From Science to Sharia
The Taliban are reprogramming Afghanistan’s youth by indoctrinating a generation of boys into blind obedience. This should alarm the free world.
KABUL, Afghanistan — As the West remains preoccupied with the domestic effects of inflation, a costly war in Ukraine with no clear end in sight, and escalating tensions in the Middle East, another frontline in the battle over freedom and authoritarianism is quietly solidifying: the minds of Afghanistan’s youth. And this one may have even deeper and more lasting consequences.
On February 27, 2025, the Taliban issued a chilling decree that slipped under the radar of international headlines. The new rule mandates a strict dress code for all male students across Afghanistan: boys in grades 1 through 9 must wear light blue traditional Pirahan and Tunban with a white cap or turban; those in grade 10 and above must wear white garments with a turban. The outfit is not just a uniform. It is an ideological symbol. It mirrors what is worn in madrasas (Islamic seminaries), setting the tone for what kind of education—and indoctrination—these students will receive.
On its face, this may seem like a trivial matter of attire. But totalitarian regimes have long understood that clothing is cultural armor —a visible symbol of loyalty and submission. The Taliban’s strategy is clear: if you can’t erase the presence of women entirely, you control the men who remain. And you begin with the boys.
In conversations with Afghan high school students *Ahmad and *Mohammad, both 17, their dismay was palpable. “I thought it was a joke,” Mohammad said. “How can a student wear such formal and traditional clothing in an academic institution?” Ahmad, an aspiring computer scientist, worries about more than appearance. “They are transforming the system so that students will be directly and indirectly attracted to fundamentalist ideas. If you don’t trim your beard, for example, teachers treat you more pleasantly.”
But clothing is just the surface. The Taliban's education system is being gutted and replaced with ideological conditioning. Ahmad described a chemistry class once taught by a qualified female teacher, now led by a man with no formal science education, who was trained only in religious subjects.
This is not a coincidence. This is a strategy: replacing modern pedagogy with dogma, inquiry with obedience.
It is a well-worn playbook of totalitarian regimes. Mao’s Red Guards, Hitler Youth, Stalin’s Komsomol, the Iranian Basij militia—all began with the youth. Control the young minds, and the future belongs to you. The Taliban, with its new dress code and parallel indoctrination effort, is following suit.
In the early stages of their return to power, the Taliban banned girls from secondary education. That policy now appears to be part of a larger logistical strategy: narrowing the focus of ideological indoctrination to one gender—males—while eliminating the other from public life altogether. Why work to control the minds of both halves of society when one can be efficiently radicalized, and the other rendered invisible?
Girls like Muzhda Akbari—now an activist based in Canada and a recipient of the Diana Award—have become exiles in the truest sense. “A system that limits curriculum to narrow religious interpretations, restricts access to diverse worldviews, and suppresses scientific inquiry and independent thought is unlikely to prepare students to engage with the modern world or contribute meaningfully to a peaceful and prosperous society,” Akbari told me. “At the same time, this decree serves as a painful contrast to the total exclusion of Afghan girls from education for nearly four years. While boys are being educated within a rigid and restricted system, girls are being denied even the basic right to learn.”
The world made a bargain in the 2020 Doha Agreement—the U.S. would withdraw, and the Taliban promised Afghanistan would not become a hub for terrorism. But anyone betting on Taliban compliance was betting against history. That wager grows more dangerous by the day.
Recent terrorist attacks in Germany, including a fatal stabbing in Mannheim and another in Aschaffenburg, were both carried out by Afghan men. The Taliban doesn't need to plan international attacks directly. It just needs to create the environment, culture, and ideology from which the next wave of extremists will emerge.
Their propaganda doesn’t require a base camp. It requires a Wi-Fi signal and enough young minds who have been conditioned to see martyrdom as destiny and liberal values as betrayal.
The Taliban’s educational overhaul is not just a domestic policy—it’s a warning sign. These boys will grow up in an environment where dissent is erased, freedom of thought is dangerous, and women are ghosts. It’s only a matter of time before that ideology crosses borders again.
Two decades of investment in Afghanistan by the West created a generation of young people who understood individual freedom, embraced globalization, and believed in their country’s potential. Ahmad and Mohammad were part of that generation—hopeful, connected, forward-looking. Now, they are being dragged backward into a worldview that sees critical thinking as a threat and women as irrelevant.
The Taliban’s reeducation of Afghan youth is not just a tragedy; it is a blueprint for authoritarian success. And the free world, distracted and distant, is letting it happen.
If we believe in freedom, liberty, and individual sovereignty, we must pay attention to Afghanistan. Not because we can or should reengage militarily, but because the price of silence is always paid later, and often far from the place where tyranny began.
*Ideas Beyond Borders uses pseudonyms to protect our partners in Afghanistan
Talibans have, through their own self-determination and long-held sacrifices, for twenty years, fought and took control of the power. They are the legitimate rulers in the true sense at best. As to the attire and dress code in educational institution, you must accept and understand that their war, efforts, and whole presence is against the very modernity and western values you are basing on to criticize them. To them, the principles of modernity, the whole framework of so-called fundamental rights, girls' education hold no value. This is what they have fought against for 20 long years and now you are, like a resented and vanquished fool, critiquing them based on the very framework they deny. Your whole project, which you are now defending, which in its core essence only suits west as it took its origination from there, which is but a mere tool of money-making, which runs on the concept of modernity - the teleological modernity, the untrue modernity, the values-vanishing modernity, the inhumane and anti-human modernity, they have long before wiped out and utterly destroyed. Now, you have but 2 options. Either like a coward earn the support of west and once again dethrone us, or keep resenting as you are doing.