The Mirror We Refuse to Hold
There is a particular kind of comfort in waiting. For many of us — the Afghan professionals, civil society leaders, journalists, academics, and activists who left after August 2021 — we have settled into a quiet assumption: that exile is perhaps temporary, that the Taliban’s brutal rule is an interruption, and that we will eventually return to resume the roles we once played. When we gather, we usually talk about “when things change.” We attend conferences. We write reports and articles, join the gatherings. We perform, once again, mostly for each other and the international audiences.
But what if the waiting itself is the problem? What if the refusal to look critically at our own past — at what we did, what we failed to do, and who we became during the twenty years of the Afghanistan Republic — is not just an intellectual oversight, but a moral failure?
This is not a comfortable question. It is, however, a necessary one.
The Stage We Built
I remember when I was teaching the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman to my students at the American University of Afghanistan, I couldn’t help but think that we built a stage. Goffman described social life as a kind of theater. There is a “front stage” — the public performance we put on for our audience — and a “backstage” — the private reality behind the curtain. For twenty years, the Afghan cosmopolitan elite performed on the front stage. We spoke the language of democracy, human rights, gender equality, and good governance. We filled the conference rooms of Kabul, Geneva, Brussels, and Washington. We were relatively articulate, Western-educated, and reassuring to our donors. Yet, something else was also taking shape.
Through years of repetition — writing the same grant proposals, attending the same workshops, using the same frameworks — we, as the philosopher Judith Butler called it, became the performance. We produced ourselves as a particular kind of subject: the “good Afghan,” the acceptable face of a country in reconstruction. And in doing so, we gradually lost the critical distance needed to ask whether what we were building was working.
Meanwhile, the backstage told a different story. The state was fragile, corrupt, and increasingly disconnected from most Afghans. The gains were real but uneven. The dependency on foreign funding was not a temporary phase — it was the architecture of the entire project. Many of us knew this. Most of us said nothing. But why the silence?
The anthropologist Mariella Pandolfi offers a painful but honest answer. International humanitarian assistance, she argues, operates through what she calls a “victimization-salvation cycle.” To receive funding, recognition, and legitimacy, local actors must continuously produce victims — people who need saving — and position themselves as the bridge between those victims and the international saviors. If the problems are solved, the funding stops. If the politics become too complicated, the donors look away.
Afghanistan’s civil society became extraordinarily skilled at navigating this system. We learned to translate our country’s political crises into the language of “capacity building,” “coordination,” and “institutional development.” We learned which problems were fundable and which were not. We learned, above all, to avoid the questions that made our donors uncomfortable — questions about the contradictions of a war fought in the name of democracy, about the corrupt former warlords and dual citizen diaspora integrated into and leading the very state we were building, about the gap between the Kabul bubble and the rest of the country.
This was not simply corruption or bad faith. It was, as Pandolfi would say, the logic of the “humanitarian imaginary” — a deeply embedded set of assumptions about what reconstruction looks like, who the ideal beneficiary is, and what counts as progress. Those assumptions came from outside Afghanistan. And we, the cosmopolitan elite, were the ones who translated them into local reality, often without vernacularization and questioning whether they fit. It goes even further. After 2001, the world demanded that Afghans prove their modernity, their compatibility with Western liberal values, to be taken seriously. This created a binary: the “good Afghan” who embraced international projects, and the “bad Afghan” who resisted them. We, the cosmopolitan elite, almost by definition, occupied the “good” side of this divide. But the price of that position was self-censorship, closing our eyes to the erosion of the moral values that define decency, and turning a blind eye to our own friends and colleagues who left the country to settle in the West, while simultaneously claiming indigeneity and ownership of Afghan civil society. We were afraid to criticize it loudly in the fear of being seen as sympathetic to the other side. And we performed our goodness, repeatedly, until the performance became our identity.
Looking back at those experiences, the question is: Are we wasting in exile? Edward Said, himself a Palestinian intellectual in permanent exile, wrote that displacement – as painful as it is – carries a rare moral gift. The exile sees the world in double vision. They carry their homeland in their memory while living in a new reality, and this duality, if embraced, produces a uniquely critical consciousness. The exile can see what those inside the culture cannot. As he observed, many exiles compensate for their displacement by freezing the homeland in the moment of departure, idealizing it, refusing to examine it critically, blaming others for failures, waiting to return and restore what was. This is precisely the “interregnum mentality” that many of us have adopted. We treat the 2021 collapse as a pause, not a rupture. We wait to return and resume our roles, without asking whether those roles and behavior, as we played them, were ethical, morally justifiable, or adequate.
I understand that displacement tends to “dehistoricize” the exiles – stripping them of their political histories and voices, reducing them to figures of pure suffering or nostalgia. The longer they live in exile, the less “authentic” their suffering appears to others. There is a pressure, in other words, to remain a victim – speechless, dehistoricized, grateful. Afghan cosmopolitan elite faces a version of this pressure. We blame each other; we ethnicize our failures, because the audiences, the Western donors, are comfortable with us as victims of the Taliban. They are less comfortable with us as political actors who bear responsibility for what happened – and who have sharp things to say about the international project that also failed Afghanistan.
To claim our place, our complex identities, we must resist the dehistorcization and blame game that exile impose on us.
So, what the moral path forward actually looks like? The old stage is gone. The donor system that sustained us is no longer our primary audience. The roles we rehearsed for twenty years no longer exist in the same form.
It is not only a loss, but also a liberation.
The moral path to resistance against Talibanism — and against the conditions that made Talibanism possible — begins not with a return to the old performance, but with an honest reckoning with it. It requires us to ask where we were passive in the face of injustice, where we saw the state and our own failures and looked away, where we accepted donor frameworks that depoliticized our struggle, where we mistook the performance of democracy for its substance.
This reckoning is not self-flagellation. It is the precondition for credibility. An Afghanistan civil society that returns — physically or intellectually — without having done this work will simply reproduce the same failures in a new context. The Afghan people, who lived through twenty years of a republic that promised much and delivered unevenly, deserve better than that.
The “exilic intellectual” speaks uncomfortable truths – including to their own community. An ethical subject holds two things simultaneously: an understanding of the conditions that shaped their choices, and a refusal to let those conditions become an excuse. Today the Taliban have seized the stage. But the stage was never the point. The point was and remains the Afghan people’s right to determine their own future. Defending the right from exile requires something more than just waiting. It requires a moral courage to look honestly in the mirror, even when – especially when – we do not like what we see.
