to pressure the Taliban. Islamabad has long argued with Washington that Kabul cannot be stable unless Pakistan’s security concerns (especially the TTP) are addressed. With the Taliban’s limited role in controlling militancy in Pakistan, which it considers the latter’s “internal problem”, Islamabad may use the uncertainty around peace talks as an example of the Taliban’s unreliability and solicit financial aid, intelligence, and military cooperation, or diplomatic backing from Western capitals on the issue. Notably, Pakistan remains a close counterterrorism partner of the United States and has strengthened bilateral security cooperation under the Donald Trump administration. With renewed support from Washington and ongoing tensions between the US and Afghanistan over the issue of the Bagram airbase control, Islamabad sees an opportunity to bolster its external support and portray the Taliban as a threat to regional and global security.
Justifying Its Aggression
Fourth, the diplomatic impasse gives Pakistan a convenient justification for an aggressive military strategy against Afghanistan under the pretext of counterterrorism operations against TTP and its affiliates. For example, Defence Minister Khawaja Asif threatened Afghanistan that Pakistan did not need “even a fraction of its full arsenal to completely obliterate the Taliban regime” if provoked further. The temporary breakdown of diplomacy between the two countries may lead to Pakistan using force and carrying out more and deeper strikes inside Afghanistan, such as in Kabul or Kandahar. In Pakistan, there are growing calls for ‘open war’ or redrawing the Durand Line by forcefully capturing some territories in eastern Afghanistan. Other options include increasing airstrikes on so-called militant hideouts, decapitation of top TTP leaders, and even attempts at regime change or a reshuffle in the current Taliban administration in Kabul. These options are possible as Pakistan is working to shape a global narrative that, if the ceasefire fails and peace talks with the Taliban break down, it reserves the right to take escalatory actions against Afghanistan.
Blaming India, As Usual
Fifth, Pakistan is also using the deadlock with the Taliban to further its propaganda that India is supposedly interfering via Afghanistan by supporting certain militant outfits. In its recent narrative, Islamabad is increasingly blaming India for influencing the Taliban regime to allegedly destabilise Pakistan’s western region. While Islamabad has failed to provide any evidence proving India’s involvement, this narrative serves the purpose of Pakistan’s military establishment: shifting attention away from its own counterterrorism policy failures, pressuring the Taliban, and placing India in the role of a destabiliser in the region. Pakistan is unsettled after the recent multi-day visit of the Acting Foreign Minister of the interim Taliban government, Amir Khan Muttaqi, to India. Muttaqi lauded India as a “close friend” that provides humanitarian aid, and announced Afghanistan’s desire for “mutual respect, trade, and people-to-people relations” with India.
Additionally, New Delhi recently agreed to upgrade its “technical” mission in Kabul to a full embassy. For Pakistan, the burgeoning India-Afghanistan relationship under the Taliban regime in Kabul is a clear failure of its decades-old “strategic depth” policy. To express its disapproval and frustration, Pakistan carried out airstrikes in Kabul, allegedly targeting key TTP leaders, during Muttaqi’s visit to India. This shows Pakistan will not accept growing diplomatic ties between Kabul and New Delhi and may intensify pressure on the Taliban through military strikes and narrative warfare against India. Nevertheless, these tactics will not solve Pakistan’s core issues with the Taliban administration, improve the internal security situation, or address deep ethnic divisions within the country.
By combining these reasons, Pakistan may extract short-term gains from ongoing tensions with the Taliban. The third-party mediation from Qatar and Turkey provides Pakistan with an additional advantage to pressure the Taliban and shape the global narrative and outcomes of the talks in its favor. Here, Pakistan’s aim is to change the Taliban’s behaviour in its favor, limit Kabul’s ties with New Delhi, and use regional instability as a time-tested tool to garner international attention.
However, this approach also poses certain risks to Pakistan. By leaning heavily on military operations and coercive diplomacy, Pakistan may further alienate the Afghan Taliban, reduce its influence, and increase the probability of a broader armed confrontation. The Taliban may turn away from Pakistan and cultivate new partnerships within the region and outside. Unlike the first Taliban regime in the late 1990s, Taliban 2.0 does not want to accept Pakistan’s policy directives and expects respectful treatment from its neighbour. On the other hand, Pakistan is not ready to accept the Taliban’s independent policy lines, especially Afghanistan’s growing ties with India, and would continue to push for a malleable leadership in Kabul. Even after four years, Islamabad has still not officially recognised the Taliban regime as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. This has generated serious mistrust in Kabul regarding Islamabad’s intentions and is one of the key reasons for tensions between the two sides.
‘Disappointment’ Is The Word
Since August 2021, Pakistan’s policy toward Afghanistan has shifted from one of triumph to one of disappointment. As the Taliban refuse to accept blatant subordination from Islamabad, Pakistan has decided to use coercive diplomacy, military measures, and the cross-border terrorism issue to create a narrative in its favour, which will allow it to justify its hard actions against Afghanistan in the future. This strategy may benefit Pakistan in the short term, as the Taliban’s international reputation is already struggling with credibility issues. However, Pakistan faces the following risks: losing influence over the Taliban in the long term, intensifying anger among Afghans, especially refugees and those impacted by Pakistani military actions, rising local militancy, and possibly consolidating the disgruntled members of the Pashtun community on both sides of the border.
Therefore, what remains to be seen is whether Pakistan’s aggressive policy on Afghanistan would ultimately pressure the Taliban and bring long-term peace to the two countries, or whether the regional instability would again help garner international attention and material support for Islamabad. One thing is clear: under Munir’s leadership, Pakistan’s military establishment is likely to use rising tensions on both its eastern and western borders as justification to further consolidate its power and deflect any calls for public accountability for its recurring counterterrorism failures and destabilising regional policy.
(Sarral Sharma is a Doctoral Candidate at JNU and a former Consultant at the National Security Council Secretariat)
Five Ways Pakistan Is Trying To ‘Hide’ Its Own Blunders In Afghanistan
In deference to Turkiye’s request, Pakistan agreed to continue the talks with the Afghan Taliban in Istanbul. A meeting of the Pakistani and Afghan principals (possibly defence ministers) on November 6 is likely to yield a compromise that has bedevilled the dialogue process so far.
Turkiye’s Foreign Office statement gave the encouraging news that “all parties agreed to continuation of ceasefire”, and “put in place a monitoring and verification mechanism that will ensure maintenance of peace and imposing penalty on the violating party”. However, whether the Taliban regime officials agree to provide written assurances on a “monitoring and verification mechanism” remains to be seen.
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Earlier, during the meeting between the officials of the two countries, Defence Minister Khwaja Asif’s blunt warning to the Taliban to provide verifiable guarantees on the TTP caused ripples in Afghan circles. Meanwhile, the Taliban’s ‘ignorance’ about the TTP’s presence or activities had no takers. In this day and age, nothing can be hidden, so why claim that there are no TTP guys in Afghanistan or that ISKP cadres are in Pakistan, not in Afghanistan?
The UN, international NGOs, including Amnesty International, report clearly the existence of these terrorist organisations in Afghanistan. Not to forget that the prominent figures of the Taliban leadership are still on the 1267 travel list.
The Istanbul talks brought home three points about the Taliban’s modus operandi towards their interlocutors. First, the decision-making process of the Taliban regime is highly centralised; nothing moves without the consent of Amir Ul Momeneen Mullah Haibtullah Akhund. Therefore, Taliban officials drag out the dialogue to the maximum to tire out their interlocutors. They also believe that yielding to a proposal or demand would give the other side space or reflect poorly on the Taliban.
Empirical evidence of their delaying tactics is the ban on girls’ education, whereby the Taliban officials maintain that they are still formulating a policy about the resumption of girls’ education beyond sixth grade. The question is: are the Taliban working out a rocket manufacturing formula that is taking so much time? The plausible answer is that through such delaying tactics, the Taliban clergy think that the people will forget all about the issue. But they are harshly mistaken; girls’ education will continue to haunt them unless they give in.
