AUTHOR Sola Mahfouz SOLA MAHFOUZ is an Afghan writer living in Boston, drawn to the voice beneath the fractures of existence. A voracious reader of global voices, she writes to give shape to what resists expression. She is currently working on her first historical novel set in Afghanistan. AUTHOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. · FEATURES Essay · Kandahar In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. Latifa Zafar Attaii, Self-Portrait (2016), digital print. The Captive Mind Our two-story house in Kandahar stood inside a compound with a garden of colors where roses of many kinds lived, competing in fragrance with the chambeli , the jasmine plant. On summer nights, the garden also brimmed with the laughter of us, the children, on bicycles, playing hide and seek beneath the stars. When winter came, the rhythm shifted. Evenings began after supper, the electricity generator shut off and the lantern lit for warmth and light. The flickering flame would stretch the shadow of the past across the wall of the present, as my siblings and I gathered by the adults. The stories shared around that lantern were not fairy tales, but inheritance. Adults spoke of many things. How someone escaped a raid. How another someone never came back. How the sound of a car slowing outside meant the worst—being killed. For them, perhaps, it was their way of reckoning, with a war they had carried into peace, and with a peace still trembling on the edge of war. I had been listening to these stories since turning six, or maybe even earlier. In 2002, however, when Afghanistan was promised a new beginning, only to end up in rubble, I began listening more closely. Something in me had opened—the way it does when your own life begins to echo the stories you've always heard. The American invasion in 2001 became my reference point for war’s meaning. Sometimes it began with something small, a radio playing an old song, or someone quietly saying how lucky we were to have this house. From there, the memories would awaken: my grandmother’s story passed to my father, his to my mother, and then to my siblings. How they had escaped from Kabul while the rockets were falling. How they had not known if we would survive the road. How a family we would have never met took us in and gave us warm food. We would watch our elders’s faces in the lantern light, tensing as the stories reached that sharp point of unknowing. Our own bodies would stiffen with theirs; vessels holding fear. But then, as their faces would soften towards the end—the ending where they didn’t die—we would relax too, sometimes getting on our knees as if leaning into relief. We clung to the parts where our families had made it through. It was because of these moments that we wanted to hear those stories again and again. Sometimes, one of us would interrupt. “Tell the funny part,” we’d say, already giggling. The one about Ana Bibi. My grandmother, asking, “ Is this rocket coming from the right side or the wrong side? ” This would make everyone laugh. Among the many stories one returned often, even more so after my grandfather died in 2007, when I was ten. In its telling and retelling, that story became more than true—it gave continuity to life, underscoring how the past is remembered, the present felt, and the future anticipated. My mother told it with quiet reverence. My grandfather had been a leftist writer, among the first to embrace modernity in the 1950s. He supported the communist project in its early promise, reforms, and a vision for a better future. But after the bloody coup and Hafizullah Amin ’s rise, that promise curdled. Friends disappeared. Dissent became dangerous. He had written against the regime, and one day, word came. His name was on Amin’s list. In the weeks that followed, each time a car edged too close to their gate, my grandfather retreated into his study, crouching beneath the desk, lantern in hand. Descriptions of the heavy velvet curtain and the earthy smell gave my mother’s story an almost magical aura. That image, though never photographed, imprinted itself on me. A dark room. A burning light. The slow terror of footsteps. I do not know if it happened exactly that way. But memory in Afghanistan is not evidence. It is transmission. In Afghanistan, each poet gives his pain to the land, or lets the land’s pain speak through him. My grandfather was one of them. He wrote during the early days of Afghanistan’s turbulent history, a time when fear came not just from war, but from the silence it demanded. Years later, when he was already living in exile in Denmark, his words still echoed in Kandahar. My mother remembered them. At one point in the story, my mother liked slowing down, and from those lived experiences that she carried in memory alone, she would emerge laughing and crying with the verses from my grandfather’s most well-known poem: Caged in the dark night I was, A victim of the chains pulled tight, I was. Hands bound, lips sewn, in waves of torture, Stuck in a hellish oven of harassment and abuse. Cold sighs rose, defiant, to the skies; My patience is like a shooting star towards the galaxy. My grief went violent, beyond what my worn heart could endure. In my chest, rebellious dreams could no longer fit, Wild cries like groans set off. That poem, she’d say, was written in the days when Hafizullah Amin Taraki's communist party had taken control—a time of extreme fear. At the time, people were being whisked away from classrooms, in the middle of a lecture. One of my mother’s teachers was thrown from a helicopter, a warning to anyone with a mind too sharp, a voice too loud. Those who remained were not in chains, but restrained by fear. The regime went after the intellectuals, the mullahs, anyone they thought could become a rallying point, a nucleus around which resistance might form. And then a glimmer of hope, or so they thought, and my grandfather continued his poem. I don’t know whether someone heard my secret plea, Or judged my groans as immodest cries of ungratefulness. Clamor rose on the podium of the universe. An adventure rose to heaven’s home; With red monsters, black too, that flowed. At every step they roared with anger. I knew not then who stepped near– To rescue me, or strike me with pretenses of giving Everyone that came crushed the bones of my helpless body, But at the same time, they broke the chains that snaked around me. And so, at the breaking of the chains, I laugh, But for each bone breaking, I cry. The Soviets invaded , and they began breaking old chains, but they also broke bones. My grandfather went on breathing, but in the mirror of history the jail cell he had marginally avoided never closed. It passed down, unlatched, via my aunts, my older siblings, and now it takes the shape of my silence, a silence that pulses like our family’s death drive. After my grandfather, no one believed in idealism. In Afghanistan, survival builds its house atop the buried bones of idealism. Literally. I used to think that was just a metaphor, until I read an old article from 1997. A boy named Faizdeen, only 14, had said: “I used to dig for scrap iron…but the Taliban banned us from exporting it to Pakistan when they captured Kabul. So now I dig for bones. There is no other work, and we need the money for food.” My father used to joke with my grandmother, nudging her to eat more yogurt and milk, “If you don’t keep your bones strong, they won’t sell well later.” I always thought he was being dark for the sake of humor. Only now do I realize his joke had roots. The absurdity was just a disguise. He wasn’t joking. He was remembering—the past bleeding into the present through the cracks in his humor. We inherit many things: land, names, trauma. But I also inherited my grandfather’s dreams. Whatever intellect I carry, it’s a small fire lit by the same lantern he read by. In 2007, I saw my grandfather for the first time in a coffin. But I don’t remember mourning his death; I remember pride. He was given a national burial. The governor came. Many of Afghanistan’s renowned poets gathered to recite verses. His funeral was not a mourning of his death but a celebration of his voice. They said he was a man a hundred years ahead of his time, a father who educated every one of his daughters. They told stories of his poverty, how he couldn’t afford even a single sheet of clean white paper. How he walked the streets and upon finding a blank piece in the trash he picked it up and wrote on it. These stories brought him back to life, each retelling pulling him from the past, giving him breath and flesh. But even then, no one spoke of him in his entirety. His idealism was buried with him for the family's safety. And after him, idealism no longer lived with my family. The war stripped it away, leaving only the habits of survival. In rebelling, I search for his image. I was forced to quit school at eleven, not that I ever loved it, but by fourteen I began to question everything. Life. War. The meaning of it all. Fear was everywhere, seeping through the walls, hovering over us every night. Airstrikes, suicide bombings, the air and land on fire. I did feel in my own way: Caged in the dark night I was . And my chains were not that of being just Afghan but of a woman too. And then I thought of my grandfather, how he was self-taught, how he created a path for himself. Suddenly, that became a path for me too. This paid off. I became a full-time self-taught student, and in search for the meaning of life, in 2016, I went on to study physics at Arizona State University, eventually becoming a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. I had made a promise to myself that leaving Afghanistan would mark the end of that chapter. The war and its memories would dissolve with distance. War had never made sense to me; it was arbitrary, brutal, and incoherent. The clean logic of math and science felt appealing precisely because I could grasp it. I believed that science would help me build a new symbolic order , what Lacan might call the framework through which meaning is stabilized. A clean logic to overwrite the chaos. Even as I dove into quantum theory, however, Afghanistan kept rippling back, like an unresolved equation buried in the wavefunction. At the lunch table among friends and colleagues, my jokes were always about war—the trademark Afghan dark humor that circles back on itself, where the punchline is a silence that swallows the room. I would laugh alone. While others laughed at their own easy jokes, I didn’t. Easy laughter didn’t come very easily to me. While others read fantasy to escape reality, I, driven by a neurotic curiosity, reached for Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Freud—to probe it. Surprisingly, the time away from Afghanistan didn’t take Afghanistan away from me. Instead, it made me see my country in everything I read. Partly, because in the US, Afghanistan is spoken about through the vocabulary of world power, war, strategy, collapse, and rarely, if ever, through the intimate lens of the human. I didn’t notice it at first, but the more I talked to people, the more I began to feel something unsettling inside me. Literature shaped by exile, grief, and repression mirrored a part of me that was still hovering outside language, unclaimed by words. The Afghan experience, I realized, was not just history, it was psychic. Complex, fractured, buried. In Afghanistan, I