Abdul Bari Jahani, former Afghan Minister of Information and Culture and the poet who composed Afghanistan’s republican national anthem, has published his fourth open letter to Taliban leadership, delivering his most direct and data-laden warning yet that the regime’s ethnic monopoly, sectarian repression and governance by unqualified clerics is pushing Afghanistan toward irreversible fragmentation.
Jahani told Taliban leadership that he had delivered the same warning to Mullah Omar thirty years ago in the presence of Mawlawi Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, predicting that public opposition would eventually bring the regime down. He told the Taliban that history records no example of any system that survived the general opposition of its own people, and repeated that warning with greater urgency today.
The letter documents Taliban morality police beating young women in public markets, which Jahani described as actions against basic human dignity that no population will tolerate indefinitely. He condemned the Taliban’s own criminal code, which imposes two years imprisonment on anyone switching from the Hanafi madhab to any other, calling it not only oppressive but un-Islamic, since all four Sunni schools of jurisprudence are recognised as valid. He pointed specifically to the Panjpiris of Kunar, whom the Taliban Higher Education Minister declared have no right to propagate their own religious method, asking on what authority the Taliban strips communities who consider themselves stronger Muslims than the Taliban of their religious freedom.
On the Shia community, Jahani cited Ayatollah Sharifi’s own Friday sermon in which Sharifi described being summoned by Taliban morality authorities, interrogated, beaten and his turban knocked to the ground. Jahani warned directly that Shia opposition to Taliban has now turned into hatred, that hatred grows daily and transfers from person to person, and that even powers far greater than the Taliban could not survive the sustained enmity of 6 to 7 million people.
Speaking on behalf of hundreds of thousands and even millions of Pashtuns, Jahani stated that not all Pashtuns and not all Kandaharis are Taliban, warning that the Taliban’s actions have made enemies of the Shia community, the majority of Pashtuns and every other ethnic group simultaneously. He warned that professional ministries covering higher education, mines, industry and telecommunications are being run by unqualified and ignorant people, and closed with a final caution: if this continues, the Taliban are leading Afghanistan into a pit of destruction.
