RASC News Agency: The once-thriving industrial park of Kandahar, long considered the economic heartbeat of southern Afghanistan, has now fallen into desolation. What was once a landscape of roaring machines and industrious optimism has descended into a wasteland of shuttered workshops, idle chimneys, and rusting machinery. The hum of productivity has been replaced by the silence of decay an audible symbol of the broader economic disintegration that has gripped Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
In the final years of the former republic, Kandahar’s industrial park was a vital artery of Afghanistan’s fragile manufacturing sector. It hosted more than 350 factories, producing construction materials, plastics, food products, and textiles that helped sustain both local consumption and limited exports to neighboring countries. Today, according to the Kandahar Chamber of Industries and Mines, fewer than 130 factories remain partially operational, struggling to survive amid collapsing infrastructure, chronic power shortages, and a near-total absence of state support.
Business owners describe a climate of suffocation and despair. “We receive only four to five hours of electricity per day,” said Sharifullah, a factory owner who invested over one million dollars in a pipe production plant before being forced to close. “It’s impossible to run machines or maintain staff under these conditions. Generators are too expensive, and fuel prices have skyrocketed. During the previous government, industrial power was prioritized. Now, our needs are ignored, and our future is uncertain.”
His testimony echoes across Kandahar. Factory after factory has gone silent, as entrepreneurs either relocate to Kabul and Herat where industrial zones receive up to 16 hours of electricity daily or abandon production altogether. Kandahar’s grid depends largely on the Kajaki Dam, whose power output has diminished drastically due to drought and lack of technical maintenance, a problem compounded by the Taliban’s administrative paralysis and indifference.
The cost of using private generators has soared to three to four times that of state-supplied power, an expense unsustainable for local manufacturers already grappling with inflation, shrinking markets, and dwindling consumer purchasing power. As the economic suffocation deepens, the once-vibrant park now resembles what locals call “a graveyard of machines.”
According to industrial sources, many of the factories that have ceased operations were owned by professionals and investors from the previous administration individuals who have since fled the country or relocated their assets to safer regions. The Taliban’s absence of economic policy, combined with growing restrictions, insecurity, and isolation from international markets, has driven away the few remaining investors who once believed in Afghanistan’s industrial promise.
Repeated appeals by Kandahar’s industrial community to meet with Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader, have gone unanswered. Local business leaders say they have sent multiple formal requests to discuss the power crisis and the collapse of production, but no response has ever been received. “They rule from behind walls,” said one businessman who requested anonymity. “They neither understand nor care about the economy. For them, power is about control, not responsibility.”
The consequences have been catastrophic. Tens of thousands of workers have lost their livelihoods, leaving entire families without income. The shutdown of these factories has devastated Kandahar’s local economy, erasing supply chains, depleting trade, and pushing many young men toward migration or illicit work to survive. The social repercussions are visible everywhere: hunger, unemployment, and despair.
Economists describe Kandahar’s crisis as a reflection of the Taliban’s broader economic failure. Since taking power in 2021, the group has shown no capacity or willingness to manage Afghanistan’s industrial sector. International isolation, ideological rigidity, and the absence of transparent governance have transformed what was once a fragile economy into one teetering on collapse. “The Taliban’s vision for governance stops at coercion,” said an Afghanistani economist in exile. “They have no economic strategy, no plan for recovery. What’s happening in Kandahar is not just local decline it’s the systematic unravelling of an entire nation’s productive capacity.”
Former workers interviewed by RASC echoed that sentiment. “We used to have steady jobs and stable lives,” said one man who spent 12 years in a plastics factory. “Now there’s nothing left no work, no salary, no food. The Taliban talk about religion and morality, but they’ve left us with hunger and silence.”
Kandahar’s industrial collapse thus stands as a potent metaphor for Afghanistan’s broader economic stagnation under Taliban rule. Once envisioned as a model of post-war reconstruction, it now symbolizes the regime’s incapacity to govern a modern economy or sustain livelihoods. The silence of the factories mirrors the silencing of Afghanistan’s economic potential both victims of a government more invested in ideological enforcement than in rebuilding the nation.
Unless urgent action is taken by regional partners and international institutions willing to bypass the Taliban’s incompetence Kandahar’s decay could mark the beginning of a wider industrial implosion across Afghanistan. Analysts warn that such a collapse will not only deepen poverty and unemployment but also accelerate mass displacement, fueling instability across South and Central Asia.
Under Taliban rule, the lights of Kandahar’s factories have gone out and with them, the last flickers of Afghanistan’s industrial hope.