never had to ask what it meant to be Afghan. The question itself didn’t arise. But in the US, I found myself caught in a mirror stage of sorts, not of my own making, but shaped by how Afghanistan was talked about all around me. I was reacting to a reflection I didn’t recognize. And in that reaction, I began to split. A part of me wanted to disappear. Another part wanted to speak, not about policy, but about how Afghanistan felt . How it smelled at dawn after the Azan was called, when my mother added cardamom to the morning tea and my brother brought fresh doodi bread from the bakery. How it danced in the upbeat songs my father played. How it mourned in my grandfather’s poetry. How it lived in a child’s fear. How it died in a suicide bomb. And how, even then, when a bomb exploded nearby, Afghans knew to open the glass windows quickly -- so the second blast, which often came, wouldn’t shatter them over us. I began to see Afghanistan not as a place left behind, but as something returning, over and over. It returns in dreams, in the pauses between sentences. My memories speak Pashto, but my thoughts answer in English. In this process, I feel that my spoken English is shaped in such a way that lived experience arrives uncannily, half-recognizable, crossing a border just to reach me. So, I went deeper in search for voices that echoed the Afghan experience, voices shaped by rupture that spoke in fear, in silences that felt familiar. I became obsessively drawn to narratives haunted by erasure, burial, and longing—that reflected the essential and the unsayable parts of Afghanistan, helping me understand the genre-defying tragedy of a people compelled to sell the remains of humans just to survive. There is a tragedy and a contradiction in being Afghan: despite having so much history, culture, pride and poetry, our immediate past opens the door to an incomprehensible reality, where some must sell the bones of the dead just to buy bread. It’s a truth hard to hold, an irreconcilable dialectical condition. And sometimes I wonder, what if those bones belonged to the very intellectuals who once dreamed of a better future? Perhaps they were the remains of those killed by the communists for their idealism, or later by the mujahideen for the same reason. In 2019, I read Miłosz’s The Captive Mind . He wrote it in postwar Paris, after defecting from Communist Poland. The book felt so connected to my life—its psychic resonances were so familiar—I wondered if it had been written by an Afghan. Suddenly, I realized something that had never found its signifier: in Afghanistan, our minds were also captive. From the communist regime to the post-2001 government, fear didn’t disappear, it adapted. The instructions were the same, only told by new faces: don’t speak of politics, don’t say what your family thinks, don’t mention the Taliban on the phone, or the Americans either. When our experiences are not mirrored back, when no one names them, when no one writes them down, they begin to dissolve and disappear. We start to question not just the experience, but in time, we begin to distrust our own interiority. As if the silence around us means the feeling itself is wrong. Reading that book, among many, I felt the Afghan experience was not just real but legible. Not just tragic but thinkable. Afghanistan could be shown as it lives in the ruined houses of Afghan hearts, with all its beauty and contradictions. Miłosz describes the Murti-Bing pill, a tranquilizer of the mind, swallowed for peace with contradiction. He wrote of people who surrendered to ideology to survive. I recognized that surrender. My own grandfather’s writings sit in a Moscow basement, unpublished. My family warns me not to bring attention to them. “Do you want the Taliban to destroy his grave?” they ask. Against the silence, I think of my grandfather who said, “An Afghan writer shouldn’t look for applause. He must write his books, buy his own books, read his own books.” My grandfather chose to write regardless of whether he would be read or not. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Kandahar Afghanistan Storytelling Family Kabul Communist Era Hafizullah Amin Taraki's Communist Party Discourses of War War War on Terror Colonialism US Imperialism Imperialism Decolonization Colonial Oppression Colonization Memory Dossiers of memory Islam United States Pakistan Pashto Absurdity Dehumanization Human Rights Violations US withdrawal 2021 Mujahideen Literary Literary Activism Literature & Liberation Afghan literature US Invasion of Afghanistan Invasion Poetry Trauma Exile Dark Humor Language War Crimes Theater of War Ketman Lacan Czesław Miłosz Diaspora Idealism Afghan Diaspora Education Murti-Bing Tranquilizer Taliban Georgi Gospodinov ICE Stand-Up Comedy Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 26th Jun 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Latifa Zafar Attaii, Untitled (2016). Thread on digital print. When I left for the United States in 2016, I thought I had made my choice to live for ideas. But history is not a linear march towards freedom. One's choices are never final, they are tested at every twist and turn. In 2025, at Tufts, where I worked as a researcher, a student was taken in for writing just an op-ed for Palestine. I have this habit when I become overwhelmed, when emotions press too hard against the inside of my chest: I write poems. That night, as I felt the space around my own mind begin to enclose, I wrote one—raw and reactive. I hovered over the “publish” button on Substack, to click or not click. I found myself navigating not survival, but a negotiation between idealism and silence, safety and speech. Not only did I not publish the poem, but instead I deleted my X/Twitter and Instagram accounts because I didn’t want any likes, shares, or posts to be used in any way. And in that moment, I turned away from the person I had worked hard to become. The old instincts returned. I started watching what I said again. At home, we were taught to stay quiet. Never talk about politics. Never say what your family thinks. Live like two people, one inside the home, another outside it. There’s a name for that kind of split. In The Captive Mind , Czesław Miłosz calls it ketman : a practiced split between thought and speech that fractures the self, creating a kind of psychological contradictory duality. Under ketman , one performs the lie of the state for so long that they lose touch with their own inner truth. What starts as concealment from others becomes concealment from the self. Over time, even the desire to resist dies. Whenever we went to the house we learnt the Quran in, or when friends visited, my mother would lean in close, her voice a hush, “Remember, even the walls have ears. Not everything needs to be said.” Back in Afghanistan, fear had a shape: the sound of a suicide bomber, the rumble of a tank passing, the sudden shadow of a plane above, the silence after a kidnapping. Here in the United States, it’s different but no less present. It's a quiet kind of fear you have to learn all over again, the kind that follows you into your inbox, your social feed, your decision to speak or not. “Does the past have an expiration date…?” Georgi Gospodinov asks through a character in Time Shelter. For Afghans, it doesn’t. The past doesn't reverberate through memory and inherited fear, but comes alive in the headlines. In Pakistan, Afghan families who have lived for decades are being deported overnight. In the US, too, there's talk that Afghans under temporary protected status may soon be deported. Anger stirs inside me. Afghans are constantly at the mercy of the world. No matter the country, no matter the context, we are always waiting, waiting to be allowed to stay, to speak, to live. I hate this. I hate seeing my people cast again and again as the world’s burden. I want to write about this, about how these two acts of deportation, one in Pakistan, the other in the US, are not separate, but part of the same story. Take my cousin, for example. She came to the US on a P1 visa after the fall of Kabul in 2021, but now she’s stuck in legal limbo, uncertain if she’ll be allowed to stay. Her own family, who fled to Pakistan during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, have lived there ever since, still undocumented, still afraid. When she calls me, she tells me she can’t even talk about her situation. “How can I add to their worry,” she says, “when they’re barely holding on themselves?' To this eerie synchronicity in the news, with two borders and one destination, Afghanistan, I want to add a truth. The continuity is not just between the displaced, but in the war itself. One refugee was driven out by the conflict that began in the 1970s. The other fled the aftermath of the US withdrawal in 2021 . But these are not separate wars. They are different phases of the same long undoing. The world, including both the U.S. and Pakistan, helped train, fund, and arm the mujahideen. The fire they lit has never gone out. Its shape has changed, but it continues to burn through Afghan lives. One of the most heartbreaking reels I saw was of an Afghan man in Pakistan. His shop was being looted, crates overturned, and a box of oranges was thrown to the ground. He ran helplessly toward it, trying to salvage what he could. I watched it and cried. Watching his face once again broke something inside me—a psychic déjà vu. I saw my parents’ past. And suddenly, memories of family came back, memories I thought I had learned to forget. One of the stories my father often tells from the time of the Civil War is of a room full of large bags of rice. In Afghanistan, they say old rice tastes better. Leaving Kabul while rockets were falling, on an empty stomach, perhaps that’s one of the reasons that memory has stayed so vividly alive to this day. One thing this perpetual war in Afghanistan has done well is strip people of their humanity, reducing their unique stories to mere headlines of victimhood. I want to tell the stories that don’t make it into the headlines, the small ones, the family ones, the ones that carry the weight of a war without saying it outright. I open a draft. I start to write about the US betrayal of Afghanistan, the foreign policies that spiraled everything that came after the Cold War. But then I stop. I read it over, hesitate, and delete it. It’s unsettling how the same instinct that made my grandfather crouch under his desk with a lantern now lives in me—surfacing as I quietly prepare to pack my bags, without knowing why. I find myself looking over the books I’ve collected. Physics textbooks, poetry, novels, and essays. Some from home, some bought here. I always thought I would build a library. It felt like a small claim on a life shaped by ideas. Now I’m giving many of them away. Not because I want to, but because something in me is telling me to prepare. It’s a quiet instinct, like the ones my family lived by for decades. You don’t wait to be told. You leave before you’re asked to. You stay quiet even before the silence is forced on you. No one has threatened me. Nothing has happened. But still I hesitate. I start writing and then stop. I delete what I mean to say. I try to explain this to myself, maybe it’s fear, maybe caution, or maybe it’s secondhand, something I inherited in those moments when voices lowered during storytelling or before we left the house, receiving instructions