When the Wires Went Silent: Life, Flight and Fracture in Kabul
On an autumn morning at Hamid Karzai International Airport, a young man stood clutching a paper ticket as if it were a passport back to normalcy. He stared at the departure board — a black rectangle, inscrutable and mute. Around him, faces hardened into the same puzzled expression: pilots, passengers, prayerful relatives, and a handful of exhausted airline workers. No one knew whether the flights would lift off; the internet had simply been turned off.
That blackout — ordered by Afghanistan’s de facto authorities — rippled across the city and the country with a force far beyond the loss of Wi‑Fi. By one count from Flightradar24, at least 14 flights scheduled for Kabul that day were cancelled outright, with dozens more listed as “unknown.” For people already living on a knife-edge, it was another layer of uncertainty stacked atop years of upheaval.
The immediate fallout: airports, banks, aid and conversation cut short
When connectivity evaporates, the modern world frays quickly. Banks could not authorise transactions. ATMs emptied faster and then stopped working. Aid agencies that track food distribution, beneficiary lists and the movements of staff were hamstrung. Local businesses — from the tea shops behind the airport to the small trading houses in downtown Kabul — were forced to close their shutters.
“It felt like someone pulled a plug on the city,” said Farida, a teacher who had been trying to book a ticket to visit her parents in Herat. “We use mobile banking for everything now. Today, even small kindnesses are trapped behind silence.”
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan warned that the shutdown risks “inflicting significant harm on the Afghan people, including by threatening economic stability and exacerbating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.” UN human rights bodies described the blackout as an “extremely serious human rights violation,” citing its outsized impact on women and girls who are already excluded from many aspects of public life.
How a few keystrokes affect whole communities
At a municipal post office, clerks thumbed through envelopes and stamped forms while muttering about bank verifications they could not complete. “We have mail, but no money to process it,” said one postmaster, tapping the top of a stack of parcels. “The systems we rely on — for fees, for identity checks — are all connected to networks that are gone.”
Kam Air, an Afghan carrier, reported running just a single flight since the blackout. Mohammad Bashir, a company representative, told local media that airlines must share flight plans and information with destination airports electronically — an impossible task with the national networks shut down. “We need to get people home,” he said. “But airplanes don’t fly on goodwill alone; they need data.”
Voices from the streets: small stories, large consequences
Walk through Kabul’s bazaars and you will hear economic data refracted into everyday worries: a fruit-seller fretting over transfers from wholesalers, a seamstress unable to receive payment for a wedding dress, a student unable to submit an essay. These are the small calamities that add up. “When there was internet, we never realized how important it was,” a bank teller told me, wiping his hands on his work shirt. “Now every balance is a worry.”
In the homes of many Kabul residents, family ties stretch across borders — cousins in Pakistan, in Europe, in the United States. Those ties are kept intact by messaging apps and social media. Without them, anxiety accumulates. “I couldn’t call my sister to tell her my mother was sick,” said Khalid, a trader. “Imagine carrying that alone.”
Where the blackout hits hardest
- Air travel: at least 14 Kabul flights cancelled; dozens listed as “unknown” according to Flightradar24.
- Banking: transactions, online authorisations and ATM services disrupted — hampering salaries, vendor payments and individual withdrawals.
- Humanitarian assistance: data-dependent aid delivery and coordination compromised at a moment when needs are surging.
- Freedom of expression: information flows curtailed, disproportionately affecting women, journalists and civil society networks.
Why would communications be cut?
The authorities have given scant explanation. In recent weeks, officials had spoken about moral concerns — publicly expressed alarm over online content — and had intermittently restricted fiber-optic links in certain provinces. But a nationwide phone-and-internet blackout is an escalation few expected. For many observers, information control is a tool as old as power itself: silence as governance.
“When you control the message, you control the response,” said Dr. Laila Rahimi, a political analyst based in the region. “Cutting communications isn’t only about preventing specific actions; it’s about shaping the landscape of risk, fear and mobility. For people who already have limited freedom, this is another way to curtail agency.”
Not just an Afghan problem: the global implications
Think for a moment about how fragile global networks can be. When one country is disconnected, international airlines shuffle schedules, aid agencies reroute supplies, and remittance flows — a lifeline for many families — wobble. Afghanistan is not an isolated case; authoritarian playbooks increasingly use digital blackouts to blunt dissent and control populations. From North Africa to South Asia, the world has seen how quick, targeted cutoffs can reshape politics and livelihoods.
And yet, the human cost is never merely theoretical. In Afghanistan, nine in ten people already depend on humanitarian assistance in some measure — a figure repeated in UN and aid agency reporting for years. In that context, disruptions to communication are not an inconvenience; they are life-threatening constraints on the delivery of food, medicine, and protection.
What might happen next?
There are a few pathways forward. The authorities could restore services, perhaps after implementing tighter controls or new regulations. The international community could pressure for reconnection, or aid agencies might turn to low-tech solutions — radio broadcasts, paper lists, in-person coordination — to bridge gaps. But each choice has costs, trade-offs, and ethical choices embedded within it.
“We need to balance security concerns with human rights,” said an aid coordinator who asked not to be named for safety reasons. “Cutting phones may quiet a city for a weekend, but it also cuts off the wounded, the elderly, the women who rely on hotlines, and the migrants trying to reach families. The poorest pay the price.”
Questions to sit with
As you read this from wherever you are — a café in Accra, a living room in London, a dorm in Delhi — consider how much of your day depends on invisible networks. How would your work, your family, your safety change if those lines were taken away? Who gets to decide when to silence a country? And perhaps most importantly: who speaks for those now muted?
Kabul’s airport may one day resume normal operations. Flights may be reinstated and phones may buzz again. But the blackout has already done more than cancel flights: it has reminded a weary world that control over information is control over life. In the waiting rooms and the marketplaces, people are recalibrating, grieving the conveniences lost and preparing for a future where connection is no longer a right but a conditional commodity.
“We are not just numbers in a system,” said an elderly woman watching planes taxi under a sun-dimmed sky. “We are families, names, stories. Turn it back on. Let us breathe.”
