Kabul Under the Taliban: A Traveler's Observations

I arrived in Kabul by road, after a long journey from Pakistan, and the first thing I noticed was how normal the city tried to be. I had expected a city frozen in fear, empty streets and closed shops, because that is the picture the news often paints. What I found instead was a city that was still alive, still trading, still arguing over prices, still sending children to school and still queuing for bread in the morning. Kabul under the Taliban is not an easy place to describe, because it is many things at once: tense and ordinary, changed and unchanged, quiet in some corners and loud with life in others. I am not a political analyst, and I do not pretend to be one. I am a traveller who walked those streets with a camera, talked to shopkeepers, drank tea with strangers, and tried to see the city as it is, not as it is described from far away. What follows is what I saw with my own eyes.

The Markets Are Still Open

The first place I always go in a new city is the market, because a market never lies about how people are living. Kabul's markets were open and busy when I visited. Vendors were selling fruit, vegetables, bread, spices, clothes, and mobile phone accessories from stalls and small shops, calling out to passers-by in the same way traders have done in this city for centuries. I watched people haggling over the price of tomatoes and onions, the way people haggle everywhere, and I watched shopkeepers weighing goods, counting change, and greeting regular customers by name. Money is tight for most people, and you can see it in the way they shop: carefully, in small quantities, choosing the cheapest option, and sometimes walking away empty-handed. But the act of trading itself continues, because it has to. A city of millions cannot stop eating. I spoke with a few shopkeepers, and the theme was the same each time: business is slower than before, prices have risen, and customers have less to spend, but the shop still opens every morning. That resilience stayed with me. In a city that has seen so much change, the market remains the most honest measure of daily life, and Kabul's markets told me that people here are surviving, not thriving, but surviving with determination.

Checkpoints and the New Normal

You cannot travel through Kabul without noticing the checkpoints. They are part of the landscape now, manned by armed men, some in uniform and some not, stopping vehicles, asking questions, and waving traffic through. For a traveller, the experience is unfamiliar and a little tense, especially the first time you approach one with a camera in your bag. I learned quickly to be polite, to answer simply, and to keep my documents ready. Most of the time, the checks were brief, and I was waved on. But I could see what they meant for ordinary Kabul residents: every journey across the city now comes with pauses, questions, and the awareness that someone is watching. People have adapted to it, the way people adapt to anything that becomes routine. Drivers slow down automatically. Passengers sit quietly. Nobody argues. At the same time, there is a visible change in the streets themselves. There are fewer women in some public spaces than I had expected, and those who are out are often accompanied by a male relative. Music and entertainment, once part of Kabul's street life, are far less visible. These are real changes, and I noticed them. But I also noticed that life has found ways to continue around them, in homes, in private gatherings, and in the small daily routines that no checkpoint can fully control.

Daily Life Goes On

What surprised me most about Kabul was the persistence of ordinary life. Children still walk to school in the morning, carrying bags that are too big for them, laughing with friends along the way. Men still gather in teahouses in the afternoon, drinking green tea and talking about cricket, prices, and the weather. Families still visit each other in the evening, and neighbours still share food when someone has a little extra. I filmed street scenes where life looked almost untouched by politics: a baker pulling fresh naan from a clay oven, a barber cutting hair on a pavement, a boy selling balloons at a traffic light, an old man reading a newspaper in the sun. These are the moments that do not make the news, because they are not dramatic, but they are the truth of Kabul. The city has problems that are impossible to miss: unemployment is high, many families struggle to afford food and fuel, and the future feels uncertain to almost everyone I spoke with. People talked about those worries openly, without being asked. But they also talked about their children, their work, and their plans for the coming winter. Daily life, in Kabul as everywhere, is a mixture of worry and hope, and the hope is often quieter than the worry but no less real.

A City of Contrasts

Kabul is a city of contrasts, and you feel them on every street. There are grand buildings and broken roads, sometimes on the same block. There are modern shopping centres and centuries-old neighbourhoods, often within a few minutes of each other. There are mountains rising around the city, beautiful and indifferent, reminding you that Kabul has been here long before any of its current rulers and will be here long after them. I spent my time in the city trying to look past the surface, past the uniforms and the checkpoints, to the people underneath. What I found was a city that is tired, certainly, after decades of war and upheaval, but not defeated. People here have learned to live with uncertainty in a way that is hard for an outsider to fully understand. They make plans, but they hold them lightly. They hope for better days, but they do not wait for them to start living. As I left Kabul, I thought about how easy it is to reduce a city to a single headline, and how wrong that is. Kabul is not one story. It is millions of stories, unfolding every day in markets, in homes, in schools, and on street corners. I was only there for a short time, and I do not claim to understand it fully. But I saw enough to know that behind the politics and the checkpoints, there is a city full of people simply trying to live their lives with dignity.

I came to Kabul as a traveller, and I left as someone who had seen a city that refuses to stop, even when the world expects it to. That is the Kabul I want to remember, and the Kabul I wanted to show you.