on what to say and what not to say. A habit passed down that became part of everyday living. A silence practiced long before it was needed. But again, as I speak to my family, it feels absurd to them. “Your grandfather was much higher than just intellect,” they say. “He didn’t publish, so you can keep quiet too.” My grandfather didn’t publish because our family was still living in Kandahar. But now we’re out. He, however, still remains in Kandahar. I'm concerned about free speech. I hate how war has reduced our ambitions to mere survival. As long as no bombs are raining down, you’re supposed to be fine. Growing up and searching for Afghan intellectuals in the books I read, I always hated that I couldn’t find them in English, in dialogue with the world. Looking back, I realize it could never have been possible—for in a country constantly at war, neither poetry nor intellect could flourish, and hope could not survive. Survival has always been more important than idealism, and you can’t live for idealism without putting your skin in the game. But survival made sense to those who came before me. Their silence kept them alive. Can I live differently? Is it possible? Every time I see an Afghan face, it is waiting at a checkpoint, a consulate, or a deportation line. But for every sad Afghan story, there’s a punchline. In my family, even the darkest recollection ended with something absurd—a sort of internal smuggler’s trade—emotion disguised in irony so the censors of sanity would let it pass, and in return, a small, uncanny, crooked laugh meant to keep the world from collapsing. Among us Afghans there is an almost tacit agreement: to live against despair, one has to laugh louder than his wounds. Humor becomes a stubborn way to insist on life’s beauty. But this isn’t your usual “hahaha” humor. It’s the kind that goes deeper than the suffering. A kind of philosophy that doesn’t deny pain, but rather makes space for it. I do this in my own way. In my stand-up comedy class, which I take just for fun , I end with the punchline: In one dream, I’m running from a bomb, afraid of being sent to heaven. In another, I’m running from ICE, afraid of being sent to the Hindu Kush mountains. My trauma has grown legs. And it keeps running. Watch out, it might kick you. ∎ Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. Latifa Zafar Attaii, Self-Portrait (2016), digital print. Artist · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION The Captive Mind LOCATION Sola Mahfouz . 26 Jun 2025 th . Letter from our columnist . Our two-story house in Kandahar stood inside a compound with a garden of colors where roses of many kinds lived, competing in fragrance with the chambeli , the jasmine plant. On summer nights, the garden also brimmed with the laughter of us, the children, on bicycles, playing hide and seek beneath the stars. When winter came, the rhythm shifted. Evenings began after supper, the electricity generator shut off and the lantern lit for warmth and light. The flickering flame would stretch the shadow of the past across the wall of the present, as my siblings and I gathered by the adults. The stories shared around that lantern were not fairy tales, but inheritance. Adults spoke of many things. How someone escaped a raid. How another someone never came back. How the sound of a car slowing outside meant the worst—being killed. For them, perhaps, it was their way of reckoning, with a war they had carried into peace, and with a peace still trembling on the edge of war. I had been listening to these stories since turning six, or maybe even earlier. In 2002, however, when Afghanistan was promised a new beginning, only to end up in rubble, I began listening more closely. Something in me had opened—the way it does when your own life begins to echo the stories you've always heard. The American invasion in 2001 became my reference point for war’s meaning. Sometimes it began with something small, a radio playing an old song, or someone quietly saying how lucky we were to have this house. From there, the memories would awaken: my grandmother’s story passed to my father, his to my mother, and then to my siblings. How they had escaped from Kabul while the rockets were falling. How they had not known if we would survive the road. How a family we would have never met took us in and gave us warm food. We would watch our elders’s faces in the lantern light, tensing as the stories reached that sharp point of unknowing. Our own bodies would stiffen with theirs; vessels holding fear. But then, as their faces would soften towards the end—the ending where they didn’t die—we would relax too, sometimes getting on our knees as if leaning into relief. We clung to the parts where our families had made it through. It was because of these moments that we wanted to hear those stories again and again. Sometimes, one of us would interrupt. “Tell the funny part,” we’d say, already giggling. The one about Ana Bibi. My grandmother, asking, “ Is this rocket coming from the right side or the wrong side? ” This would make everyone laugh. Among the many stories one returned often, even more so after my grandfather died in 2007, when I was ten. In its telling and retelling, that story became more than true—it gave continuity to life, underscoring how the past is remembered, the present felt, and the future anticipated. My mother told it with quiet reverence. My grandfather had been a leftist writer, among the first to embrace modernity in the 1950s. He supported the communist project in its early promise, reforms, and a vision for a better future. But after the bloody coup and Hafizullah Amin ’s rise, that promise curdled. Friends disappeared. Dissent became dangerous. He had written against the regime, and one day, word came. His name was on Amin’s list. In the weeks that followed, each time a car edged too close to their gate, my grandfather retreated into his study, crouching beneath the desk, lantern in hand. Descriptions of the heavy velvet curtain and the earthy smell gave my mother’s story an almost magical aura. That image, though never photographed, imprinted itself on me. A dark room. A burning light. The slow terror of footsteps. I do not know if it happened exactly that way. But memory in Afghanistan is not evidence. It is transmission. In Afghanistan, each poet gives his pain to the land, or lets the land’s pain speak through him. My grandfather was one of them. He wrote during the early days of Afghanistan’s turbulent history, a time when fear came not just from war, but from the silence it demanded. Years later, when he was already living in exile in Denmark, his words still echoed in Kandahar. My mother remembered them. At one point in the story, my mother liked slowing down, and from those lived experiences that she carried in memory alone, she would emerge laughing and crying with the verses from my grandfather’s most well-known poem: Caged in the dark night I was, A victim of the chains pulled tight, I was. Hands bound, lips sewn, in waves of torture, Stuck in a hellish oven of harassment and abuse. Cold sighs rose, defiant, to the skies; My patience is like a shooting star towards the galaxy. My grief went violent, beyond what my worn heart could endure. In my chest, rebellious dreams could no longer fit, Wild cries like groans set off. That poem, she’d say, was written in the days when Hafizullah Amin Taraki's communist party had taken control—a time of extreme fear. At the time, people were being whisked away from classrooms, in the middle of a lecture. One of my mother’s teachers was thrown from a helicopter, a warning to anyone with a mind too sharp, a voice too loud. Those who remained were not in chains, but restrained by fear. The regime went after the intellectuals, the mullahs, anyone they thought could become a rallying point, a nucleus around which resistance might form. And then a glimmer of hope, or so they thought, and my grandfather continued his poem. I don’t know whether someone heard my secret plea, Or judged my groans as immodest cries of ungratefulness. Clamor rose on the podium of the universe. An adventure rose to heaven’s home; With red monsters, black too, that flowed. At every step they roared with anger. I knew not then who stepped near– To rescue me, or strike me with pretenses of giving Everyone that came crushed the bones of my helpless body, But at the same time, they broke the chains that snaked around me. And so, at the breaking of the chains, I laugh, But for each bone breaking, I cry. The Soviets invaded , and they began breaking old chains, but they also broke bones. My grandfather went on breathing, but in the mirror of history the jail cell he had marginally avoided never closed. It passed down, unlatched, via my aunts, my older siblings, and now it takes the shape of my silence, a silence that pulses like our family’s death drive. After my grandfather, no one believed in idealism. In Afghanistan, survival builds its house atop the buried bones of idealism. Literally. I used to think that was just a metaphor, until I read an old article from 1997. A boy named Faizdeen, only 14, had said: “I used to dig for scrap iron…but the Taliban banned us from exporting it to Pakistan when they captured Kabul. So now I dig for bones. There is no other work, and we need the money for food.” My father used to joke with my grandmother, nudging her to eat more yogurt and milk, “If you don’t keep your bones strong, they won’t sell well later.” I always thought he was being dark for the sake of humor. Only now do I realize his joke had roots. The absurdity was just a disguise. He wasn’t joking. He was remembering—the past bleeding into the present through the cracks in his humor. We inherit many things: land, names, trauma. But I also inherited my grandfather’s dreams. Whatever intellect I carry, it’s a small fire lit by the same lantern he read by. In 2007, I saw my grandfather for the first time in a coffin. But I don’t remember mourning his death; I remember pride. He was given a national burial. The governor came. Many of Afghanistan’s renowned poets gathered to recite verses. His funeral was not a mourning of his death but a celebration of his voice. They said he was a man a hundred years ahead of his time, a father who educated every one of his daughters. They told stories of his poverty, how he couldn’t afford even a single sheet of clean white paper. How he walked the streets and upon finding a blank piece in the trash he picked it up and wrote on it. These stories brought him back to life, each retelling pulling him from the past, giving him breath and flesh. But even then, no one spoke of him in his entirety. His idealism was buried with him for the family's safety. And after him, idealism no longer lived with my family. The war stripped it away, leaving only the habits of survival. In rebelling, I search for his image. I was forced to quit school at eleven, not that I ever loved it, but by fourteen I began to question everything. Life. War. The meaning of it all. Fear was everywhere, seeping through the walls, hovering over us every night. Airstrikes, suicide bombings, the air and land on fire. I did feel in my own way: Caged in the dark night I was . And my chains were not that of being just Afghan but of a woman too. And then I thought of my grandfather, how he was self-taught, how he created a path for himself. Suddenly, that became a path for