RASC News Agency: As Afghanistan careens toward disaster with rising poverty, crippling unemployment, and widespread hunger leaving millions at the brink of collapse Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada has offered no radical economic vision, no plan to feed the starving or secure the unemployed. Instead, he has urged the citizens to grow long beards and don turbans, declaring these personal adornments a key to societal salvation. In a recent gathering of sympathetic clerics in Kandahar, the Taliban leader extolled these outward symbols as embodiments of the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions, calling on mosque preachers to enforce them as moral obligations. Taliban deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat echoed his remarks, asserting that outer appearance must align with the inner imperatives of Sharia law and that promoting virtue is a “sacred duty” essential to preventing moral degradation.
This symbolic sorcery comes while the country is engulfed in a humanitarian crisis. Education systems are collapsing, health services are nonexistent, and Afghanistani women stripped of jobs, access to education, and autonomy are rapidly becoming invisible. The Taliban’s decree criminalizing trimmed or shaved beards has escalated absurdly into punitive enforcement. Barbers have been jailed. Shops have been shuttered. And men are punished not for any crime, but for defying an ideological mandate that bears no relation to the urgent needs of their families. It is a familiar, unforgettable tyranny one that divorces governance from responsibility. “The livelihood of the people is not the regime’s concern,” Akhundzada has reiterated in prior speeches. “Sustenance comes from God.” With that, he absolves himself of accountability for food shortages, crumbling infrastructure, or any semblance of public welfare.
Meanwhile, millions increasingly rely on dehydrated rations and humanitarian handouts a lifeline growing ever more fragile as international aid stutters under the weight of the regime’s mistrust and targeting of relief workers. What emerges is not dogma, but dereliction. A state that ignores hunger while regulating beards is not a moral authority it is a regime entrenched in ideology, using control of the body as surrogate for competence. As the Taliban encircle citizens with sermons and sanctions, an entire nation starves. Their devotion to symbols over sustenance is not a return to tradition it is a collapse into cruelty.
