The Taliban have banned smartphones for government employees, judges, police, and military personnel across Afghanistan, after video of their own forces shooting protesters went viral and they apparently decided the solution was to destroy the cameras, not change the behavior. Violators face having their devices smashed on the spot, unspecified "sharia punishment," and the privilege of filling out a form proving they destroyed their own phone. The ban took effect June 16, and it is already bleeding into hospitals, schools, and university dormitories.
How You Ban a Country's Eyes
Here is how this started. In early June, Taliban forces in Herat arrested women and girls for "improper hijab" violations. Witnesses told NPR that Taliban forces then opened fire on the people who showed up to protest, killing at least one person. Someone filmed it. The video spread online before the Taliban could contain it.
Within weeks, Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada issued a verbal order banning smartphones for government staff. That order was then formalized in a military court directive sent to court heads, police commanders, and intelligence chiefs across all eight of Afghanistan's administrative zones. The directive is explicit: get caught with a smartphone, lose the phone, face legal and sharia punishment. Want an exemption? You need a written decree from Akhundzada himself. Good luck with that paperwork.
The Taliban also built monitoring lists, according to NPR, recording employees' names, positions, workplaces, mobile carriers, and phone numbers. Security officials told members to destroy their own devices and submit proof on a designated form. They are making people file evidence of their own compliance. This is not governance. This is a hostage situation with bureaucratic paperwork.
The Midwife Who Can't See the Baby Anymore
Farzana is a 40-year-old midwife covering ten villages across Moqor district in Ghazni province. Until June, worried mothers would send her photos of newborns showing rashes, swelling, skin infections. She could triage from a distance. She could decide who needed her most urgently before she traveled anywhere.
She has stopped using her smartphone now, NPR reports, because she is afraid. She can still be reached by regular phone line, but WhatsApp is how people in Afghanistan actually communicate affordably. Without it, she cannot see the baby. She cannot assess the rash. She cannot tell whether a mother is bleeding out or just nervous. "I cannot be everywhere at once," she told NPR. "Sometimes a photo or a message helps me understand whether a mother or newborn needs urgent help."
That is not a quote about technology. That is a quote about whether infants live or die. The Taliban banned smartphones for government workers, but as NPR found, the restrictions are already spreading into hospitals in some provinces. The policy has a logic to it, and the logic does not include newborn health outcomes.
Schools Are Eating the Ban Too
The formal directive targets government employees, not civilians. But the crackdown has moved well past that boundary already. At Kabul University, NPR reports, the leadership council ordered a complete smartphone ban for professors, staff, and students, effective June 21. The ban was announced at an academic council meeting where members were not allowed to ask questions. That detail deserves a second read.
At Herat University, signs at the entrance warn that smartphones are prohibited on campus, and the restriction extends into student dormitories. The Wi-Fi has been cut off in those dorms too. In Baghlan province, students carrying smartphones are being turned away at the university gate before they even get inside. In Kandahar, an 18-year-old madrassa student named Baryalai told NPR the change at his school was total: "Now there's a complete ban. No one brings smartphones anymore."
For context: Afghan girls and women have largely been locked out of in-person education since the Taliban returned to power. Smartphones and internet access were, for many of them, a partial workaround. Remote learning. Recorded lessons. Contact with teachers. That workaround is now being systematically closed.
Feature Phones Are the New Normal, If You Can Afford One
The Taliban have clarified that feature phones, the old-school devices with calls and texts but no touchscreen, no camera, no internet, are still permitted. So that is the offer: you can communicate, you just cannot document, photograph, record, verify, or share anything.
One government employee in Herat, who asked NPR not to use his name for fear of retaliation, said phone restrictions had quietly been in place in his office for months before the national order. When he and his colleagues resisted, officials confiscated and smashed their phones. There was no appeal process. There was no warning. The phones were just gone.
Afghanistan is a country where people rely on WhatsApp for phone calls because it is cheaper than the regular phone network. Stripping smartphones from the population is not a neutral policy shift. It is an economic hit on top of a surveillance crackdown on top of a communications blackout. The Taliban have managed to make repression cost-effective for themselves while making basic coordination more expensive for everyone else.
What the Taliban Learned From That Video
The timing here is not subtle. Protests happen. People film the response. The footage spreads before anyone in Kabul can contain it. The next move is to ban the filming, not reconsider the response.
This is the authoritarian playbook, and it is not new. What is striking is how fast it moved from "contain this specific incident" to "restructure how an entire country communicates." The Taliban did not pass a law narrowly targeting protest documentation. They banned the devices from government offices, then courts, then military, then schools, then university dormitories. The scope expands because the underlying goal is not managing one video. It is managing all future videos.
The Taliban administration did not respond to NPR's request for comment. Shocking.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about what happened here. The Taliban shot at protesters, someone recorded it, and the Taliban's policy response was to try to make recording impossible. That is the whole story. Everything else, the directives, the monitoring lists, the smashed phones, the dormitory Wi-Fi cuts, is just the operational detail of that one decision.
The part that should haunt you is the midwife. Farzana is not a dissident. She is not a journalist or an activist. She covers ten villages and she used her phone to figure out which baby needed her first. That use case is now gone, and no feature phone brings it back, because feature phones do not send photos. The Taliban did not weigh that tradeoff and decide the security benefit was worth the maternal health cost. They almost certainly did not think about it at all. That is what makes it worse.
Afghanistan has been through decades of catastrophic governance failures, foreign interventions, and deliberate cruelty from multiple directions. The people there have built fragile workarounds out of whatever they have. Smartphones were one of those workarounds. They connected midwives to mothers, students to teachers, women locked out of schools to something resembling an education. The Taliban looked at that fragile system and saw a threat. They were right that it was a threat. It documented them. And so they are destroying it, one confiscated phone at a time, while the international community watches and the exemption forms pile up on Akhundzada's desk.