me too. This paid off. I became a full-time self-taught student, and in search for the meaning of life, in 2016, I went on to study physics at Arizona State University, eventually becoming a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. I had made a promise to myself that leaving Afghanistan would mark the end of that chapter. The war and its memories would dissolve with distance. War had never made sense to me; it was arbitrary, brutal, and incoherent. The clean logic of math and science felt appealing precisely because I could grasp it. I believed that science would help me build a new symbolic order , what Lacan might call the framework through which meaning is stabilized. A clean logic to overwrite the chaos. Even as I dove into quantum theory, however, Afghanistan kept rippling back, like an unresolved equation buried in the wavefunction. At the lunch table among friends and colleagues, my jokes were always about war—the trademark Afghan dark humor that circles back on itself, where the punchline is a silence that swallows the room. I would laugh alone. While others laughed at their own easy jokes, I didn’t. Easy laughter didn’t come very easily to me. While others read fantasy to escape reality, I, driven by a neurotic curiosity, reached for Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Freud—to probe it. Surprisingly, the time away from Afghanistan didn’t take Afghanistan away from me. Instead, it made me see my country in everything I read. Partly, because in the US, Afghanistan is spoken about through the vocabulary of world power, war, strategy, collapse, and rarely, if ever, through the intimate lens of the human. I didn’t notice it at first, but the more I talked to people, the more I began to feel something unsettling inside me. Literature shaped by exile, grief, and repression mirrored a part of me that was still hovering outside language, unclaimed by words. The Afghan experience, I realized, was not just history, it was psychic. Complex, fractured, buried. In Afghanistan, I never had to ask what it meant to be Afghan. The question itself didn’t arise. But in the US, I found myself caught in a mirror stage of sorts, not of my own making, but shaped by how Afghanistan was talked about all around me. I was reacting to a reflection I didn’t recognize. And in that reaction, I began to split. A part of me wanted to disappear. Another part wanted to speak, not about policy, but about how Afghanistan felt . How it smelled at dawn after the Azan was called, when my mother added cardamom to the morning tea and my brother brought fresh doodi bread from the bakery. How it danced in the upbeat songs my father played. How it mourned in my grandfather’s poetry. How it lived in a child’s fear. How it died in a suicide bomb. And how, even then, when a bomb exploded nearby, Afghans knew to open the glass windows quickly -- so the second blast, which often came, wouldn’t shatter them over us. I began to see Afghanistan not as a place left behind, but as something returning, over and over. It returns in dreams, in the pauses between sentences. My memories speak Pashto, but my thoughts answer in English. In this process, I feel that my spoken English is shaped in such a way that lived experience arrives uncannily, half-recognizable, crossing a border just to reach me. So, I went deeper in search for voices that echoed the Afghan experience, voices shaped by rupture that spoke in fear, in silences that felt familiar. I became obsessively drawn to narratives haunted by erasure, burial, and longing—that reflected the essential and the unsayable parts of Afghanistan, helping me understand the genre-defying tragedy of a people compelled to sell the remains of humans just to survive. There is a tragedy and a contradiction in being Afghan: despite having so much history, culture, pride and poetry, our immediate past opens the door to an incomprehensible reality, where some must sell the bones of the dead just to buy bread. It’s a truth hard to hold, an irreconcilable dialectical condition. And sometimes I wonder, what if those bones belonged to the very intellectuals who once dreamed of a better future? Perhaps they were the remains of those killed by the communists for their idealism, or later by the mujahideen for the same reason. In 2019, I read Miłosz’s The Captive Mind . He wrote it in postwar Paris, after defecting from Communist Poland. The book felt so connected to my life—its psychic resonances were so familiar—I wondered if it had been written by an Afghan. Suddenly, I realized something that had never found its signifier: in Afghanistan, our minds were also captive. From the communist regime to the post-2001 government, fear didn’t disappear, it adapted. The instructions were the same, only told by new faces: don’t speak of politics, don’t say what your family thinks, don’t mention the Taliban on the phone, or the Americans either. When our experiences are not mirrored back, when no one names them, when no one writes them down, they begin to dissolve and disappear. We start to question not just the experience, but in time, we begin to distrust our own interiority. As if the silence around us means the feeling itself is wrong. Reading that book, among many, I felt the Afghan experience was not just real but legible. Not just tragic but thinkable. Afghanistan could be shown as it lives in the ruined houses of Afghan hearts, with all its beauty and contradictions. Miłosz describes the Murti-Bing pill, a tranquilizer of the mind, swallowed for peace with contradiction. He wrote of people who surrendered to ideology to survive. I recognized that surrender. My own grandfather’s writings sit in a Moscow basement, unpublished. My family warns me not to bring attention to them. “Do you want the Taliban to destroy his grave?” they ask. Against the silence, I think of my grandfather who said, “An Afghan writer shouldn’t look for applause. He must write his books, buy his own books, read his own books.” My grandfather chose to write regardless of whether he would be read or not. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Latifa Zafar Attaii, Untitled (2016). Thread on digital print. When I left for the United States in 2016, I thought I had made my choice to live for ideas. But history is not a linear march towards freedom. One's choices are never final, they are tested at every twist and turn. In 2025, at Tufts, where I worked as a researcher, a student was taken in for writing just an op-ed for Palestine. I have this habit when I become overwhelmed, when emotions press too hard against the inside of my chest: I write poems. That night, as I felt the space around my own mind begin to enclose, I wrote one—raw and reactive. I hovered over the “publish” button on Substack, to click or not click. I found myself navigating not survival, but a negotiation between idealism and silence, safety and speech. Not only did I not publish the poem, but instead I deleted my X/Twitter and Instagram accounts because I didn’t want any likes, shares, or posts to be used in any way. And in that moment, I turned away from the person I had worked hard to become. The old instincts returned. I started watching what I said again. At home, we were taught to stay quiet. Never talk about politics. Never say what your family thinks. Live like two people, one inside the home, another outside it. There’s a name for that kind of split. In The Captive Mind , Czesław Miłosz calls it ketman : a practiced split between thought and speech that fractures the self, creating a kind of psychological contradictory duality. Under ketman , one performs the lie of the state for so long that they lose touch with their own inner truth. What starts as concealment from others becomes concealment from the self. Over time, even the desire to resist dies. Whenever we went to the house we learnt the Quran in, or when friends visited, my mother would lean in close, her voice a hush, “Remember, even the walls have ears. Not everything needs to be said.” Back in Afghanistan, fear had a shape: the sound of a suicide bomber, the rumble of a tank passing, the sudden shadow of a plane above, the silence after a kidnapping. Here in the United States, it’s different but no less present. It's a quiet kind of fear you have to learn all over again, the kind that follows you into your inbox, your social feed, your decision to speak or not. “Does the past have an expiration date…?” Georgi Gospodinov asks through a character in Time Shelter. For Afghans, it doesn’t. The past doesn't reverberate through memory and inherited fear, but comes alive in the headlines. In Pakistan, Afghan families who have lived for decades are being deported overnight. In the US, too, there's talk that Afghans under temporary protected status may soon be deported. Anger stirs inside me. Afghans are constantly at the mercy of the world. No matter the country, no matter the context, we are always waiting, waiting to be allowed to stay, to speak, to live. I hate this. I hate seeing my people cast again and again as the world’s burden. I want to write about this, about how these two acts of deportation, one in Pakistan, the other in the US, are not separate, but part of the same story. Take my cousin, for example. She came to the US on a P1 visa after the fall of Kabul in 2021, but now she’s stuck in legal limbo, uncertain if she’ll be allowed to stay. Her own family, who fled to Pakistan during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, have lived there ever since, still undocumented, still afraid. When she calls me, she tells me she can’t even talk about her situation. “How can I add to their worry,” she says, “when they’re barely holding on themselves?' To this eerie synchronicity in the news, with two borders and one destination, Afghanistan, I want to add a truth. The continuity is not just between the displaced, but in the war itself. One refugee was driven out by the conflict that began in the 1970s. The other fled the aftermath of the US withdrawal in 2021 . But these are not separate wars. They are different phases of the same long undoing. The world, including both the U.S. and Pakistan, helped train, fund, and arm the mujahideen. The fire they lit has never gone out. Its shape has changed, but it continues to burn through Afghan lives. One of the most heartbreaking reels I saw was of an Afghan man in Pakistan. His shop was being looted, crates overturned, and a box of oranges was thrown to the ground. He ran helplessly toward it, trying to salvage what he could. I watched it and cried. Watching his face once again broke something inside me—a psychic déjà vu. I saw my parents’ past. And suddenly, memories of family came back, memories I thought I had learned to forget. One of the stories my father often tells from the time of the Civil War is of a room full of large bags of rice. In Afghanistan, they say old rice tastes better. Leaving Kabul while rockets were falling, on an empty stomach, perhaps that’s one of the reasons that memory has stayed so vividly alive to this day. One thing this perpetual war in Afghanistan has done well is strip people of their humanity, reducing their unique stories to mere headlines of victimhood. I want to tell the stories that don’t make it into the headlines, the small ones, the family ones, the ones that carry the weight of a war without saying it outright. I open a draft. I