Second, the Taliban are stony-faced when confronted by opponents with incontrovertible evidence. For instance, while they are passionate about relaxation in transit trade from Pakistan, their Islamic ethics take a backseat when they happily allow the smuggling of contraband items to Pakistan.
Third, if cornered on the TTP, the Afghan Taliban tell Pakistan that “we fear that bringing pressure on the TTP may push them to join the ISKP”. They also admit that TTP cadres have already joined ISKP. Hence, taking action against the TTP would be detrimental to the Taliban regime. While maintaining this stance, the Taliban officials forget that they are not living on an island and their regime is bound to take action against all terrorist groups, be they ISKP, TTP, ETIM or Al-Qaeda.
The above observations are not a conference-room eyewitness account but a drawing-board sketch of a group of people who are ruling Afghanistan, about whom our ruling elite wore a proud smile when they triumphantly entered Kabul. The Pakistanis were led to believe that the “Taliban have broken the shackles of slavery”, without realising that soon Afghanistan would be ruled by a group with a basic knowledge of religious and conservative characteristics. Therefore, the Taliban regime’s actions do not enjoy endorsement from the Islamic world, especially the ban on girls’ education and women’s right to work, which have been unanimously condemned by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
What should be Pakistan’s course of action in tackling the situation with the Afghan Taliban regime? If Pakistan is banking on controlling the TTP in Afghanistan as a panacea to the current onslaught by the terrorist organisation, there is a need to reexamine the drawing board. That’s where it becomes apparent that the TTP’s back can be broken, mainly in the merged districts of former Fata, with crucial support from the local people, of course.
Once TTP cadres within Pakistan are neutralised, the ones sitting in Afghanistan will automatically become orphans and lose their nuisance value. Also, political ownership of the problem by all and sundry would be crucial for a successful campaign against TTP terrorists. The same applies to Balochistan, where people must be made stakeholders if we intend to render the BLA/BLF irrelevant.
As regards the Afghan Taliban, Pakistan will have to show patience and leadership while tackling the Afghan Taliban diplomatically. Preference should be focused on intelligence-based operations (IBOs) to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure wherever it exists. The government of Pakistan should consider taking measures to make the TTP cadres and their leadership’s lives difficult in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As a first step, the government should issue red warrants for the TTP leaders holed up in Afghanistan and raise the issue with the UN Security Council’s 1267 Committee for their arrest and repatriation to Pakistan to face the law.
Second, the TTP’s narrative should be effectively challenged, including their religious locus and the legitimacy of their cause. It is encouraging to note that the TTP does not enjoy legitimacy in Pakistan, especially in the tribal areas. The TTP’s blackmail can be challenged by empowering the local population and adequately resourcing the police.
Third, Pakistan should send a friendly message to the people of Afghanistan, regardless of the government in Kabul. The Afghan people feel comfortable in Pakistan, which is Pakistan’s great strength. By deporting Afghans in droves, the anti-Pakistan lobby in Afghanistan will only be further strengthened, which should be avoided. Fourth, create a conducive environment for people-to-people contacts and business and investment opportunities, especially by encouraging Afghan businesspeople to invest in Pakistan. Afghan businesspeople will be ready to invest billions of dollars in Pakistan, provided their investments are secure.
The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan to Iran and the UAE. He is also a former special representative of Pakistan for Afghanistan and currently serves as a senior research fellow at the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI).
THE FINEST HOTEL IN KABUL: A People’s History of Afghanistan, by Lyse Doucet
After an intense 20-year relationship, America and the West have largely ghosted Afghanistan. As the Taliban regime has implemented gender apartheid, as Afghans have endured hunger and earthquakes and internet blackouts, we’ve averted our gaze from the suffering.
To her credit, Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, who has been reporting from the country since 1988, hasn’t wavered in her attachment. In “The Finest Hotel in Kabul,” she’s made an uneven but ultimately compelling attempt to provide a “people’s history” of the country through the story of one building, the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul.
The Inter-Con, as it continued to be known long after the chain that lent its name severed ties, was originally a five-star accommodation built by the British in the late 1960s on a hill at the edge of the city. From the start it was meant for foreigners and the Afghan elite; ordinary Kabulis rarely passed through its doors, except to work. In the opening chapters, Doucet details its glamorous early years while telling the story of the employees who made it run, and, she says, found a second home there.
The pace here often feels slow, the detail about both the hotel and the author’s journalistic challenges excessive and the prose occasionally prone to what sounds like TV-speak (“he knew a thing or two about diplomatic derring-do”). She also makes the distracting choice to refer to herself in the third person.
Doucet does have an eye for the black comedy of successive regimes assuming control of both country and hotel. In 1973, the hotel staff takes down the king’s portraits after he is deposed, then in the succeeding three decades do the same for a series of presidents and commanders, all of them exiled or executed. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a dozen mujahedeen squeeze, with their rifles and rocket launchers, into the hotel’s unfamiliar revolving door, only to smash it in frustration.
For a good chunk of the book, I questioned Doucet’s choice to tell the country’s story through this particular place. As a foreign correspondent I spent time at the Inter-Con, though nowhere near as much as Doucet. The mix of warlords, government officials, spies and diplomats there was always intriguing, but I never considered it representative.
As Doucet herself writes, “The Hotel Intercontinental Kabul felt like a different country.” It’s not until the mujahedeen take power in 1992 that she lets slip that Afghan traditional dress had not previously been encouraged in the hotel, and that even the few local musicians who performed for guests usually covered their baggy tunics in sequins. Could there be any clearer sign that, despite its loyal employees, this was not a “people’s” place?
But at some point, the book rises — or falls — into the more representative history Doucet aims for. Violence and loss are so ubiquitous in Afghanistan’s recent history that no one and no fortress, not even the “finest hotel,” can avoid them. The Inter-Con comes into its morbid own as a vehicle for Afghanistan’s story. And a somewhat plodding, occasionally frothy book becomes both riveting and sad.
The Soviets invade in 1979, and the hotel is run by government apparatchiks. After a decade of brutal occupation they leave, and then two different civil wars end with the first Taliban takeover. The hotel limps forward through repeated damage and rebuilds, while its employees endure a gantlet of torments.
During the height of the fighting in 1993, an Inter-Con housekeeper named Hazrat finds he is unable to cross the city to reach the hotel. He ekes out a living making matchboxes at home with his family, Doucet writes, for “a city mostly lit by hurricane lamps and candlewicks.” A rocket strikes the house, killing his niece. When the family sets out for a safer area, another rocket kills his brother.
The hotel gets a new life during the two-decade American presence that comes with the U.S. invasion in 2001, but its identity as a Westernized hub makes it a target: It’s attacked not once but twice, in 2011 and again in 2018. Employees see guests and friends murdered. Some come to believe the hotel is haunted by djinns.
Doucet’s long focus pays off. In the early ’70s, Hazrat, the housekeeper, is an optimistic 20-year-old bartending at a discothèque for extra cash. Nearly a half-century later, in 2018, he’s pushing 70 and hiding for more than 10 hours in a tiny, dark cleaners’ closet while the hotel is under siege.
“In just one night, more of the hotel had been destroyed than in all the war-torn decades gone by,” Doucet writes of that attack. “The ruin didn’t stop at marble, wood and steel. The hotel’s people were broken.”
It’s those people who haunted me after I closed the book. They are at the mercy of the power hungry. They may believe their fate is in God’s hands. Yet their sheer determination to survive, to feed and house their families and keep them safe, and to improve their children’s chances, never flags. If their absence of flaws doesn’t ring completely true, Doucet’s choice to highlight their ordinary heroism in this deeply felt account is understandable.
After the second attack, the hotel faces a new precarity. In 2021, Hazrat is let go in a large staff cut. Soon after, the government falls, and the Americans withdraw in chaos. The Taliban, back in power, greet the hotel, the second time around, like an old friend. A sign (“Intercontinental for Everyone”) appears at the bottom of the hill.
“Everyone” does not include women, who are ordered out of government jobs. Malalai, the hotel’s first female waiter and her family’s sole earner, is sent home. In a stroke of good fortune, she’s later brought back, not to work in the restaurant but in security — body-searching the rare woman who comes up the hill.
