Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the cost of seeing each other through state eyes

Two guests from Kabul, on the eve of something

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming two guests who are, unusually for the show, not from Pakistan. Shahrzad Kofi is the coordinator for the Pakistan-Afghanistan Youth Forum and the director of Justice for Equality, a nonprofit she has run since she was eighteen. Asad Khosha is the chief editor of Kabul Now, an English-language newspaper in Afghanistan. Both are in Islamabad for a conference.

Muzamil sets the conversation up plainly. Most Pakistanis, he says, have only ever seen Afghanistan through western media — a frame built almost entirely around the war. He wants to use the next forty minutes to undo some of that. The timing is not lost on anyone in the room. The U.S. withdrawal is underway, the Taliban are taking province after province, and the peace talks in Doha are stalling.

Shahrzad’s Afghanistan, and her mother’s

Shahrzad is twenty-three. Her father died when she was five and she has no brother, so she and her sister were raised by her mother — a woman who, she says, was one of the very few who continued to work even during the Taliban era. After the Taliban fell, her mother joined the UN, and later became the first woman to serve as a deputy speaker in the Afghan parliament.

That biography matters because it is also Shahrzad’s argument. The Afghanistan she has lived in is one where a woman could raise two daughters alone, study abroad on scholarship, and run a nonprofit by eighteen. “The women of Afghanistan are not as privileged as other women around the globe,” she tells Muzamil. But, she adds, things had changed drastically since 2001 — women in media, women in politics, women able to leave the house without a male escort.

The qualifier she puts on all of it is what makes the conversation heavy. In Kabul, she can move freely. In the provinces the Taliban have already taken, she cannot. “In other provinces that are being controlled by the Taliban, unfortunately, a woman cannot go alone outside.” She describes Taliban factions in her own home province of Badakhshan asking for lists of unmarried and widowed women, and barring girls from studying past tenth grade — while at the same time demanding female doctors and female teachers. The contradiction does not bother them.

”If we can take over by fight, why should we negotiate?”

Muzamil pushes on the obvious question. Are the Taliban actually strong enough to do this again, the way they did in the nineties?

Asad’s answer is precise. No, Afghan society has changed too much — in culture, in finance, in the makeup of its urban population. The Taliban, in his framing, are “a bunch of village mullahs who don’t have the understanding of the governance of today’s world,” and that gap is exactly what distances them from the youth and the educated. But — and this is the line that hangs over the rest of the episode — they are gaining ground anyway.

The reason, both guests agree, is not Taliban brilliance. It is Afghan government failure. “The reason why Taliban are gaining more support lies in the failure of the government,” Asad says. “The government cannot deliver services. The government is corrupt. And there is a huge gap between the public and the government.” The Taliban are exploiting that gap, not filling it.

Shahrzad confirms it from the ground. In some districts, people welcomed the Taliban not out of ideology but out of exhaustion: shops could stay open, robberies stopped, prayers could be performed without fear. In Badakhshan, she says, police handed over their arms and walked away rather than fight cousins and brothers. The Taliban’s own self-image, Asad notes, is that of the victorious — and as long as they think that, “they skipped last time off the table” rather than negotiate. What they want, he says, is “complete control over Afghanistan and a surrender.”

Will it be civil war?

Muzamil asks the question directly. Is civil war a real possibility?

Shahrzad answers without hedging. Her mother is part of the negotiation team in Doha, and was shot in the arm by suspected Taliban gunmen one month before the talks; she arrived at the table with her hand in a cast. There was, Shahrzad says, a moment of hope. Then the U.S. announced its withdrawal. “As soon as the U.S. decided to withdraw out of nowhere — I mean, they told us that they are, but it was very unprepared. We were unprepared for this.” The Taliban read the exit as confirmation. “Through fighting, we’re not interested in talking anymore.” Yes, she says, this may lead to civil war.

A youth bulge, with no internet

The conversation moves to demographics. Pakistan, Muzamil notes, talks constantly about its youth bulge — sixty percent of its population is under thirty. Afghanistan has no recent official census, but a population estimated at thirty-two to thirty-four million, and a majority that is young.

Shahrzad is unsentimental about what that means and what it doesn’t. The older generation, she says, is fractured along ethnic lines — Pashtun, Hazara, Tajik — and that is precisely what has held the country back. The younger generation, exposed to social media and to the wider world, cares much less about race or ethnicity. “I see a bright future in Afghanistan through our youth if we’re given the chance.”