start to write about the US betrayal of Afghanistan, the foreign policies that spiraled everything that came after the Cold War. But then I stop. I read it over, hesitate, and delete it. It’s unsettling how the same instinct that made my grandfather crouch under his desk with a lantern now lives in me—surfacing as I quietly prepare to pack my bags, without knowing why. I find myself looking over the books I’ve collected. Physics textbooks, poetry, novels, and essays. Some from home, some bought here. I always thought I would build a library. It felt like a small claim on a life shaped by ideas. Now I’m giving many of them away. Not because I want to, but because something in me is telling me to prepare. It’s a quiet instinct, like the ones my family lived by for decades. You don’t wait to be told. You leave before you’re asked to. You stay quiet even before the silence is forced on you. No one has threatened me. Nothing has happened. But still I hesitate. I start writing and then stop. I delete what I mean to say. I try to explain this to myself, maybe it’s fear, maybe caution, or maybe it’s secondhand, something I inherited in those moments when voices lowered during storytelling or before we left the house, receiving instructions on what to say and what not to say. A habit passed down that became part of everyday living. A silence practiced long before it was needed. But again, as I speak to my family, it feels absurd to them. “Your grandfather was much higher than just intellect,” they say. “He didn’t publish, so you can keep quiet too.” My grandfather didn’t publish because our family was still living in Kandahar. But now we’re out. He, however, still remains in Kandahar. I'm concerned about free speech. I hate how war has reduced our ambitions to mere survival. As long as no bombs are raining down, you’re supposed to be fine. Growing up and searching for Afghan intellectuals in the books I read, I always hated that I couldn’t find them in English, in dialogue with the world. Looking back, I realize it could never have been possible—for in a country constantly at war, neither poetry nor intellect could flourish, and hope could not survive. Survival has always been more important than idealism, and you can’t live for idealism without putting your skin in the game. But survival made sense to those who came before me. Their silence kept them alive. Can I live differently? Is it possible? Every time I see an Afghan face, it is waiting at a checkpoint, a consulate, or a deportation line. But for every sad Afghan story, there’s a punchline. In my family, even the darkest recollection ended with something absurd—a sort of internal smuggler’s trade—emotion disguised in irony so the censors of sanity would let it pass, and in return, a small, uncanny, crooked laugh meant to keep the world from collapsing. Among us Afghans there is an almost tacit agreement: to live against despair, one has to laugh louder than his wounds. Humor becomes a stubborn way to insist on life’s beauty. But this isn’t your usual “hahaha” humor. It’s the kind that goes deeper than the suffering. A kind of philosophy that doesn’t deny pain, but rather makes space for it. I do this in my own way. In my stand-up comedy class, which I take just for fun , I end with the punchline: In one dream, I’m running from a bomb, afraid of being sent to heaven. In another, I’m running from ICE, afraid of being sent to the Hindu Kush mountains. My trauma has grown legs. And it keeps running. Watch out, it might kick you. ∎ Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 SOLA MAHFOUZ is an Afghan writer living in Boston, drawn to the voice beneath the fractures of existence. A voracious reader of global voices that reflect the multiplicity of human experience, she writes to give shape to what resists expression -- what language forgets but the soul remembers. She is currently working on her first historical novel set in Afghanistan. LATIFA ZAFAR ATTAII is a visual artist whose work examines themes of identity, migration, and memory. Her work has been exhibited in China, Switzerland, the UAE, Italy, Iran, and across South Asia. Her practice has been recognized with the Prince Claus Seed Award 2024, and she has been nominated for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, the Cultures of Resistance Award, and the Second Prize in the Allegro Art Prize. Raised as a refugee in Quetta, Attaii currently lives and works in Tehran. Essay Kandahar Afghanistan Storytelling Family Kabul Communist Era Hafizullah Amin Taraki's Communist Party Discourses of War War War on Terror Colonialism US Imperialism Imperialism Decolonization Colonial Oppression Colonization Memory Dossiers of memory Islam United States Pakistan Pashto Absurdity Dehumanization Human Rights Violations US withdrawal 2021 Mujahideen Literary Literary Activism Literature & Liberation Afghan literature US Invasion of Afghanistan Invasion Poetry Trauma Exile Dark Humor Language War Crimes Theater of War Ketman Lacan Czesław Miłosz Diaspora Idealism Afghan Diaspora Education Murti-Bing Tranquilizer Taliban Georgi Gospodinov ICE Stand-Up Comedy Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. Latifa Zafar Attaii, Self-Portrait (2016), digital print. Artist Kandahar Sola Mahfouz 26 Jun 2025 th · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION The Captive Mind Our two-story house in Kandahar stood inside a compound with a garden of colors where roses of many kinds lived, competing in fragrance with the chambeli , the jasmine plant. On summer nights, the garden also brimmed with the laughter of us, the children, on bicycles, playing hide and seek beneath the stars. When winter came, the rhythm shifted. Evenings began after supper, the electricity generator shut off and the lantern lit for warmth and light. The flickering flame would stretch the shadow of the past across the wall of the present, as my siblings and I gathered by the adults. The stories shared around that lantern were not fairy tales, but inheritance. Adults spoke of many things. How someone escaped a raid. How another someone never came back. How the sound of a car slowing outside meant the worst—being killed. For them, perhaps, it was their way of reckoning, with a war they had carried into peace, and with a peace still trembling on the edge of war. I had been listening to these stories since turning six, or maybe even earlier. In 2002, however, when Afghanistan was promised a new beginning, only to end up in rubble, I began listening more closely. Something in me had opened—the way it does when your own life begins to echo the stories you've always heard. The American invasion in 2001 became my reference point for war’s meaning. Sometimes it began with something small, a radio playing an old song, or someone quietly saying how lucky we were to have this house. From there, the memories would awaken: my grandmother’s story passed to my father, his to my mother, and then to my siblings. How they had escaped from Kabul while the rockets were falling. How they had not known if we would survive the road. How a family we would have never met took us in and gave us warm food. We would watch our elders’s faces in the lantern light, tensing as the stories reached that sharp point of unknowing. Our own bodies would stiffen with theirs; vessels holding fear. But then, as their faces would soften towards the end—the ending where they didn’t die—we would relax too, sometimes getting on our knees as if leaning into relief. We clung to the parts where our families had made it through. It was because of these moments that we wanted to hear those stories again and again. Sometimes, one of us would interrupt. “Tell the funny part,” we’d say, already giggling. The one about Ana Bibi. My grandmother, asking, “ Is this rocket coming from the right side or the wrong side? ” This would make everyone laugh. Among the many stories one returned often, even more so after my grandfather died in 2007, when I was ten. In its telling and retelling, that story became more than true—it gave continuity to life, underscoring how the past is remembered, the present felt, and the future anticipated. My mother told it with quiet reverence. My grandfather had been a leftist writer, among the first to embrace modernity in the 1950s. He supported the communist project in its early promise, reforms, and a vision for a better future. But after the bloody coup and Hafizullah Amin ’s rise, that promise curdled. Friends disappeared. Dissent became dangerous. He had written against the regime, and one day, word came. His name was on Amin’s list. In the weeks that followed, each time a car edged too close to their gate, my grandfather retreated into his study, crouching beneath the desk, lantern in hand. Descriptions of the heavy velvet curtain and the earthy smell gave my mother’s story an almost magical aura. That image, though never photographed, imprinted itself on me. A dark room. A burning light. The slow terror of footsteps. I do not know if it happened exactly that way. But memory in Afghanistan is not evidence. It is transmission. In Afghanistan, each poet gives his pain to the land, or lets the land’s pain speak through him. My grandfather was one of them. He wrote during the early days of Afghanistan’s turbulent history, a time when fear came not just from war, but from the silence it demanded. Years later, when he was already living in exile in Denmark, his words still echoed in Kandahar. My mother remembered them. At one point in the story, my mother liked slowing down, and from those lived experiences that she carried in memory alone, she would emerge laughing and crying with the verses from my grandfather’s most well-known poem: Caged in the dark night I was, A victim of the chains pulled tight, I was. Hands bound, lips sewn, in waves of torture, Stuck in a hellish oven of harassment and abuse. Cold sighs rose, defiant, to the skies; My patience is like a shooting star towards the galaxy. My grief went violent, beyond what my worn heart could endure. In my chest, rebellious dreams could no longer fit, Wild cries like groans set off. That poem, she’d say, was written in the days when Hafizullah Amin Taraki's communist party had taken control—a time of extreme fear. At the time, people were being whisked away from classrooms, in the middle of a lecture. One of my mother’s teachers was thrown from a helicopter, a warning to anyone with a mind too sharp, a voice too loud. Those who remained were not in chains, but restrained by fear. The regime went after the intellectuals, the mullahs, anyone they thought could become a rallying point, a nucleus around which resistance might form. And then a glimmer of hope, or so they thought, and my grandfather continued his poem. I don’t know whether someone heard my secret plea, Or judged my groans as immodest cries of ungratefulness. Clamor rose on the podium of the universe. An adventure rose to heaven’s home; With red monsters, black too, that flowed. At every step they roared with anger. I knew not then who stepped near– To rescue me, or strike me with pretenses of giving Everyone that came crushed the bones of my helpless body, But at the same time, they broke the chains that snaked around me. And so, at the breaking of the chains, I laugh, But for each bone breaking, I cry. The Soviets invaded , and they began breaking old chains, but they also broke