Afghanistan doesn’t need visitors looking for a spectacle or to be portrayed through filtered reels. It needs not to be forgotten.
It has been almost five decades now—half a century—since Afghanistan has lived in a state of constant conflict. War has shaped the lives of generations. We were born into it, raised by it, and—somehow—taught to hope in spite of it. The world has watched from a distance, headlines shifting with each regime change, each explosion, each fragile peace agreement.
After 9/11, when the United States and NATO poured into the country, they called it a fight against terror. They built one of the largest military bases in the world and launched the longest American war in history. And in the shadows of their presence, a door cracked open—just slightly. A new constitution, a few elections, voices rising in classrooms and on stages and in front of cameras. There was a glimpse of something like democracy, a copy of US democracy, but with an Afghan version.
I am part of the generation that has grown up while this door was open. I found my voice behind a camera. I began to tell stories. Small human stories, about a girl who rode her bicycle through villages despite being told not to. About a young student studying late into the night by candlelight. A mother who used to work all day to send her daughters to school. These stories were not always easy to film. Every shot I took came with risk. Every truth I tried to tell came with fear. But the work was rooted in where I came from. That work was everything to me.
I don’t write this as an expert. I write this as someone who has carried a camera through dusty streets and mountain trails, as someone who stayed long enough to know the cost of every frame. I write this as someone who still wakes up wondering what story I should have told before it was too late. I write this as someone who believes that Afghanistan is not a backdrop. It is not a brand. It is a country full of real people with voices, memories, and histories that deserve more than digital tourism.
Then, in August 2021, it all disappeared. Like someone turned off the lights. The same group that once whipped women in the streets for showing their faces, and a group who used to carry out lethal attacks against my community, who blew up girls’ schools and banned music, returned to power. I had filmed the women they had tried to erase before. I had heard their stories. I knew that nothing fundamental had changed—only the face of the performers.
Now, I live outside of Afghanistan, in safety, but also in silence. I try to keep telling stories, working with refugee communities here in the UK, listening again, learning to plant my feet in a new country. But something has changed in me. Maybe it’s grief, maybe it’s survivor’s guilt. Often, I find myself watching my homeland transformed into ‘content’ for people who know nothing about it.
Because now, Afghanistan has become a destination again—not for military campaigns, but for influencers. YouTubers, TikTokers, travel vloggers. They walk through Kabul, through Bamiyan, through places that still live inside my dreams, and they film everything. They smile for the camera with Taliban guards. They sip tea in the same courtyards where women have been beaten. They post clips of themselves playing with guns that were originally provided by the U.S. They call it “adventure.” They call it “authentic.” They tell their followers that the Taliban have changed. And thousands of people believe them.
But what they don’t show is that a few months ago, a girl in Dasht-e-Barchi, a locality in west Kabul (with a majority of Hazara residents), stood on top of the tallest building there and wanted to jump to end her life. Or they don’t talk about the women who were imprisoned by the Taliban and remain at risk of torture and other ill treatment.
They don’t see the blood of men targeted just because they were former members of the Afghan security force. They don’t show the Hazara families in the central highlands who are losing their land because of their ethnicity, or the children going to bed hungry in cities where work has vanished. The economy has collapsed. People are starving. All the while, the Taliban poses for photographs. It is not governance. It is a theatre.
What hurts me the most is that the government is replacing not only the systems and institutions from the republican years, but even the memory of those who worked in these systems. They have removed educated professionals from public roles—especially those who belong to minority groups like Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek communities—and replaced them with their own loyalists.
Often, these are men without proper qualifications, knowledge of governance, or sense of responsibility. Meanwhile, so many people who once built schools, ran ministries, organized aid, and spoke up for justice are now silent, or in hiding, or in exile like me.
And so I live in exile and watch. Watch as people fly in for a few days, take selfies, eat Qabuli Palaw, and leave with thousands of likes. Watching as those of us who risked our lives to show the truth are forgotten. Watching as our pain becomes someone else’s content.
I write this as someone who has carried a camera through dusty streets and mountain trails, as someone who stayed long enough to know the cost of every frame. I write this as someone who still wakes up wondering what story I should have told before it was too late. As someone who believes that Afghanistan is not a backdrop, or a brand. It is a country full of real people with voices, memories, and histories that deserve more than digital tourism.
So when you see those videos with influencers hugging Taliban fighters, when you hear someone say “the Taliban has changed”—I hope you pause. I hope you wonder, ‘Who is missing from this picture?’ I hope you ask yourself: “What does it mean to visit a land where people are not free to speak, but outsiders are free to film?”
Because Afghanistan doesn’t need visitors who come for spectacle. It needs allies. It doesn’t need filtered reels. It doesn’t need applause. It needs memory.
All photos by Mohammad Ali Sheida
Article image: Buddha projection. On 25 November 2019, the image of the Buddha statue in Bamiyan destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 was illuminated in orange to support the International Day for the Elimination of Gender-Based Violence.