Amy Waldman is the author of the novels “A Door in the Earth,” which is set in Afghanistan, and “The Submission.” She is also a former South Asia bureau chief for The Times.
THE FINEST HOTEL IN KABUL: A People’s History of Afghanistan | By Lyse Doucet | Allen Lane | 423 pp. | $29
Over the course of four years, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist spoke with dozens of elite military personnel about misconduct in Afghanistan by their peers.
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
Two months before the fall of Kabul in August 2021, Matthieu Aikins, a freelance contributor to The New York Times Magazine, began working on a story that would take four years to come to fruition.
The results of that investigation were recently published by the magazine as a four-part series, “America’s Vigilantes,” which also featured the work of the photographer Victor J. Blue, a longtime partner and friend of Mr. Aikins’s.
Mr. Aikins has been reporting from Afghanistan since 2008. His coverage of the war and its aftermath, including a 2024 investigation into an Afghan general and U.S. ally who was involved in human rights abuses and disappearances, has earned him two Pulitzer Prizes. For this series, Mr. Aikins spoke with more than 100 people, including many members of the military. The Times also filed lawsuits to obtain thousands of pages of previously unpublished military records.
In a recent interview with Times Insider, Mr. Aikins talked about his four-year reporting effort, which he called a “long, dogged quest for truth.” This interview has been condensed and edited.
What is the biggest thing you hope readers take away from this 25,000-word series?
I think it’s vital for them to understand the secret history of this war. To understand how we’ve gotten to our current moment, where there is a clear and present danger that the military will be used in illegal and unconstitutional ways against American citizens.
How much of your vast access do you credit to your long career covering the war and the region?
There’s no doubt that many people respected the fact that I had been on the ground, that I had gotten access to areas of Afghanistan that were even difficult for the military to go to. I had become very familiar with the way the military works, particularly these elite units. I understood the entire organizational structure, the names of units, the names of officers, how military careers work in special operations, what their training entails. And I can speak very fluently in the military jargon that they use.
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Did you encounter pushback from members of the military?
Some people didn’t agree with the bigger picture that I was trying to portray, that there was a culture of impunity that had become a problem in the military. But a lot of people were willing to speak about things they had personally witnessed. I was surprised by the level of access we were able to get. I spoke with two dozen current and former members of Army Special Operations. There were some former Green Berets who were willing to go on record and accuse their organization of misconduct, which is extremely rare for people in elite Army units to speak out like that.
Why do you think so many of them were willing to go on the record?
The sense I got from talking to people in the military is that there is a real feeling of alarm about what is happening. They’re not partisan. They’re motivated by a deep sense that the system is being subverted and the country is headed in a dangerous direction. There’s a widespread feeling in the military that the country’s leadership is ignoring and flouting long-established rules and norms that are for the good of the country.
I was amazed how people were coming out of the woodwork. I had sources just email me out of the blue. It was really out of loyalty to their country, to their beliefs as a military officer in the law and the Constitution that demanded a very difficult choice from them, which was to break from this brotherhood of soldiers. And the price for that was high. You can be socially ostracized; you can face consequences in terms of what jobs you have access to after the military. It was really motivated by their conscience.
This series is largely focused on things that happened overseas. But can you talk more specifically about the domestic implications of your reporting?
This story is really about how a lawless war overseas came home to roost. Because this type of misconduct was allowed to happen unchecked, it now poses a danger to Americans. There’s no doubt that the language and rhetoric of the war on terror is now being mobilized by Trump and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, against immigrants and dissidents on the home front. If you look at the way they’re using tools that were developed to combat terrorism in response to 9/11, they’re now being wielded against those they see as criminals or domestic extremists.
Many of the implications for the United States — the rule of law, the military and the government, and the embrace of this kind of vigilante ethos by our leaders — sort of came to pass in the process of reporting this story. Trump was elected. He appointed Pete Hegseth as his secretary of defense. Then they started aggressively pushing the limits of what were considered legal and constitutional uses of the military, including what would amount to lethal strikes against suspected drug traffickers and the deployment of military troops to U.S. cities.
A lot of this stuff had been hypothetical at the beginning of this project. Then it started unfolding in front of our eyes and really gave it an urgency and relevance that this initially more historically focused project didn’t have.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 29, 2025, Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Exploring the Secret History of a ‘Lawless’ War.
Investigating the Secret History of a ‘Lawless’ War
In Afghanistan, women face challenges in nearly every aspect of their lives. At times, those obstacles seem insurmountable, especially for women who engage in activities outside the home in fields still considered to be the exclusive domain of men. The idea of women in sports, for example, is particularly taboo. This is true not only in rural areas but also in major cities such as the capital Kabul, where many still believe that women have no place in sports. Yet, there have been women who have broken through these barriers and have gone on to become successful sportswomen. In this instalment of the Daily Hustle, Rohullah Sorush hears from a young Afghan sportswoman about her journey from playing volleyball in high school to gaining a place on the Afghan national team and her life now in Canada.
Breaking the rules: the first serve
In my country, women face challenges in nearly every part of life — especially when it comes to doing something like playing volleyball. Many Afghans still think that women shouldn’t play sports, but there have always been women who’ve challenged these conservative ideas that keep us from going after our dreams. I am one of them.
The first time I held a volleyball, I didn’t realise I was breaking a rule. I just wanted to play. But in Afghanistan, a girl on a sports field is more than an athlete; she is a rebel.
I fell in love with volleyball the first time I served the ball over the net. I was already in high school in Kabul when I started to develop an interest in sports. All week, I looked forward to our physical education classes and was the first to show up, ready to jump in and play whatever sport we were playing that week. There were all sorts – basketball, track and field, football – but it was volleyball that captured my heart. It became more than just a game – it became a part of my identity. I practised every chance I got, even outside school hours. Eventually, I was invited to join the school’s volleyball team. By the time I graduated in 2013, I was a sportswoman and I knew that volleyball was my calling. I took the university entrance exam and was accepted into the Physical Education Institute.
Pushing past the barriers
But not everyone in the family supported my decision. My relatives questioned it. One uncle once asked, “Why would you even study sports? What business does a girl even have in sports?” My parents were worried about what people would say, even though they weren’t against the idea of a daughter in sports themselves. My mother kept repeating a saying we have in Afghanistan: “You can close your front door, but you can’t shut people’s mouths.” But my brother supported me. “We live for ourselves, not for what other people think,” he told them. “Sports are good for everyone — men and women. People who exercise and play sports are healthy and have sound minds. Leave it to me to deal with what people say and let her study what makes her happy.” And with those words, I was allowed to accept the offer to enrol in the Physical Education Institute. I studied hard and trained even harder. In time, I was selected to join the national volleyball team. It’s difficult to explain how proud I felt wearing Afghanistan’s colours and representing my country internationally. I knew that every early morning start and every reproachful glance from others had been worth it.
Finding my stride
Alongside my studies, I joined the Gender Equity Programme at the sports NGO, Free to Run, that empowers women and girls through sports. The programme introduced me to other sports like running and mountain climbing. I ran my first 10-kilometre race in 2016 in Bamyan. my first marathon (42 kilometres) later that same year and, in 2018, I represented Afghanistan in an ultramarathon (250 kilometres) in Mongolia. I did very well in the ultramarathon because all most of the other runners weren’t used to running at such high elevations and struggled a little. But I’m from Kabul, which is one of the highest capitals in the world. I was used to running in thin air and at 1,350 metres, Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, is about 400 metres lower than Kabul’s 1,790 metres.
But I also knew that I had to gain other skills that would help me find a career after the one I had mapped out for myself in sports was over. I decided on sports management, and to make that a reality, I began a post-graduate course in Business Administration at Kateb University in 2016. My days were full and hectic. I’d wake up at four in the morning to get ready and leave the house right after the morning prayer to go train with my team. I’d get back home just in time to have breakfast, rest a bit and help my mother with some chores around the house. There was volleyball practice every afternoon at the Olympic Committee and university classes in the evenings. By the time I got home to join my family for dinner, I was exhausted, but very happy.
