Ramsha
Afghanistan today appears to be peaceful, with fewer attacks and rarely protests in the streets. Many view this as stability, but it is not. The relative calm does not indicate that people have accepted or supported their government. Rather, it indicates that they feel they do not have other options. With limited freedom in public and high risk for those who speak out against the Taliban, there is an atmosphere of fear where being silent is viewed as safer than speaking out.
The lack of speech in Afghanistan isn’t random. It’s actively created and reinforced. The reason for the lack of speech is due to fear of punishment, restrictions on speech, and social norms that create an environment that deters people from speaking out.
According to report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, punishments are often arbitrary, and while there may be rules, those rules may vary depending on location or who enforces them. The unpredictability creates a culture where people will remain silent and avoid testing the boundaries, fearing punishment. In addition, there are a few avenues for lawfully expressing dissent. As stated by Human Rights Watch, political parties, public sentiments, and independent media outlets have all been suppressed. When people speak publicly about their views, they do so at great personal risk with little to no benefit.
Communities tend to support the status quo over complaining, as demonstrated through field work by the Afghanistan Analysts Network. People have learned to keep disputes private, and opinions unspoken to maintain some level of stability.
According to the United Nations, many Afghans have withdrawn from participating in public life, yet at the same time, many people continue to break the rules, most notably in areas of education and work. Although the Taliban has banned girls from attending school, according to Amnesty International, there has been an increase in girls attending informal schools and home-based schools.
Similarly, although the International Labour Organization (ILO) has reported that formal jobs are decreasing, there has been an increase in both underground and home-based jobs. According to reporting by Afghanistan Analysts Network, there is also evidence of private disobedience which occurs “off radar” of the government and is therefore less likely to result in conflict. These parallel social worlds provide a way for the citizens to live out their lives daily without necessarily indicating their complete disengagement from society. What appears to be calm is an entire society living outside of the authority of the government.
In Afghanistan, silence has an actual measurable value in evaluating governance performance. The loss of public dialogue represents one of the most direct signs of this phenomenon. At various times, internet access and social media were blocked or shut down by authorities, eliminating the platforms where people previously exchanged opinions and organized.
Another indicator is the transition from protests to exits — via migration — resulting from economic failure and unemployment that has forced so many Afghan citizens to consider leaving their homes or depart already. This mirrors earlier studies, which found significant declines in both livelihoods and movement from home communities. In addition, private coping mechanisms have developed, including clandestine schooling groups for girls and secret employment networks operating outside official systems.
Finally, there has been a dramatic decline in public participation in government, because the formal avenues for citizen feedback, opposition to government policies, or political discussion are disappearing. When silence expands, it means that a country’s ability to govern is very limited. When silence intensifies, authority relies on force rather than legitimacy. And when silence is broken abruptly, disorder generally occurs. The above trends suggest that Afghanistan is neither clearly stable nor clearly unstable. Instead, its system of governance appears to exist in a state of suspended order.
In addition to masking the fragility of governance in Afghanistan, silence erodes the social trust necessary for effective governance and obscures the informal coping mechanisms available to individuals. Although stability exists in some form in Afghanistan, it is an unstable one. Analysts view silence as a cautionary sign rather than as an indicator of peace. Because the absence of violent conflict does not denote legitimacy or stability, it represents a suspension of order and authority that may at some point become unstable.
It is therefore important to consider the silence with caution, because the most dangerous threats to the state and society often arise when citizens have no opportunity to express themselves and when people’s compliance with the current political system is merely a result of a lack of alternatives, while the underlying structures of the government remain fragile.
The author is a MPhil scholar in Strategic Studies from National Defence University. She has previously worked for several reputed research institutes including Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), Institute of Regional Studies (IRS) etc. Also, she has multiple research paper publications in Journal of Peace and Diplomacy, Research Consortium Archive and IRS journal.
