Taliban Messaging Vs Afghan Reality – OpEd
The pitch made by Zabihullah Mujahid is built around an elementary trade: lived complexity must be traded by a puritanic narrative of unity, security and Islamic order. It is communication which is thus represented to have settled, the sort of placid prose which brings the neighbour to quiet down, the critic to silence, the non-believer to standardise. But it is not that he paints his side on a good side, every state does. The point is that the photo is based on the neglect of the parts of Afghanistan which still break the frame.
The non-violent line of civil war is not interchangeable with the fact that the population is safe. Even the UN sanctions monitoring report itself acknowledges some degree of internal stability, but it says that the government insistence that no terrorist cells are stationed and operating on Afghan territory and is not plausible and that major attacks in Pakistan are directly associated with Afghanistan soil. That is not a footnote. It is a stark contrast to the fact that the security is full and within the boundaries of borders.
To receive the most uncomplimentary reality check you can indicate towards the same UN report that there are more than 20 international and regional terrorist groups that are active in Afghanistan. Arguably capacity, intent, and control but the number alone kills the illusion of an enclosed and disciplined security environment. It can also be applied in determining why the message of peace does not go down well in Kabul, as compared to the border areas, and how cities in the region still perceive Afghanistan as a source of spill-over risk, rather than a problem solved.
The next one is the type of economy that is good on paper: the World Bank has been showing year after year of rising GDP, declining inflation and rising domestic revenues. But even that message by World Bank dilutes the spirit of victory as it refers to declining GDP per capita, instability in the banking and lending mechanisms, dependence on imports, and dependency on donors in the balance sheets. A recovery through expansion brought about by consumption demand and income is not a steady recovery brought about by investment, productiveness and prolonged job development.
All this is supported by the fact that recovery is most of the time merely survival but on a leash. The more extended update of the World Bank presents the image of a path of insignificant, consumption-based development, frozen investment, additional fragility, and dependence on humanitarian assistance in case of governance and business environment conditions are unchanged. This is essential as factories in numbers or project anecdotal choices would not respond to the most basic question Afghans are continually putting to themselves daily: am I earning, am I eating, am I planning beyond next week. Systems may be placed on their humanitarian lifelines and informal extraction, but they will not make it a healthy one.
Other examples of how an injured can be hidden in a figure can be observed in the refugee returning line in the interview. The UN monitoring report cites the fact that the million Afghans were deported by the neighbouring states since the end of 2023, putting the strain on the service and social integration and downplaying the remittances. Reuter reports about food security situation depict a country where hunger is increasingly getting more serious, refugees are lagering around few opportunities and organizations offering aid foretell that there will be no jobs and malnutrition in epidemic proportions. In cases where deportation, fear, or blocked residency are an incentive to go back, it is not a vote of trust to government. It is exile with its new name.
The most devastating in the gap of branding is the governance gap. Salary payment does not amount to nothing, but it does not tell of a working state when half the population are sent away out of the realm of publicity and the service channel is emptied. A new crackdown on rights including rights against women and girls, limitations on work, and limitations on speech and assemblies have been reported by human rights watch. The UN monitoring report also reports unreasonable arrests and worsening of media situations in its scrutiny of the internal control. When the people are told that there is cost of speaking, one may think that a society will be found to be silent.
The most evident form of long-term self-sabotaging is in the education ban of the girls because of the application of the Islamic language of governance. UNICEF has reiterated the fact that the current ban on secondary education among girls is robbing millions of their right to education and has the ripple effect on the staffing of health care and future potential of a country. Whatever Mujahid claims to be doing, he is not making the situation stable, he is putting it on a mortgage by having girls out of school.
Both movements boast that they are together until they cannot accommodate the argument in the room. The UN surveillance report narrates about the centralized power surrounding the supreme leader who is secluded in Kandahar and the differences within are normally discreet and unity takes precedence. That is not merit based inclusion. It is the regulated silence and monopoly of the clerks. And silence is not consent. It is either more often fear or exhaustion or calculation.
It is not spin alone in the interview of Mujahid. It is a strategy: it must appear that frame criticism is Islam ignorance, order is control and market feebleness is success. Nevertheless, the coercion, exclusion and narrative policing make a state weak, not strong. The alienation between the official discourses and real life in Afghanistan is not lessened. It is growing, and the more so the more the regime must govern by decree and by shutting down, not by legitimacy, and by trust as well as by decree.