I trained with 15 other girls. We ran three days a week and on Fridays, we went mountain climbing. For safety reasons, we had to change our routine all the time. This was my life every day. My father was always worried about my safety and also about what the neighbours and people in the family would say:
You’re leaving home so early in the morning that it’s still dark. People will talk and I’m worried about your safety. What if something happens to you?I know we live in Kabul, but many people are still very traditional and narrow-minded – even some of our relatives. They keep asking your mother and me why our daughter is leaving home so very early in the morning. Where’s she going?
I’d reassure my father, telling him I was never alone, that we were a team of fifteen girls and had safe transport. But in my heart, I knew there was truth in what he was saying. Afghan society is still very conservative and women who are perceived to be stepping outside the line are regularly harassed. Even some men on the national volleyball team made us feel unwelcome: “Any girl who plays sports is not a good girl,” they’d say.
Women in Afghanistan often have to fight on two fronts — one outside the home and another one at home. Some, like me, have it easier because they have the support of their families, but many are not as lucky – and for them, the struggle can feel impossible.
Turning my calling into a career
In 2018, I applied for and was selected as a programme officer at Free to Run. This was validation that I had made the right choice and proof to the naysayers that sports were not just fun and games – and they weren’t only for men – that it could offer a career path to women too.
Working full-time meant that my routine had to change. I still left home early to run with my team, but now, instead of taking me home, the driver would drop me off at the office by 8:30. I couldn’t practice volleyball on weekdays anymore, but I was still on the national team and joined the training sessions at the Saramyasht (Afghan Red Crescent Society) on weekend. On match days, I took the day off work and joined the national team on the court.
The experience really changed me. Sports went from being just a personal dream to my way of giving back and being a role model to other girls.
Playing on a new court: leaving home and starting over
When the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan fell in August 2021 and the Taliban retook power, I had to leave the country. The NGO, Free to Run, helped me and my family get to Canada. Leaving Afghanistan was the hardest decision of my life – I left behind my team, my friends and the only life I’d ever known.
My family and I had to get used to our new life in Canada – so very different to what life was like back home – and help each other through those difficult moments of homesickness. I still run every day and I went back to school and earned a diploma in Business Management from Oxford College in Toronto.
I also still work for Free to Run, as a programme manager, in their Omid (Hope) programme, which helps girls in Afghanistan pursue their interest in sports through remote sessions from home. We provide weekly indoor strength and mindfulness training sessions, focusing on mental health and resilience. I also work in the Marketing Department of a company called Blue Mountain in Toronto.
Here in Canada, my days are full again – active and brimming with purpose. I work at Blue Mountain Company from 9 to 5 and go for runs after work. In the evening, I spend about three hours preparing online training sessions for girls back home.
I didn’t know what I would find in Canada when I left Kabul. I certainly didn’t expect a large Afghan community, but there’s one here and many of the girls have expressed an interest in volleyball. So, we’re putting a local Afghan girls’ team together and this summer we plan to start practising. I can’t wait to get back on the court. I still miss the sound of volleyballs on courts in Kabul and the thrill of fans cheering us on.
When I look back at my life, I see a young woman who’s been shaped by her mettle, tenacity and hope. Sports taught me that bravery isn’t the absence of fear — it’s deciding to move forward despite it. In Afghanistan, I learned to run through barriers and in Canada, I’m learning how to run towards what the future offers. I dream of a future when Afghan girls can, one day, play sports openly — not as rebels, but simply as athletes.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
The Daily Hustle: One serve at a time – A volleyball player’s journey from Kabul to Toronto
The global icon of women’s education is ready to tell the full story of her turbulent recent life, from arguing with her parents to being ghosted by the statesmen who were once desperate to be seen with her
How smoking a bong brought back the trauma of the Taliban’s attack – an exclusive extract from Malala Yousafzai’s memoir
I am at the shed where Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai smoked her first bong. No, there’s no punchline – it’s not that kind of anecdote. “My life has changed for ever,” Yousafzai says sadly, as we gaze at the semi-derelict structure. “Everything changed for ever, after that [night].”
The shed is tucked away at the back of Lady Margaret Hall, away from the prying eyes of Oxford’s college life. You have to know how to find it. Yousafzai leads me through quadrangles and out into a hidden garden. Inside are dusty pint glasses and spiderwebs, and board games with the pieces missing.
We are meeting on a bright summer afternoon, ahead of the release of her memoir, Finding My Way, a sequel to her 2013 bestseller I Am Malala. Dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and a headscarf, Yousafzai is accompanied, at a discreet distance, by two close-protection officers. The college is quiet – it’s the summer holidays – and Yousafzai attracts no attention from the few students who remain as she tramps across the grass.
This is not our first interview. Our last conversation sparked days of negative headlines for Yousafzai, back home in her native Pakistan. As we gaze at the bong-shed, I fear that round two may lead to more of the same.
In 2021, I profiled a then-23-year-old Yousafzai for the cover of British Vogue. The world’s youngest Nobel laureate – she received the award at 17, for her activism for girls’ education – had recently graduated from university and was about to launch her adult life.
Yousafzai began campaigning at the age of 11. Her father, Ziauddin, is an education activist and she followed in his footsteps, writing a blog for BBC Urdu about her life as the Taliban shut down girls’ schools across Pakistan’s Swat valley where she lived. When a Taliban gunman shot her in the head on her school bus when she was just 15 years old, Yousafzai was airlifted to the UK and made a remarkable recovery, resettling with her family in Birmingham, where she attended secondary school, all the while campaigning for the rights of girls around the world to receive an education.
When I met Yousafzai in April 2021, she had just got a 2.1 from Oxford in politics, philosophy and economics, and signed a deal with Apple TV+ to develop and produce her own slate of TV and films. (The deal has now ended.) We did an interview at a hotel in London before walking around a Covid-era St James’s Park. When I asked her if she had a romantic partner, she blanched. “I would say that I have come across people who have been great, and I hope that I do find someone,” she stuttered, visibly embarrassed.
Later, she mused on marriage. “I still don’t understand why people have to get married,” she told me. “If you want to have a person in your life, why do you have to sign marriage papers, why can’t it just be a partnership?”
Her comments seemed unexceptional. I was more concerned that the fact she’d told me that she frequented pubs could create controversy, given that Yousafzai is Muslim, and so when I wrote up the interview I was careful to specify that she did not drink alcohol.
The article came out. Yousafzai shared it, and sent me a message of thanks. The following day, logging on to Twitter (now X), I saw that #shameonMalala was trending in Pakistan. Her comments had been widely misinterpreted to mean that she was denouncing nikah, the Islamic institution of marriage, and implicitly to suggest that she condoned premarital sex.
She led Pakistan’s national news for days. Online commentators accused Yousafzai of betraying her religion as a result of western indoctrination. An influential cleric tagged her father on Twitter, asking him to explain his daughter’s un-Islamic remarks. (He responded, saying they had been taken out of context.) Parliamentarians in an assembly in north-west Pakistan even debated her comments.
Yousafzai maintained a dignified silence. And then, in November 2021, she announced her surprise wedding to Pakistani cricket manager Asser Malik. Many, including myself, struggled to make sense of it.
Shirt: Stella McCartney. Skirt: Kent & Curwen. Headscarf and shoes: Gucci
“Malala, what happened?!” I ask now as she walks, alone, into an empty conference room and greets me with a hug.
She smiles sheepishly. “When you asked that question [about meeting someone],” she says, “I felt like I was caught. It was like, wait a second, does she know anything? I was like, no, no, no, you know, I just don’t want to get married.”
In Finding My Way, Yousafzai reveals that, by the time of the Vogue interview, she and Malik were already dating. In other words, Yousafzai over-corrected to throw me off the scent.
But she was sincere in having her doubts about marriage. Growing up in Pakistan, she says, it represented “a future without any opportunity, where your husband determines your life”.
After the furore, her parents, but particularly her mother, were distraught. “She was somad at me,” Yousafzai says. Family and friends kept texting articles. An imam from her village called to lecture her parents on the phone. “I was facing a lot of pressure,” she says, “from my dad, especially, and my mum, to issue a statement to clarify what my thoughts were on marriage, and I found this absurd.”