The qualifier is real. The internet in Afghanistan, she explains, is mainstream but expensive — many users buy fifty- to two-hundred-megabyte packages that effectively give them only Facebook. That is why Facebook in particular is enormous in Afghan public life; a Facebook post can start a family feud. But the friends she has who lack good internet at home get up early and walk to cafés to do research. The hunger, she says, is there. The infrastructure is not.

Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the security prism

The most pointed stretch of the conversation arrives when Muzamil asks Asad about Afghan public perception of Pakistan. Asad does not soften it. The general perception is not very positive, and politics is partly responsible. But, he adds, the media on both sides share a heavy load of blame. “The image that most Pakistani media portray of Afghanistan here is, I think, is flawed, is not exactly correct. And same is the case with the Afghan media and Afghan public opinion.”

His framing of why is precise. “The two states look at each other from a security prism, and that is what has created a lot of problem and misperception.” He tells a small story to ground it. An old Islamabad cab driver once asked him where he was from. When Asad said Afghanistan, the driver asked, in earnest, whether there were any mosques in Kabul. Asad recounts it without theatrics. That, he says, is the kind of vacuum that misinformation fills on both sides.

Later in the discussion, he sharpens the point further. “What I think a fault Pakistan has been committing is that Pakistan has been engaged with a specific group in Afghanistan.” If Pakistan engaged instead with civil society, think tanks, universities, and media, he says, a lot could change. Muzamil agrees, citing the March 18 dialogue inside Pakistan where the state laid out a shift from geo-security to geo-economics as the new posture toward the region.

An agricultural country, a war economy

Muzamil presses on what Afghanistan could become economically if the war stopped. The mental image most outsiders carry, he admits, is of barren mountains.

Shahrzad corrects it. The north has mountains, but the border with Pakistan is warm and green, with rice and crops. The country has significant mineral and oil reserves. “If we were able to work on our agriculture, we’ll be self-sufficient. We wouldn’t need to import goods from outside.” The reason it has not happened is the same reason nothing else has happened: the war.

Asad adds the structural piece. Afghanistan is landlocked, and its economy is dependent — historically a war economy. The only honest route out, he says, is regional connectivity. Pakistan and Afghanistan were and will remain neighbours; they have to come to terms. He references CPEC and Gwadar as a route Afghanistan could meaningfully plug into, and notes that the absence of Pakistani investment in Afghanistan has, by default, been filled by India, which has used development projects as a diplomatic tool with real effect on public opinion.

”We don’t want any more intervention”

Muzamil asks both guests where they see hope — from Russia, from China, from anywhere — in keeping Afghanistan from sliding back. Shahrzad gives one of the cleanest lines of the episode: “I wouldn’t say unfortunately. I would say it is a good opportunity for us to be able to stand on our own feet finally. I don’t want any more intervention from US or any other international community in Afghanistan because we are capable of changing our own country if we wanted to.”

Asad’s answer is structurally different but lands in the same place. The war in Afghanistan, he says, is partly internal and partly the war of other powers. Regional countries — Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia — can play vital roles, just as they played vital roles in keeping the war going. Until the India-Pakistan rivalry, and the Kashmir question underneath it, is addressed, he says, the conflict in Afghanistan will continue.

Two futures

Muzamil closes with the question Shahrzad’s age makes inevitable. Best case, worst case. Two futures.

Best case, she says: the peace talks succeed, the Taliban agree to an interim government, an inclusive government follows, and foreign capital comes in because the country is finally stable. Worst case: Afghanistan goes back to where it was. Brain drain accelerates — she knows people personally who are selling their entire properties to leave, for Pakistan, Canada, Europe, Australia, even Tajikistan. “Although they love their country, it’s hard to take such decisions. But for the better future of their kids, they have to make such decisions.”

Asad’s framing is steadier but not lighter. There is still time, he says, to pressure the Taliban to the table. If that works, settlement and prosperity and less migration. If it does not, “we will have refugee influx back to Pakistan, and we have a war. And remember, when you have a neighbour where there is a fight going on, then it fires back to your home as well.”

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil does not pretend to have a tidy close. He wishes both guests well, says he cannot imagine what their families are going through, and points to the one direction that has felt different over the previous six months — a Pakistani establishment looking at Afghanistan through economics rather than only through security. Whether that pivot arrives in time is the question the episode leaves open.