The Taliban’s military courts have issued a sweeping order banning smartphone use for every tier of government personnel—from senior ministers and ordinary mujahideen fighters to low-ranking service staff. Effective immediately, the directive stipulates that any device discovered will be physically smashed in front of its owner, who then faces additional legal and sharia punishments. Exemptions require a handwritten decree from supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada alone. Videos circulated on social media capture the edict’s grim theatre: one official reads the ban aloud from a smartphone while colleagues methodically destroy handsets, a scene that underscores the regime’s determination to perform enforcement as spectacle.

Viewed from Kabul, the ban is officially justified as a measure to plug leaks and restore workplace discipline. Officials have routinely photographed confidential documents and recorded closed-door meetings, disseminating sensitive material before formal announcements. The leadership also complains that employees waste hours scrolling on their devices, sapping administrative efficiency. Yet the crackdown may already be bleeding beyond government offices. Reports from Herat province indicate that authorities have confiscated phones from civilians, medical staff, teachers and even students, suggesting the edict is being used as a template for wider societal control.

Regional observers in Tehran and New Delhi, along with Western analysts, see the move as a potential trial balloon for a full-scale internet blackout. Last September, the Taliban imposed a sudden two-day nationwide web shutdown—purportedly to combat “immoral content”—that paralysed commerce, grounded flights and crippled emergency systems before a backlash from the private sector and the regime’s own security officials forced a reversal. That episode now reads like a dry run. A permanent ban on smartphones for the entire population would sever Afghans from global information networks, entrenching the Taliban’s hermetic rule and complicating humanitarian operations.

Enforcement remains uneven across provinces, but the public destruction of devices sends an unambiguous signal. The contradiction of using smartphones to decree their own destruction reveals a regime caught between ideological purity and the practicalities of modern governance. If the ban expands nationwide, Afghanistan risks becoming one of the world’s most digitally repressed states, its population locked out of the information age by the very tools the Taliban once used to broadcast their return to power.