And then there was Malik. Yousafzai’s parents had met him, but she hadn’t felt ready to make the relationship public. She felt guilty for disavowing him publicly, but Malik didn’t blame her, and instead stepped in to help mediate with her parents. Over the following months, Yousafzai began to interrogate her views on marriage. She asked Malik about his thoughts on women and equality, and liked what she heard. “I’m supposed to be an advocate for girls and women, and even I was limiting my own self in how I perceived marriage,” Yousafzai says.
But there were other pressures, familiar to any immigrant child who has butted up against their parents’ cultural expectations. When Malik and Yousafzai left the house together, her mother would urge them to “maintain, like, a 10-foot distance”, she says.
It seems from reading Finding My Way that she would not have married so young were it not for her parents. She nods. “I felt like I was sort of giving up,” she says. Refusing to marry would have led to not only interfamilial, but international, conflict. “Am I willing to fight my mum and my dad? Am I willing to start a new debate on people living together without these ceremonies and traditions?” Yousafzai realised that she couldn’t live with Malik “without getting married in the traditional way, in the religious way”.
She could dig her heels in, but it would cause immense pain to her parents. And, besides, she was in love. “He’s so charming, he’s so smart, and I just could not stop thinking about him.” So she relented. On 9 November 2021, at her parents’ house in Birmingham, in an Islamic ceremony, Yousafzai married.
After marriage, Yousafzai realised that “things feel sort of the same. They’re not that different.” She lives with Malik in a riverside apartment in London. They split the chores; neither cooks, instead eating out or using a meal delivery service. (Yousafzai’s mother thinks this is “a disaster. She says, ‘Your house is the only house where there’s a fridge with no vegetables!’”)
It has been only four years since we met, but Yousafzai is much changed. The woman I met before appeared girlish, even a little gauche. She was visibly mortified when we spoke about relationships. Now, she is grounded and at ease. She also looks subtly different, having undergone surgery to improve the facial paralysis she suffered after the attack.
At university, Yousafzai experienced the sweetness of independent adult life for the first time. When we met in 2021, she described a whirl of college balls, societies and essay crises. Now she’s more willing to share the unvarnished reality of her university experience.
Skirt, shirt and scarf: Jacquemus. Earrings: Pond London. Cuff: Charlotte Chesnais. Head scarf: stylist’s own
In Finding My Way, Yousafzai writes of the pressures of having to travel internationally, maintaining the relationships critical to the Malala Fund, which supports girls’ education projects around the world, in addition to paid speaking gigs. She is the breadwinner not only for her parents and two brothers, but also for her extended family back home in Pakistan, and even family friends. (At one point, she was paying for two family friends to attend college, in the US and Canada.)
Did she feel resentful of these financial obligations? “It was difficult to manage,” Yousafzai says. She “hated the experience of thinking about our expenses for the next year and [thinking], OK, I have to do this event, because otherwise we won’t be able to cover these costs.”
Her studies suffered. Yousafzai got a 2.2 in her first-year exams and had to seek additional support from specialist tutors, a humbling experience for the most famous education activist in the world. “I felt like an impostor,” she laughs. “I felt ashamed.” She asked her tutor to write a letter to her parents explaining that she was forbidden from working during term time because she was failing her degree. Why didn’t she tell her parents herself? “I had talked to my family many times about the pressure,” she says, “and how difficult it was to manage.”
She writes of how, at home in Birmingham, “my dad treated our house like an art museum, and me like the signature piece in the collection”. She would be summoned downstairs to meet visitors keen to gawp at a Nobel laureate up close. “My dad is a very generous person,” she says, “a giving person, and he always understood what other people wanted … in his heart, he knew that they wanted to meet me.”
Have there been times, I ask, where he’s pushed you too much?
“Oh,” she laughs, “he has physically pushed me.” When meeting well-wishers or guests at family events, Ziauddin has given her the odd shove. “You know when you have a little kid, and you sort of push the kid [to] say hello to this person? I’m, like, it’s fine when they’re little kids, you know.” But even when she’s grouching, it’s clear Yousafzai has tremendous love and respect for the man who, however inadvertently, propelled her on to the world stage. “My dad has always been supportive,” she says. “Whenever I explain something to him, he completely understands it. He is one of those cool dads, who never disagrees with me.”
But I fear even the world’s most down-to-earth father may have concerns about what Yousafzai – whose new book is likely to be a bestseller (her first memoir sold nearly 2m copies) – is about to put in the public domain.
And so to the bong incident. What happened that night: Yousafzai tried to walk back to her room, but she blacked out en route. A girlfriend carried her back instead. She couldn’t sleep. Her brain endlessly replayed a loop of the day the Taliban attempted to murder her. The gun. The bloodspray. Her body being carried through crowds to an ambulance.
She had always thought she couldn’t remember being shot. But the bong unlocked long-submerged memories, of the attack and also of a childhood growing up under the spectre of Taliban violence. “I had never felt so close to the attack as then, in that moment,” she tells me. “I felt like I was reliving all of it, and there was a time when I just thought I was in the afterlife.” She felt she was dying, or already dead. “It’s easier to laugh about it now,” she says, with a small, tight smile.
Listening to her speak, I feel deep compassion for all she went through as a young child. “I was nine or 10 when the Taliban took over control in our valley,” she says, “and they would bomb schools, they would kill or slaughter people and hang their bodies upside down.”
After the bong, Yousafzai developed anxiety. “I felt numb … I couldn’t recognise myself in the mirror,” she says. The sweetness of college life fell away. She told her parents in general terms about the incident, but “they were a bit dismissive”, she says. She struggled to tell them how much it had affected her mental health. “I just could not explain to them that things are not the same any more.”
Friends were worried about her. (Maria, her personal assistant, who lives in London, was so concerned she drove up to be with her immediately after the incident.) Yousafzai lied and told them things were fine. “I’m the girl who was shot … I’m supposed to be a brave girl,” she says. Until she couldn’t pretend any longer. “I’d be sweating and shaking and I could hear my heart beat. Then I started getting panic attacks.” She saw a therapist, and realised that her childhood, the attempted murder and exam stress were overwhelming her mental health. In the book, Yousafzai writes a list of her symptoms at the time: a racing heart, finding it hard to breathe, struggles sleeping, brain fog and a constant fear of someone she loved dying. “Normal people don’t have lists like this,” she writes, adding,“Something is wrong with me.”
“I survived an attack,” she says, “and nothing happened to me, and I laughed it off. I thought nothing could scare me, nothing. My heart was so strong. And then I was scared of small things, and that just broke me. But, you know, in this journey I realised what it means to be actually brave. When you can not only fight the real threats out there, but fight within.”
Has becoming famous so young also had an impact? “Yes,” Yousafzai says, nodding emphatically. She talks about how young she was when she started winning awards, and what it was like to go to ceremonies and see activists there who had spent decades fighting for a cause. It made her feel as if she needed to “spend the rest of my life campaigning for girls’ education” to show she was worthy.
But no matter how many leaders she lobbied, or projects she helped to fund – Yousafzai glows when she talks about the girls’ school she opened back home – she felt it was not enough. There was “always this feeling … could I do more?” Her youthful idealism began to flake and peel off in patches, and then rub clean away. “As I was getting older,” she says, “I was realising that things are not as straightforward. Things are more complex.”
As a teen, Yousafzai had seen the world as a biddable place. She would reason with world leaders! Show them girls’ education was important! As she got older, she began to see the world as it really is.
You became cynical? I ask.
“Yeah,” she says, “for sure.” She gives a bitter, clipped laugh. “100%.”
In April 2021, the US announced it was withdrawing from Afghanistan in August of that year. Within days of them leaving, the Taliban took over the country. “We had calls with the Afghan activists who the Malala Fund were supporting,” she says, “and it was just unbelievable. Some of them knew the worst was coming. Some of them still had faith.”
Afghanistan is now the only country in the world where girls cannot go to secondary school or higher education, with the only option available being madrasas that promote an extreme interpretation of Islam. The Malala Fund continues to do what it can. “We are providing funding for alternative education right now,” she says. “There are underground schools, there are radio and television education programmes.”
