Afghan politics has produced a class of actors who can best be described as “disposable intermediaries of power.” The phrase may be sharper than conventional political language, but it captures a clear reality: people with no intellectual foundation, no lasting loyalty to national, historical, or religious values, and no principled commitment to any political movement. They stand between power and the public, conceal the true face of political networks, reduce the moral cost of their decisions, and, once their usefulness ends, offer themselves to the next patron.
Such people are republicans today, ethnic nationalists tomorrow, defenders of women’s rights the day after, and mediators with the Taliban the following week. They rewrite their past, blame others for failure, and manufacture a new identity for each political season. Their behaviour is marked by opportunism, conformity to power, moral disengagement, and selective amnesia. They have replaced conscience with self-interest.
Today, this class is especially active on X and inside coalitions formed behind closed doors. New groups appear under new names, and people who were part of yesterday’s machinery of failure return dressed as saviours. They enter so-called “national coalitions” through old networks, money, media access, and willingness to bargain.
Among the most prominent are figures associated with Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. Karzai’s approach may be summed up by his description of the Taliban as his “disaffected brothers.” Ghani’s responsibility, however, was more consequential.
Ghani inherited a political order built with the blood of thousands of citizens, soldiers, and mujahideen, before and after 2001. Yet he reduced it to a narrow circle inside the Presidential Palace. He favoured loyal but inexperienced appointees over professional commanders and weakened the chain of command through constant personnel changes.
Reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, concluded that his government failed to develop an effective security strategy for the withdrawal of foreign forces. Whatever the mixture of incompetence, political calculation, and dependence on foreign support, Ghani’s responsibility for the collapse of the Republic cannot be denied.
The release of approximately five thousand Taliban prisoners was also part of this process. It cannot simply be called “Ghani’s personal gift,” since it emerged from the U.S.–Taliban agreement and international pressure. Nevertheless, his political responsibility for accepting and implementing it cannot be ignored.
I did not watch the collapse on television. I witnessed it, particularly during the final stand of the popular resistance forces in Herat, and documented what I saw.
In those final days, I saw a city in which the will to resist was still alive, even as the central government had shattered trust. Soldiers and civilians can fight, but when there are no clear orders, promised support never arrives, and commanders fear secret arrangements, the front collapses from within before the enemy enters.
Ghani’s flight on August 15, 2021, was not the beginning of the catastrophe. It was the final act of a process that had begun years earlier. He abandoned thousands of military personnel, local officials, civil-society activists, and families who had trusted in the Republic.
Today, some figures who benefited from Ghani’s inner circle present themselves as opponents of the Taliban and even as founders of the Republic. They invoke soldiers and mujahideen who were marginalized, removed, or left without support, and who have now risen against ethnic domination and Taliban tyranny.
The question is simple: what did you do when authority, public funds, and media platforms were in your hands? What position did you take against the personalisation of the state, discrimination, the removal of professional commanders, and the release of Taliban prisoners? When front lines were abandoned, and our young people were dying, what did you do about your “disaffected brothers”? Where was your front against the Taliban?
Many of you, knowingly or unknowingly, helped weaken the Republic from within. Today you speak of freedom and resistance to avoid disappearing from the political marketplace. Unless you can answer these questions, your tweets are not evidence of resistance. They are advertisements for a new patron.
The deeper problem is that some Pashtun intellectuals provide such figures with platforms and legitimacy. In these circles, people associated with the failed order may present prejudice, distortion, and self-justification as “the viewpoint of a segment of society.”
Yet when a Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, or member of another community speaks in a comparable tone, that person is quickly branded an extremist, separatist, or enemy of national unity. The mujahideen and resistance are easily attacked, while there is silence about two decades of corruption, exclusion, institutional decay, and destruction of a system that was supposed to become democratic. There is also little willingness to confront exclusionary policies whose roots reach back to Amir Abdur Rahman Khan.
This double standard gives political disagreements an ethnic character and destroys trust. It is the tribal mind dressed in modern clothing: the language of citizenship combined with the instinct to protect one’s own group. Education and democratic vocabulary do not necessarily free a person from tribal prejudice.
This is not a collective condemnation of Pashtuns. The Taliban is predominantly Pashtun, and its leadership is overwhelmingly dominated by Pashtuns. Yet millions of Pashtuns are themselves victims. Pashtun women are denied education, Pashtun youth are trapped in poverty and war, and Pashtun families also lose their children.
The enemy is not the Pashtun people. The enemy is a political project that presents Pashtun identity as the basis of an exclusive right to rule and portrays criticism of that project as hostility towards Pashtuns. A Pashtun intellectual becomes a genuine partner in nation-building when confronting supremacist tendencies within the Pashtun political sphere rather than seeing prejudice only among others.
The responsibility of Afghanistan’s other communities cannot be limited to complaint. Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Aimaqs, Baloch, Nuristanis, Pashai, and others must move beyond fragmentation, personality cults, and temporary bargains. They must build an independent, organised, and sustainable political force.
Such an alliance must not descend into anti-Pashtun hostility or reverse ethnic nationalism. Replacing one monopoly with another would merely change those holding power. Pashtuns who sincerely believe in equality must stand at the heart of this alliance. The standard must not be ancestry, but commitment to shared principles.
Those principles must be clear and non-negotiable: equal citizenship, human dignity, the rule of law, equality between women and men, freedom of thought, religion, and expression, transitional justice, accountability for corruption and collapse, equal rights for all languages and cultures, fair distribution of resources, and meaningful political and administrative decentralisation.
Pashtun-centric domination in Afghan politics cannot be ended through slogans alone. It is rooted in concentrated power, an appointment-based system, a one-sided official history, unequal distribution of resources, politicised security institutions, and networks controlling public platforms.
Breaking it requires elected local councils, genuine distribution of power, financial transparency, collective leadership, and political memory. No public figure should erase the past by adopting a new slogan.
Even partition would not necessarily uproot this mentality. A supremacist ideology can reproduce itself within any border. Only a conscious, principled alliance among citizens and communities can defeat domination and break the hold of ethnic monopoly.
Disposable political intermediaries are the product of a society with a short memory. As long as we fail to ask politicians where they stood yesterday, where their money comes from, and which decisions they accept responsibility for, these figures will return after every catastrophe in new packaging.
Afghanistan is neither the property of one ethnic group, nor the inheritance of one family, nor the prize of one political network. The end of the Taliban will not come merely with the departure of a few mullahs. What must also end is the mentality that regards political power as the hereditary right of one lineage.
The market for these disposable intermediaries will close only when politics is judged not by connections, ethnicity, or slogans, but by public record, principles, accountability, and commitment to human dignity.
