The restriction and disruption of internet access in Afghanistan is not a mere technical or security measure; it is part of the Taliban’s larger political project to enforce silence and build a “single-voice society.” This strategy strikes women the hardest—women for whom the internet had become the last and only window of freedom, learning, and independence under the regime’s gender apartheid.
1. Taliban and the Architecture of Darkness
The Taliban understand that their ideological order cannot survive through physical repression alone; it requires cultural engineering. The internet poses an existential threat because it creates bridges between the silenced society and the outside world—a space for alternative narratives, documenting violence, and organizing resistance.
By shutting down access, the Taliban aim to destroy these bridges and imprison collective consciousness within the confines of their imposed narrative.
2. Women: The First and Silent Victims of Digital Darkness
For Afghan women, who have already been deprived of education, employment, and public presence, the internet was the last space to breathe.
Education erased: Thousands of girls attending online classes and virtual universities are forced back into total exclusion.
Loss of financial independence**: Women who gained relative autonomy through online businesses, digital projects, and remote work are pushed back into dependency and invisibility.
Silenced voices: The digital sphere once allowed women to write, speak, and be seen. With the click of a switch, this possibility is erased.
Cutting the internet means dragging women back into absolute silence—removing them from the final battlefield of civil resistance.
3. Controlling Media, Enforcing a Single Narrative
After crushing independent domestic media, online platforms and social networks became Afghanistan’s only channels for free circulation of information. The Taliban clearly recognize this, which is why they move to shut it down:
Without online media, political opposition is quickly isolated and silenced.
Afghan society falls captive to a “single narrative system,” where all information is filtered through the regime’s ideology.
Civil society and global audiences lose access to the realities on the ground.
4. Darkness as Policy
Restricting internet access is not only about control—it is a deliberate attempt to extinguish the last sparks of awareness. Women and girls, who had resisted with creativity and resilience even under suffocating bans, are now stripped of their final tool for learning, working, and self-expression.
To cut the internet in Afghanistan is to imprison women not only in their homes but also in the virtual sphere. It is to erase their voices, their images, and their visions of a future.