Yousafzai is heartbroken at what has come to pass. “I feel the world has forgotten about the women in Afghanistan,” she says. What stings is that “people were willing to trust the Taliban more than Afghan women”. Which people, I ask? “World leaders,” she says, “decision makers.”
Yousafzai writes of emailing politicians, begging for their assistance in evacuating her Afghan partners to safety before the Taliban took over. “For years, I’d smiled in pictures with these leaders, shaken their hands and stood next to them at podiums – but not one of them picked up the phone, or replied to my messages. To the men who ran the world, I was just a photo op.”
Who didn’t take her calls? She mentions Biden. Johnson. Macron. Trudeau. She notes, pointedly, that female politicians did. Erna Solberg, the then Norwegian prime minister, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Lolwah Al-Khater, assistant foreign minister of Qatar at the time, stepped in to help evacuate her Afghan partners to safe countries, in some instances without passports.
For many years, Yousafzai pioneered a model of professional activism: cautious, consensus-driven, willing to work with institutions, rather than calling them out; one that used the photo op and the handshake, rather than the megaphone and the protest. Her detractors said she was too corporate, but Yousafzai sincerely believed it was better to work with people and make incremental change. And then Afghanistan happened. Did she feel duped?
“I do feel like I’m more cynical,” she says. “But, at the same time, I do my work. I know that optimism is the only way you can keep going, because there’s no other option.”
There is a perception on social media that, as one of the most prominent Muslim activists in the world today, Yousafzai has not done enough to speak out on Gaza. This perception is not entirely fair. Through the Malala Fund, and personally, Yousafzai has donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to organisations that support children and schools in Gaza. She first called for a ceasefire on 10 October 2023.
Today, it is Yousafzai who brings up Gaza. “Israel has to stop this indiscriminate bombing,” she says. Humanitarian aid must be allowed in, she adds, characterising the starvation of civilians as “deliberate”. But, still, the perception lingers. Her critics, she says, “completely are dismissing or ignoring the actual work that I’m doing”.
Yousafzai describes what is happening in Gaza as “a genocide”. “You look at the evidence, you look at what’s happening, you look at how they’re [the IDF] committing these actions, and it’s very clear if they’re targeting people for collecting aid, or getting water. Everyone knows children are unarmed.” She also calls for the release of the surviving hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza in appalling conditions. “I’ve been very consistent in saying that the hostages should be freed … I don’t believe in using violence for resistance.”
Does she think she has done enough? “I wish I lived in a world where I could do a tweet and the world would stop the war.” After we meet, Yousafzai travels to Egypt to meet injured Palestinian child refugees, and announces a $100,000 grant from the Malala Fund to support their medical treatment and education.
“There isn’t a night where I don’t think about what I can do,” she says.
Throughout the 2010s, Yousafzai was the most prominent of a wave of child activists – such as the climate-change campaigners Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate, or gun-control advocate EmmaGonzález (now X González) – feted by world leaders, invited to events, on the covers of magazines, writing bestselling memoirs, delivering speeches to adoring audiences. This cultural moment has now passed. The celebrity activist feels like a relic of a different era. Many question what these activists achieved.
The Malala Fund supports girls’ education projects in six countries. In order to maintain the funding streams, Yousafzai has to cultivate relationships with funders and world leaders, inevitably leading to accusations of selling out. Most of the people who slam her online will never achieve a fraction of what she has done for girls around the world. But it can at times be jarring to see Yousafzai enjoying an international jet-set lifestyle – days out at Formula One and at Taylor Swift concerts – interspersed with posts about Gaza or the plight of Afghan girls.
She is often compared unfavourably by her critics, particularly those on the left, with Thunberg, who is willing to put herself in physical danger, boarding the Freedom Flotilla and setting sail for Gaza. “I really look up to Greta,” says Yousafzai, adding she checked in with her after she was detained by Israeli authorities.
In April 2024, Yousafzai attended the opening night of Suffs, a Broadway musical about the suffragettes that she executive produced. Also in attendance was Hillary Clinton, a fellow executive producer. Online commentators flamed Yousafzai for being associated with the hawkish former secretary of state. In reality, Yousafzai says, she didn’t realise that Clinton was an executive producer on the project until after she had been brought on, and they did not work together on it.
“People say, ‘Oh, you’re at the Suffs premiere, you are an executive producer, oh, Hillary Clinton has these views, therefore you support these views, therefore you are also complicit.”
Being photographed at the same star-studded premiere as Clinton, rightly or wrongly, reinforces a persistent criticism of Yousafzai in Pakistan: that she is in the pocket of western powers; there are even longstanding rumours that she is an intelligence asset. When I ask her about this, she pushes back. “Pakistan is a part of me,” she says, “and so I get defensive when I’m asked this question. I say, no, no, no, Pakistan doesn’t hate me.”
She fears that by giving succour to the view that she is unpopular in Pakistan, she feeds into broader anti-Muslim sentiment: the idea that Pakistan is a country full of backwards people who instinctively hate educated women. “I believe,” she says, “and it is deliberate, on my side, that I have a lot more love and support in Pakistan.” But, equally, she says, “I’m not going to deny there isn’t any hint [of hatred] at all. There is. There have been these campaigns from when I was, like, 12 years old.
“The criticism is not against me,” she adds. “It’s more criticism against the west, criticism against these bigger narratives, and political conversations, but I am sort of attached to it.”
Still, it’s clear to see it wears on her. “I do find it sad,” she admits, “that I sometimes have to read everything 10 times before I post it, because I’m, like, what is it that will get people’s attention?
It is difficult. I do wish for more freedom in expressing myself.”
After I wrap up the section of the interview on politics, Yousafzai exhales with relief and stretches her arms out in front of her, as if we are colleagues who have just finished a difficult task and can now relax with a cup of tea and a biscuit. By contrast, when it comes to talking about her family and her relationship with Malik, she speaks freely, laughing often. She is happiest when talking about her plans for Recess, an investment fund with a focus on women’s sports that she recently launched with Malik.
Recess isn’t a non-profit, as I initially assumed. It’s a business, with the aim of increasing participation in women’s sports. Malik helped Yousafzai find her love of exercise. The fact that Malik is a cricket manager was part of his initial appeal, says the cricket-mad Yousafzai, even if her husband refuses to let her watch him play. “He says,” Yousafzai says, with an eye roll, “‘I used to work in cricket management! I was not a professional cricketer!’ I’m, like, uh-huh. He did not explain that before marriage.” She hopes that Recess will “create more opportunities for women in sports” and help women “get a say in sports at all levels, whether that’s from the field to the owner’s box”.
Before we leave, I ask Yousafzai if her parents have read Finding My Way. She says she has given them the gist of it, but they have not read it. “I have told them, ‘You will read it when it’s released, and you can pick it up from any bookshelf in any bookstore, and feel free to read it, but then you cannot make any changes.’”
I understand the logic, familiar to many first- and second-generation immigrant children, including myself. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. But I’m also floored. Because Yousafzai is a global figure: the bong story will, inevitably, unleash a maelstrom of negative publicity back home.
She is ready. “I am very prepared for that,” Yousafzai says, absolutely calm. “I don’t think I’m going to get defensive about it at all. I’m not going to issue any statement. If anybody has any confusion, they can read my book and decide for themselves.”
It strikes me as I walk away from our interview that she never chose any of this. To be shot as a child, to be airlifted to the UK, to win the Nobel peace prize. Yousafzai seems to be someone who consistently puts others before herself, whether it’s accommodating her parents’ cultural expectations around marriage, supporting her family back home, or dedicating her life to advancing girls’ education. “I’m working so hard to learn how to say no,” she says, “and to be more direct … I do sort of overthink about other people’s feelings sometimes.”
If the story of her teens and early 20s was of service to others, her late 20s are about Yousafzai choosing happiness for herself. I think she deserves it.
‘To the men who ran the world, I was just a photo op’: Malala Yousafzai on growing up, getting cynical – and how getting high nearly broke her
Shabana Basij-Rasikh is co-founder and president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA).