bones. My grandfather went on breathing, but in the mirror of history the jail cell he had marginally avoided never closed. It passed down, unlatched, via my aunts, my older siblings, and now it takes the shape of my silence, a silence that pulses like our family’s death drive. After my grandfather, no one believed in idealism. In Afghanistan, survival builds its house atop the buried bones of idealism. Literally. I used to think that was just a metaphor, until I read an old article from 1997. A boy named Faizdeen, only 14, had said: “I used to dig for scrap iron…but the Taliban banned us from exporting it to Pakistan when they captured Kabul. So now I dig for bones. There is no other work, and we need the money for food.” My father used to joke with my grandmother, nudging her to eat more yogurt and milk, “If you don’t keep your bones strong, they won’t sell well later.” I always thought he was being dark for the sake of humor. Only now do I realize his joke had roots. The absurdity was just a disguise. He wasn’t joking. He was remembering—the past bleeding into the present through the cracks in his humor. We inherit many things: land, names, trauma. But I also inherited my grandfather’s dreams. Whatever intellect I carry, it’s a small fire lit by the same lantern he read by. In 2007, I saw my grandfather for the first time in a coffin. But I don’t remember mourning his death; I remember pride. He was given a national burial. The governor came. Many of Afghanistan’s renowned poets gathered to recite verses. His funeral was not a mourning of his death but a celebration of his voice. They said he was a man a hundred years ahead of his time, a father who educated every one of his daughters. They told stories of his poverty, how he couldn’t afford even a single sheet of clean white paper. How he walked the streets and upon finding a blank piece in the trash he picked it up and wrote on it. These stories brought him back to life, each retelling pulling him from the past, giving him breath and flesh. But even then, no one spoke of him in his entirety. His idealism was buried with him for the family's safety. And after him, idealism no longer lived with my family. The war stripped it away, leaving only the habits of survival. In rebelling, I search for his image. I was forced to quit school at eleven, not that I ever loved it, but by fourteen I began to question everything. Life. War. The meaning of it all. Fear was everywhere, seeping through the walls, hovering over us every night. Airstrikes, suicide bombings, the air and land on fire. I did feel in my own way: Caged in the dark night I was . And my chains were not that of being just Afghan but of a woman too. And then I thought of my grandfather, how he was self-taught, how he created a path for himself. Suddenly, that became a path for me too. This paid off. I became a full-time self-taught student, and in search for the meaning of life, in 2016, I went on to study physics at Arizona State University, eventually becoming a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. I had made a promise to myself that leaving Afghanistan would mark the end of that chapter. The war and its memories would dissolve with distance. War had never made sense to me; it was arbitrary, brutal, and incoherent. The clean logic of math and science felt appealing precisely because I could grasp it. I believed that science would help me build a new symbolic order , what Lacan might call the framework through which meaning is stabilized. A clean logic to overwrite the chaos. Even as I dove into quantum theory, however, Afghanistan kept rippling back, like an unresolved equation buried in the wavefunction. At the lunch table among friends and colleagues, my jokes were always about war—the trademark Afghan dark humor that circles back on itself, where the punchline is a silence that swallows the room. I would laugh alone. While others laughed at their own easy jokes, I didn’t. Easy laughter didn’t come very easily to me. While others read fantasy to escape reality, I, driven by a neurotic curiosity, reached for Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Freud—to probe it. Surprisingly, the time away from Afghanistan didn’t take Afghanistan away from me. Instead, it made me see my country in everything I read. Partly, because in the US, Afghanistan is spoken about through the vocabulary of world power, war, strategy, collapse, and rarely, if ever, through the intimate lens of the human. I didn’t notice it at first, but the more I talked to people, the more I began to feel something unsettling inside me. Literature shaped by exile, grief, and repression mirrored a part of me that was still hovering outside language, unclaimed by words. The Afghan experience, I realized, was not just history, it was psychic. Complex, fractured, buried. In Afghanistan, I never had to ask what it meant to be Afghan. The question itself didn’t arise. But in the US, I found myself caught in a mirror stage of sorts, not of my own making, but shaped by how Afghanistan was talked about all around me. I was reacting to a reflection I didn’t recognize. And in that reaction, I began to split. A part of me wanted to disappear. Another part wanted to speak, not about policy, but about how Afghanistan felt . How it smelled at dawn after the Azan was called, when my mother added cardamom to the morning tea and my brother brought fresh doodi bread from the bakery. How it danced in the upbeat songs my father played. How it mourned in my grandfather’s poetry. How it lived in a child’s fear. How it died in a suicide bomb. And how, even then, when a bomb exploded nearby, Afghans knew to open the glass windows quickly -- so the second blast, which often came, wouldn’t shatter them over us. I began to see Afghanistan not as a place left behind, but as something returning, over and over. It returns in dreams, in the pauses between sentences. My memories speak Pashto, but my thoughts answer in English. In this process, I feel that my spoken English is shaped in such a way that lived experience arrives uncannily, half-recognizable, crossing a border just to reach me. So, I went deeper in search for voices that echoed the Afghan experience, voices shaped by rupture that spoke in fear, in silences that felt familiar. I became obsessively drawn to narratives haunted by erasure, burial, and longing—that reflected the essential and the unsayable parts of Afghanistan, helping me understand the genre-defying tragedy of a people compelled to sell the remains of humans just to survive. There is a tragedy and a contradiction in being Afghan: despite having so much history, culture, pride and poetry, our immediate past opens the door to an incomprehensible reality, where some must sell the bones of the dead just to buy bread. It’s a truth hard to hold, an irreconcilable dialectical condition. And sometimes I wonder, what if those bones belonged to the very intellectuals who once dreamed of a better future? Perhaps they were the remains of those killed by the communists for their idealism, or later by the mujahideen for the same reason. In 2019, I read Miłosz’s The Captive Mind . He wrote it in postwar Paris, after defecting from Communist Poland. The book felt so connected to my life—its psychic resonances were so familiar—I wondered if it had been written by an Afghan. Suddenly, I realized something that had never found its signifier: in Afghanistan, our minds were also captive. From the communist regime to the post-2001 government, fear didn’t disappear, it adapted. The instructions were the same, only told by new faces: don’t speak of politics, don’t say what your family thinks, don’t mention the Taliban on the phone, or the Americans either. When our experiences are not mirrored back, when no one names them, when no one writes them down, they begin to dissolve and disappear. We start to question not just the experience, but in time, we begin to distrust our own interiority. As if the silence around us means the feeling itself is wrong. Reading that book, among many, I felt the Afghan experience was not just real but legible. Not just tragic but thinkable. Afghanistan could be shown as it lives in the ruined houses of Afghan hearts, with all its beauty and contradictions. Miłosz describes the Murti-Bing pill, a tranquilizer of the mind, swallowed for peace with contradiction. He wrote of people who surrendered to ideology to survive. I recognized that surrender. My own grandfather’s writings sit in a Moscow basement, unpublished. My family warns me not to bring attention to them. “Do you want the Taliban to destroy his grave?” they ask. Against the silence, I think of my grandfather who said, “An Afghan writer shouldn’t look for applause. He must write his books, buy his own books, read his own books.” My grandfather chose to write regardless of whether he would be read or not. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Latifa Zafar Attaii, Untitled (2016). Thread on digital print. When I left for the United States in 2016, I thought I had made my choice to live for ideas. But history is not a linear march towards freedom. One's choices are never final, they are tested at every twist and turn. In 2025, at Tufts, where I worked as a researcher, a student was taken in for writing just an op-ed for Palestine. I have this habit when I become overwhelmed, when emotions press too hard against the inside of my chest: I write poems. That night, as I felt the space around my own mind begin to enclose, I wrote one—raw and reactive. I hovered over the “publish” button on Substack, to click or not click. I found myself navigating not survival, but a negotiation between idealism and silence, safety and speech. Not only did I not publish the poem, but instead I deleted my X/Twitter and Instagram accounts because I didn’t want any likes, shares, or posts to be used in any way. And in that moment, I turned away from the person I had worked hard to become. The old instincts returned. I started watching what I said again. At home, we were taught to stay quiet. Never talk about politics. Never say what your family thinks. Live like two people, one inside the home, another outside it. There’s a name for that kind of split. In The Captive Mind , Czesław Miłosz calls it ketman : a practiced split between thought and speech that fractures the self, creating a kind of psychological contradictory duality. Under ketman , one performs the lie of the state for so long that they lose touch with their own inner truth. What starts as concealment from others becomes concealment from the self. Over time, even the desire to resist dies. Whenever we went to the house we learnt the Quran in, or when friends visited, my mother would lean in close, her voice a hush, “Remember, even the walls have ears. Not everything needs to be said.” Back in Afghanistan, fear had a shape: the sound of a suicide bomber, the rumble of a tank passing, the sudden shadow of a plane above, the silence after a kidnapping. Here in the United States, it’s different but no less present. It's a quiet kind of fear you have to learn all over again, the kind that follows you into your inbox, your social feed, your decision to speak or not. “Does the past have an expiration date…?” Georgi Gospodinov asks through a character in Time Shelter. For Afghans, it doesn’t. The past doesn't reverberate through memory and inherited