The Washington Post
October 11, 2025
I was talking to a teenage girl in Afghanistan last week. She was on her laptop and I was on mine. She was explaining to me how she came to understand that women don’t have the temperament to be politicians.
And then she vanished. One moment she was there. The next moment — gone.
She hadn’t shut off her computer. She had lost internet access, just like everyone else in Afghanistan. Tens of millions of people went dark in an unprecedented nationwide internet shutdown that lasted more than two days. No phone calls, no text messaging, no emails, no social media — nothing. A complete blackout for everyone in the country.
Blame immediately fell on the Taliban. Properly so. In mid-September, they cut off fiber-optic internet in several Afghan provinces, stressing the need to combat immorality and vice. But they left the mobile internet untouched. This most recent episode seemed like a ratcheting-up to total information control. The thousands of girls and women who defy the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education by taking internet classes — including the students of SOLAx, my Afghan girls’ school’s online academy — found their opportunities eclipsed, gone dark just like their computers and phones.
The Taliban said the blackout was due to upgrades to Afghanistan’s infrastructure. Was the blackout therefore merely due to technical ineptitude? Maybe. But even if so, the Taliban is very obviously working on implementing a dark vision.
The Taliban recently banned all books written by women from being used in universities in Afghanistan. More than a dozen university-level subjects have also been banned. Among them are gender and development courses and courses on women’s sociology.
Women, of course, are not attending these universities. Women haven’t attended any university in Afghanistan since 2022. Indeed, girls haven’t gone to school past sixth grade since shortly after the Taliban’s seizure of power. An Afghan girl’s formal education ends around the time she enters puberty. For the Taliban, no further education is needed for the only job a woman is meant to do.
“I’m 14 now,” the girl I was talking to, the girl who suddenly went dark last week, told me. “I have big dreams. I wanted to be a member of parliament; I’ve always been drawn to law and justice. Then I did research and found out that women are softhearted and cannot be great judges. So, I thought about other things I can do.”
In the space of four years under the Taliban, Afghanistan has become a place where women’s dreams glow only in a dim light. A place where a teenage girl can come to understand that her role in society is not what she desires it to be. A place where she can come to understand that she was wrong to even have that desire at all.
The internet is back on in Afghanistan now. And it needs to stay on. In 2023, when I spoke at the U.N. Security Council, I urged the international community to take the necessary steps to keep the internet accessible within Afghanistan. With the internet, I said, education could come into every Afghan home, into the smartphone in the palm of every Afghan girl’s hand. And we as Afghans — educators and activists — would take care of the rest.
But without the internet, it’s darkness. The Taliban made the internet go dark for two days. They can do it again, and they can do it for much longer. This cannot be allowed.
I’d like to talk to that girl again, the girl on the laptop that went dark. I’d like to share a poem with her, a poem that a different Afghan girl shared with me just a few weeks earlier. A teenage girl looked to the sky over Kabul and saw illumination there that defies all attempts at eclipse.
Ayoub Heidari of the Iranian embassy contests the claim that hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees may be released into neighbouring countries
While Iran has continuously shouldered this heavy responsibility largely on its own, international support for refugee hosting and integration in the country has remained minimal compared with the scale of needs.
Your report claims that Iran is considering “releasing” large numbers of refugees toward neighbouring countries (Iran may release hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees into Iraq and Turkey, 2 October). No such policy or decision has been announced by the competent Iranian authorities. Iran’s refugee policy has consistently been grounded in humanitarian principles, respect for human dignity, and cooperation with relevant international mechanisms.
Publishing unverified or incomplete information risks distorting realities on the ground and misleading public understanding.
Ayoub Heidari Spokesman, Iranian embassy, London
Iran has taken care of millions of Afghan refugees with little international support
The Islamic Emirate’s ban on poppy cultivation has reshaped life in many areas across Afghanistan, especially in Helmand province, where poppy was fundamental to the economy and to many farmers’ livelihoods. This is the story of one such farmer, Muhammad, who, having lost his main source of income following the poppy ban and finding that persistent drought was frustrating his attempts to grow other crops and pushing him into debt, took the desperate measure of trying to get to Iran for work. He left his wife and seven of his children and set out for Iran with one teenage son. But his journey ended in tragedy: Muhammad was shot dead by Iranian border police and his son was badly injured. In this instalment of The Daily Hustle, Nur Khan Himmat hears from a friend of Muhammad’s about his final journey and the family he left behind.My friend, Muhammad, was 45 years old, a farmer from Marja district in Helmand province. He owned seven jeribs of land (about 1.4 hectares), and for years, poppy cultivation was his main source of income. He grew opium poppies on most of his land and wheat, just for his family, on a small patch of it. When the Emirate banned poppy cultivation, he took to growing wheat and cotton. But the prolonged drought has ruined one harvest after another. His debts grew and it became nearly impossible for him to put food on the table for his family.
Debt, drought and the struggle for survival in Helmand
About a month ago, Muhammad rented out his land to another farmer for five kharwar of wheat (around 2,200 kg). He sold part of the wheat to repay his debts and kept the rest for his family. Then he joined nine other men from his village and set out for Nimruz province, where a smuggler had promised to take them across the border into Iran. Muhammad had twin 17-year-old sons; he took one with him and left the other behind to look after the family. These days, the journey is riskier than it has ever been and there are no guarantees of finding work or even being able to stay in Iran, if you can get there. The government there is taking a hard stance against Afghans. They’ve been picking people up off the street, even going into their homes or places of work and deporting them. There are even reports of Iranian border guards shooting people as they try to cross into the country. But he felt like he didn’t have a choice but to take on the risk and go there to earn some money.
The journey to Nimruz
By the time they reached Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz, it was already dark. The men from Helmand had already arranged to meet the smuggler who’d take them across the next morning. So, they spent the night in a cheap hotel and, early the next morning, joined another group that was also heading to Iran. But just as they reached no-man’s land between the two countries, they were caught by the Emirate’s border patrols and forced to return to Zaranj. The police made them promise not to try to cross illegally again. This isn’t unusual; many people try multiple times over a week or more, before they can successfully cross into Iran. The smuggler told them it would be better to try the crossing at night, using the cover of darkness to avoid detection by the patrols. After discussing their options, they agreed to try again that evening.
Crossing into danger
It was around nine at night when the group set out again. As they climbed the border wall that had been built by the Iranian government, the Iranian border patrols spotted them and opened fire. We heard what happened from two of the men from Helmand who managed to escape and make their way home to their families – although they had no news of their companions. They said that in the chaos, some of the men escaped, others vanished – no one knew who made it across the border, who had been caught and who had been killed or injured.
Later, we found out that, for my friend Muhammad, the journey ended at the border. He was shot dead, along with another man from Zabul’s Khak-e Afghan district. Muhammad’s son and another man from Zabul were injured. The Iranian police handed the dead and wounded to the Afghan authorities, who took the living to the hospital and the dead to the morgue.
Bringing him home
Later at the hospital, the police asked Muhammad’s son for a phone number so they could contact the family. At first, when they called, the police didn’t tell us what had happened. They only asked us where Muhammad was. We told them that he’d gone to Iran. That was when the man on the phone gave us the devastating news: Muhammad had been shot dead by the Iranian police and his son lay wounded in hospital.
With a heavy heart, I went with some of Muhammad’s relatives to Zaranj to bring them both home. They kept his son in hospital for two more days before they let us take him back to the village to recover. We also brought Muhammad back to his family and buried him in the village. This is how my friend’s story ends. He took a dangerous gamble out of desperation and lost. But for his grieving wife and seven children, the journey is only just beginning. They now face a future marked by grief, poverty and uncertainty, without their beloved husband and father.
The family he left behind
Every migration story is a tale of survival and in places like Afghanistan, survival can be a deadly business. My friend’s story isn’t just about one man’s misfortune – it’s just one story among thousands about the desperate choices that many Afghan families have to make just to survive.
I tell his story because details matter – how he lost his livelihood, the land he leased to pay his debts, the one twin he left behind and the other that he took along, the hopes he had of finding a living and supporting his family and the death of a good man who only wanted his family to survive – they shine a light on the human cost of poverty and the impossible choices people have to make just to keep going.
Muhammad went to Iran looking for financial security and a future for his family, but he found death instead. His children now inherit not security, but hunger, poverty and grief in a world that offered their father no safe path forward.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
The Daily Hustle: Muhammad’s last journey – a story of survival, debt and loss
The Acting Foreign Minister of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, Amir Khan Muttaqi, will be traveling to New Delhi between October 9-16, after having received a waiver from the UNSC sanctions committee. His previous bid to secure the waiver back in September was not successful. During his visit, he is expected to meet the External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and will arrive in New Delhi after having participated in the Moscow Format Dialogue in Russia. The impending visit has raised – and might answer – important questions about how India’s relationship with the Taliban-led regime has evolved in the past four years. While there is an acknowledgement of the inevitability of engaging with the Taliban because of strategic and security considerations, concerns about what form this engagement would take and whether India can secure its interests for real, persist.
India’s Reaction In 2021
When the Taliban usurped power in August 2021 and anointed themselves at the helm in Afghanistan, India’s response to the developments was simultaneously knee-jerk and gradual. As the fighting intensified, India did not take much time to shut down its consulates and close its embassy. It was also quick in revoking visas and arranging the evacuation of Indian citizens from the country. But there was still a degree of dilly-dallying on how it intended to engage with the regime. A few weeks after the group’s return, the Indian ambassador in Qatar met the head of the political office of the Taliban in Doha in order to seek assurances about protecting India’s security and interests in the country.
Subsequently, after a visit by the then Joint Secretary of the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran division in the Ministry of External Affairs to Kabul in June 2022, New Delhi operationalised a technical mission in the country to facilitate and monitor the delivery of aid. This ad hoc, reluctant engagement has now metastasised into a tacit acceptance of the inevitability of grappling with the reality of the Taliban.
The Dubai Meeting
At the beginning of this year, the Indian Foreign Secretary met Muttaqi in Dubai – the first high-level engagement between the two sides. The meeting saw a discussion over a broad spectrum of issues between the two countries – from humanitarian and development assistance to the importance of the Chabahar port for the purposes of trade and delivery of aid. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the Taliban defined India as a key ‘economic and regional player’ in their statement. After the terrorist attack in Pahalgam in April, a delegation led by India’s Joint Secretary in the PAI division also met Muttaqi. This was followed by a telephonic conversation between the Indian External Affairs Minister and Muttaqi, where India expressed gratitude for the Taliban’s condemnation of the attacks in Pahalgam.
The January meeting between Misri and Muttaqi came in the backdrop of Pakistan’s air-strikes in Afghanistan the previous month and New Delhi’s condemnation of the same, while the April meeting and the consequent call happened in the context of the Pahalgam terror attack and India’s retaliatory strikes on Pakistan under Operation Sindoor. The Taliban had condemned the attack and spoken against how it had an adverse impact on regional peace and stability. The deterioration of ties between Pakistan and Afghanistan has consequently given India more space to engage with the Taliban.
What’s Driving India’s Strategy
While India’s relationship with Afghanistan has always been perceived as being based on the long-drawn historical and civilisational ties between the two countries, New Delhi has been cognisant of the security risks that it faces on its north-western frontier. In the immediate aftermath of the Taliban’s return, concerns about the group’s tacit support and assistance to terror groups like the Al Qaeda and the presence of groups like the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) and those particularly inimical to India’s interests like the Al Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohamed had raised New Delhi’s fears.
This, in addition to the growing regional engagement with the Taliban, also persuaded New Delhi to pursue its engagement. In July this year, Russia became the first country to grant de jure recognition to the Islamic Emirate, a first since the group’s return to power. While other countries like China, Iran and the Central Asian Republics haven’t granted de jure recognition, they have all stepped up their engagement – either through the exchange of ambassadors or by handing over the control of their embassies to Taliban appointees.
Breaking From Pak?
For the Taliban, engagement with India allows them to create a perception of legitimacy for their domestic constituents. Since their return to power, they have tried to pitch their approach towards foreign policy-related issues as one based on pragmatism – with its focus on a ‘balanced and economic foreign policy’. The deterioration in ties with Pakistan also allows them to hedge their bets and also show how it is no longer dependent on Islamabad for its survival – carving out an identity separate from their over-dependence on Pakistan. And while this does give India more space to maneuver, it has to be mindful of the China-Pakistan-Afghanistan trilateral as well.
Any position that India takes vis-a-vis Afghanistan is also significant from the perspective of the interests and concerns of the Afghan people. A significant fallout of New Delhi’s decision to shut down its presence in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Taliban’s return and also its decision to engage with the group has been on the people of Afghanistan. In the last few years, there has been a consistent push for New Delhi to resume the provision of visas, increase its aid and also refocus its attention on development assistance. The Taliban have also been persuading India to resume its infrastructure projects and welcome investments between the two countries. After the recent earthquake on August 31, India was one of the first countries to offer aid; it also facilitated this through the Chabahar port, offering food items, water purifiers, tents and essential medicines, thus bolstering its support to the Afghan people.
What To Expect
The current meeting is expected to see discussions on the appointment of a Taliban-supported ambassador to the embassy in New Delhi, something that the group has been seeking for a while. The Republic-era appointees have already left the embassy, back in November 2023, while the consulate in Mumbai also has an appointee who reports back to the Ministry in Kabul. Thus, the Acting Foreign Minister could push for further institutionalisation of the status quo. Muttaqi could also reiterate their demands for the issuance of more visas, investments and the resumption of infrastructure projects. For India, the priority is the protection of its security interests and extracting security guarantees from the group.
New Delhi’s growing engagement with the Taliban comes at a time when the group’s political reality in Afghanistan has become much more apparent, with more and more countries establishing some form of communication framework with them. The concerns about the proliferation of terror groups and the manifestation of other security risks in the country necessitate this engagement. For India, an expectation about balancing its increasing political engagement with the Taliban regime with its support to the Afghan people will still remain. As more and more high-level engagements become common, there will be an equal expectation of this translating into India increasing its support to the people of Afghanistan and also making a case for the group to dial down their draconian restrictions on women and minorities. How much leverage does India have in pushing for this and the trust it can impose on the Taliban’s ability to support India’s interests is still circumspect.
(Harsh V Pant is Vice President, ORF. Shivam Shekhawat is a Junior Fellow with ORF’s Strategic Studies Programme)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
Opinion | Why The Taliban Foreign Minister Is Really Visiting India
The United Nations says aid workers are still in a “race against time” to remove rubble and rebuild after the devastating earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan last month, killing at least 2,200 people and cutting off remote areas.
The 6.0-magnitude quake on Aug. 31 was shallow, destroying or causing extensive damage to low-rise buildings in the mountainous region. It hit late at night, and homes — mostly made of mud, wood, or rocks — collapsed instantly, becoming death traps.
Satellite data shows that about 40,500 truckloads of debris still needs to be cleared from affected areas in several provinces, the United Nations Development Program said Wednesday. Entire communities have been upended and families are sleeping in the open, it added.
The quake’s epicenter was in remote and rugged Kunar province, challenging rescue and relief efforts by the Taliban government and humanitarian groups. Authorities deployed helicopters or airdropped army commandos to evacuate survivors. Aid workers walked for hours on foot to reach isolated communities.
“This is a race against time,” said Devanand Ramiah, from the UNDP’s Crisis Bureau. “Debris removal and reconstruction operations must start safely and swiftly.”
People’s main demands were the reconstruction of houses and water supplies, according to a spokesman for a Taliban government committee tasked with helping survivors, Zia ur Rahman Speenghar.
People were getting assistance in cash, food, tents, beds, and other necessities, Speenghar said Thursday. Three new roads were under construction in the Dewagal Valley, and roads would be built to areas where there previously were none.
“Various countries and organizations have offered assistance in the construction of houses but that takes time. After the second round of assistance, work will begin on the third round, which is considering what kind of houses can be built here,” the spokesman said.
Afghanistan is facing a “perfect storm” of crises, including natural disasters like the recent earthquake, said Roza Otunbayeva, who leads the U.N. mission to the country.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