fear, but comes alive in the headlines. In Pakistan, Afghan families who have lived for decades are being deported overnight. In the US, too, there's talk that Afghans under temporary protected status may soon be deported. Anger stirs inside me. Afghans are constantly at the mercy of the world. No matter the country, no matter the context, we are always waiting, waiting to be allowed to stay, to speak, to live. I hate this. I hate seeing my people cast again and again as the world’s burden. I want to write about this, about how these two acts of deportation, one in Pakistan, the other in the US, are not separate, but part of the same story. Take my cousin, for example. She came to the US on a P1 visa after the fall of Kabul in 2021, but now she’s stuck in legal limbo, uncertain if she’ll be allowed to stay. Her own family, who fled to Pakistan during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, have lived there ever since, still undocumented, still afraid. When she calls me, she tells me she can’t even talk about her situation. “How can I add to their worry,” she says, “when they’re barely holding on themselves?' To this eerie synchronicity in the news, with two borders and one destination, Afghanistan, I want to add a truth. The continuity is not just between the displaced, but in the war itself. One refugee was driven out by the conflict that began in the 1970s. The other fled the aftermath of the US withdrawal in 2021 . But these are not separate wars. They are different phases of the same long undoing. The world, including both the U.S. and Pakistan, helped train, fund, and arm the mujahideen. The fire they lit has never gone out. Its shape has changed, but it continues to burn through Afghan lives. One of the most heartbreaking reels I saw was of an Afghan man in Pakistan. His shop was being looted, crates overturned, and a box of oranges was thrown to the ground. He ran helplessly toward it, trying to salvage what he could. I watched it and cried. Watching his face once again broke something inside me—a psychic déjà vu. I saw my parents’ past. And suddenly, memories of family came back, memories I thought I had learned to forget. One of the stories my father often tells from the time of the Civil War is of a room full of large bags of rice. In Afghanistan, they say old rice tastes better. Leaving Kabul while rockets were falling, on an empty stomach, perhaps that’s one of the reasons that memory has stayed so vividly alive to this day. One thing this perpetual war in Afghanistan has done well is strip people of their humanity, reducing their unique stories to mere headlines of victimhood. I want to tell the stories that don’t make it into the headlines, the small ones, the family ones, the ones that carry the weight of a war without saying it outright. I open a draft. I start to write about the US betrayal of Afghanistan, the foreign policies that spiraled everything that came after the Cold War. But then I stop. I read it over, hesitate, and delete it. It’s unsettling how the same instinct that made my grandfather crouch under his desk with a lantern now lives in me—surfacing as I quietly prepare to pack my bags, without knowing why. I find myself looking over the books I’ve collected. Physics textbooks, poetry, novels, and essays. Some from home, some bought here. I always thought I would build a library. It felt like a small claim on a life shaped by ideas. Now I’m giving many of them away. Not because I want to, but because something in me is telling me to prepare. It’s a quiet instinct, like the ones my family lived by for decades. You don’t wait to be told. You leave before you’re asked to. You stay quiet even before the silence is forced on you. No one has threatened me. Nothing has happened. But still I hesitate. I start writing and then stop. I delete what I mean to say. I try to explain this to myself, maybe it’s fear, maybe caution, or maybe it’s secondhand, something I inherited in those moments when voices lowered during storytelling or before we left the house, receiving instructions on what to say and what not to say. A habit passed down that became part of everyday living. A silence practiced long before it was needed. But again, as I speak to my family, it feels absurd to them. “Your grandfather was much higher than just intellect,” they say. “He didn’t publish, so you can keep quiet too.” My grandfather didn’t publish because our family was still living in Kandahar. But now we’re out. He, however, still remains in Kandahar. I'm concerned about free speech. I hate how war has reduced our ambitions to mere survival. As long as no bombs are raining down, you’re supposed to be fine. Growing up and searching for Afghan intellectuals in the books I read, I always hated that I couldn’t find them in English, in dialogue with the world. Looking back, I realize it could never have been possible—for in a country constantly at war, neither poetry nor intellect could flourish, and hope could not survive. Survival has always been more important than idealism, and you can’t live for idealism without putting your skin in the game. But survival made sense to those who came before me. Their silence kept them alive. Can I live differently? Is it possible? Every time I see an Afghan face, it is waiting at a checkpoint, a consulate, or a deportation line. But for every sad Afghan story, there’s a punchline. In my family, even the darkest recollection ended with something absurd—a sort of internal smuggler’s trade—emotion disguised in irony so the censors of sanity would let it pass, and in return, a small, uncanny, crooked laugh meant to keep the world from collapsing. Among us Afghans there is an almost tacit agreement: to live against despair, one has to laugh louder than his wounds. Humor becomes a stubborn way to insist on life’s beauty. But this isn’t your usual “hahaha” humor. It’s the kind that goes deeper than the suffering. A kind of philosophy that doesn’t deny pain, but rather makes space for it. I do this in my own way. In my stand-up comedy class, which I take just for fun , I end with the punchline: In one dream, I’m running from a bomb, afraid of being sent to heaven. In another, I’m running from ICE, afraid of being sent to the Hindu Kush mountains. My trauma has grown legs. And it keeps running. Watch out, it might kick you. ∎ Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 SOLA MAHFOUZ is an Afghan writer living in Boston, drawn to the voice beneath the fractures of existence. A voracious reader of global voices that reflect the multiplicity of human experience, she writes to give shape to what resists expression -- what language forgets but the soul remembers. She is currently working on her first historical novel set in Afghanistan. LATIFA ZAFAR ATTAII is a visual artist whose work examines themes of identity, migration, and memory. Her work has been exhibited in China, Switzerland, the UAE, Italy, Iran, and across South Asia. Her practice has been recognized with the Prince Claus Seed Award 2024, and she has been nominated for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, the Cultures of Resistance Award, and the Second Prize in the Allegro Art Prize. Raised as a refugee in Quetta, Attaii currently lives and works in Tehran. Essay Kandahar Afghanistan Storytelling Family Kabul Communist Era Hafizullah Amin Taraki's Communist Party Discourses of War War War on Terror Colonialism US Imperialism Imperialism Decolonization Colonial Oppression Colonization Memory Dossiers of memory Islam United States Pakistan Pashto Absurdity Dehumanization Human Rights Violations US withdrawal 2021 Mujahideen Literary Literary Activism Literature & Liberation Afghan literature US Invasion of Afghanistan Invasion Poetry Trauma Exile Dark Humor Language War Crimes Theater of War Ketman Lacan Czesław Miłosz Diaspora Idealism Afghan Diaspora Education Murti-Bing Tranquilizer Taliban Georgi Gospodinov ICE Stand-Up Comedy Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

ARTIST Latifa Zafar Attaii LATIFA ZAFAR ATTAII is a visual artist whose work examines themes of identity, migration, and memory. Her work has been exhibited in China, Switzerland, the UAE, Italy, Iran, and across South Asia. Her practice has been recognized with the Prince Claus Seed Award 2024, and she has been nominated for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, the Cultures of Resistance Award, and the Second Prize in the Allegro Art Prize. Raised as a refugee in Quetta, Attaii currently lives and works in Tehran. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

POET, ARCHIVIST I Sayed I SAYED is a queer poet and community archivist at the Queer Archives of the Bengal Delta. POET, ARCHIVIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Rahul Tiwari RAHUL TIWARI grew up in Bhadwar, a small Bhojpuri speaking village in Bihar. Rahul received an MFA from Banaras Hindu University in 2018. Strongly informed by his place of origin, his work examines regional ecologies and folklore as they pertain to both societal and environmental wellbeing, justice, and change. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. THE VERTICAL Khabristan In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. Uzair Rizvi On the night of May 9, 2025, I closely tracked the unfolding hostilities between two nuclear-armed neighbours. I was watching a debate on the ongoing border situation on the Times Now Navbhara t news channel when the TV anchor, Sushant Sinha, abruptly paused the discussion to announce with glee that “Indian forces have entered Pakistan.” A panelist in the debate, a retired Indian Army veteran, trying to whip up jingoistic fervour, urged the Indian Navy to launch an attack on Karachi, declaring, “Set fire to Karachi Port and reduce the entire city to ashes.” While India and Pakistan’s firepower echoed on the borders, another battle was taking place inside the television studios. The latest surge in violence came in the aftermath of armed militants killing 26 tourists in the meadows of Indian Kashmir in April. India labelled these as terrorist attacks and blamed Pakistan, an allegation Pakistan denies. Following the attack on Indian tourists, some in the Indian TV media adopted an aggressive nationalistic stance . They further escalated tensions by calling for retaliation against Pakistan. Some newsrooms even openly endorsed military strikes against the country, which ignited a wave of hysteria in India. In the days that followed, I spent even more time on social media monitoring India TV broadcasts, noticing frequent bursts of misinformation. A casual scroll on X (formerly Twitter) revealed a post from an obscure account alleging that India had fired towards Pakistan. Within minutes, I searched the keywords #India and #Pakistan , and my timeline was flooded with similar claims. Indian mainstream media outlets like Aaj Tak and Times Now quickly picked up these unconfirmed posts, and within an hour, they snowballed into a full-blown conflict of speculations as early as day 1. As new events unfolded on the border on successive days, the media kept broadcasting unverified content. The onslaught of misinformation that followed was staggering: images of missile strikes, anti-air defence guns firing at targets, and armed forces downing each other's fighter jets. Editors and readers alike seemed unaware that the information was from a popular tactical shooter simulation video game, Arma 3 . Archival clips also resurfaced and were presented as proof of Pakistan’s devastation of the Indian military . Many of these images and videos were not of real-time offenses but came from the Russia–Ukraine war and Israeli air raids on Gaza. As the conflict escalated on days two and three, the deluge of misinformation went into full throttle. In these moments of crisis, both the Indian and Pakistani television media ditched accuracy altogether. They deceived audiences with unverified claims , manipulated visuals, and emotionally charged distortions of the ground reality. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. India Today reported a breaking news story that claimed that the Karachi port had been attacked by the Indian Navy; Zee News told viewers that the capital city of Islamabad had been captured. The latter even claimed that the Prime Minister of Pakistan had surrendered . ABP and NDTV news showed exclusive visuals of India’s air defence downing Pakistan drones, even though the original video was from Israel. Beyond mainstream English and Hindi media, regional TV channels also joined the bandwagon, amplifying the misinformation. The Karachi Port Trust posted on X, denying that an attack had occurred. However, some of the newspapers had already picked up and published this news in the following day's edition.A report from the Reuters Institute said that almost half of Indian online users receive their news from television, which makes these instances of misinformation especially egregious and impactful. One of the anchors at an Indian television station apologized for an “error”—but the apology came nearly 12 hours after millions of viewers in India had seen the segment. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the media passed off old visuals of fighter plane crashes as evidence of recent strikes on Indian fighter planes by Pakistan. Things escalated beyond newsrooms when an official X (Twitter) account of the Government of Pakistan posted footage from Arma 3 of what it claimed was real videotape of Pakistan downing India’s Rafale fighter jet. The rise of artificial intelligence played a significant role in augmenting the falsification of the conflict. AI-generated disinformation, including a deepfake video of a Pakistani military officer admitting that the country lost some of its fighter jets, was widely circulated in Indian media. Another AI-generated clip featured US President Donald Trump promising to “wipe out Pakistan,” giving fodder to Indians who believed that the United States would enter the war against Pakistan. Other AI-generated images claimed to show Pakistan’s defeat, while pictures of a Turkish pilot were falsely presented as proof that India had captured a Pakistani air force officer. A doctored version of a letter was also shared. It was falsely positioned to be from Pakistan’s government and claimed that Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, had died in judicial custody. TV media do not operate in a vacuum, these viral clips quickly find their way to social media platforms and instant messaging mobile applications like WhatsApp. Social media users on both sides consume and share misinformation at lightning speed, especially when it aligns with nationalistic sentiment. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. The World Economic Forum ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation, which is defined as incorrect information shared to purposefully obfuscate the truth. But, false reports surged in Pakistan during the crisis as well. A Pakistani politician praised —in Parliament—about the might of his country’s air force based on an AI-generated image of a British newspaper. Of course, most military crises lead to a surge in falsehoods and unverified claims. While the media is supposed to inform the public, during these delicate moments, much of the television coverage descends into a spectacle of exaggeration, rumor, and nationalistic war mongering . From fabricated airstrikes to altered footage , the focus shifts away from facts toward constructing a narrative of preemptive victory and toward manufacturing consent for potential war crimes. In today’s digital world, this misinformation is not limited to local viewers. It moves quickly, heightening tensions and fueling broader cycles of global propaganda. The long-term consequences of such wartime fallacies are deeply damaging. By amplifying rumors and unverified stories, both Indian and Pakistani television media deepened public divisions, pushing citizens into isolated, conflicting realities. A similar situation occurred in 2019, after the killing of Indian paramilitary soldiers in Kashmir. False and misleading images and videos circulating on social media were republished by mainstream media, fuelling the calls for military retaliation against rival Pakistan. This conduct erodes the ethos of journalism. Audiences start to see all media as biased or deceptive. For fact-checkers in the field, debunking these falsehoods is an enormous challenge, and by the time fact-checked content reaches the general public, truth has already become the ultimate casualty. ∎ On the night of May 9, 2025, I closely tracked the unfolding hostilities between two nuclear-armed neighbours. I was watching a debate on the ongoing border situation on the Times Now Navbhara t news channel when the TV anchor, Sushant Sinha, abruptly paused the discussion to announce with glee that “Indian forces have entered Pakistan.” A panelist in the debate, a retired Indian Army veteran, trying to whip up jingoistic fervour, urged the Indian Navy to launch an attack on Karachi, declaring, “Set fire to Karachi Port and reduce the entire city to ashes.” While India and Pakistan’s firepower echoed on the borders, another battle was taking place inside the television studios. The latest surge in violence came in the aftermath of armed militants killing 26 tourists in the meadows of Indian Kashmir in April. India labelled these as terrorist attacks and blamed Pakistan, an allegation Pakistan denies. Following the attack on Indian tourists, some in the Indian TV media adopted an aggressive nationalistic stance . They further escalated tensions by calling for retaliation against Pakistan. Some newsrooms even openly endorsed military strikes against the country, which ignited a wave of hysteria in India. In the days that followed, I spent even more time on social media monitoring India TV broadcasts, noticing frequent bursts of misinformation. A casual scroll on X (formerly Twitter) revealed a post from an obscure account alleging that India had fired towards Pakistan. Within minutes, I searched the keywords #India and #Pakistan, and my timeline was flooded with similar claims. Indian mainstream media outlets like Aaj Tak and Times Now quickly picked up these unconfirmed posts, and within an hour, they snowballed into a full-blown conflict of speculations as early as day 1. As new events unfolded on the border on successive days, the media kept broadcasting unverified content. The onslaught of misinformation that followed was staggering: images of missile strikes, anti-air defence guns firing at targets, and armed forces downing each other's fighter jets. Editors and readers alike seemed unaware that the information was from a popular tactical shooter simulation video game, Arma 3 . Archival clips also resurfaced and were presented as proof of Pakistan’s devastation of the Indian military . Many of these images and videos were not of real-time offenses but came from the Russia–Ukraine war and Israeli air raids on Gaza. As the conflict escalated on days two and three, the deluge of misinformation went into full throttle. In these moments of crisis, both the Indian and Pakistani television media ditched accuracy altogether. They deceived audiences with unverified claims , manipulated visuals, and emotionally charged distortions of the ground reality. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. India Today reported a breaking news story that claimed that the Karachi port had been attacked by the Indian Navy; Zee News told viewers that the capital city of Islamabad had been captured. The latter even claimed that the Prime Minister of Pakistan had surrendered . ABP and NDTV news showed exclusive visuals of India’s air defence downing Pakistan drones, even though the original video was from Israel. Beyond mainstream English and Hindi media, regional TV channels also joined the bandwagon, amplifying the misinformation. The Karachi Port Trust posted on X, denying that an attack had occurred. However, some of the newspapers had already picked up and published this news in the following day's edition.A report from the Reuters Institute said that almost half of Indian online users receive their news from television, which makes these instances of misinformation especially egregious and impactful. One of the anchors at an Indian television station apologized for an “error”—but the apology came nearly 12 hours after millions of viewers in India had seen the segment. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the media passed off old visuals of fighter plane crashes as evidence of recent strikes on Indian fighter planes by Pakistan. Things escalated beyond newsrooms when an official X (Twitter) account of the Government of Pakistan posted footage from Arma 3 of what it claimed was real videotape of Pakistan downing India’s Rafale fighter jet. The rise of artificial intelligence played a significant role in augmenting the falsification of the conflict. AI-generated disinformation, including a deepfake video of a Pakistani military officer admitting that the country lost some of its fighter jets, was widely circulated in Indian media. Another AI-generated clip featured US President Donald Trump promising to “wipe out Pakistan,” giving fodder to Indians who believed that the United States would enter the war against Pakistan. Other AI-generated images claimed to show Pakistan’s defeat, while pictures of a Turkish pilot were falsely presented as proof that India had captured a Pakistani air force officer. A doctored version of a letter was also shared. It was falsely positioned to be from Pakistan’s government and claimed that Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, had died in judicial custody. TV media do not operate in a vacuum, these viral clips quickly find their way to social media platforms and instant messaging mobile applications like WhatsApp. Social media users on both sides consume and share misinformation at lightning speed, especially when it aligns with nationalistic sentiment. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. The World Economic Forum ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation, which is defined as incorrect information shared to purposefully obfuscate the truth. But, false reports surged in Pakistan during the crisis as well. A Pakistani politician praised —in Parliament—about the might of his country’s air force based on an AI-generated image of a British newspaper. Of course, most military crises lead to a surge in falsehoods and unverified claims. While the media is supposed to inform the public, during these delicate moments, much of the television coverage descends into a spectacle of exaggeration, rumor, and nationalistic war mongering . From fabricated airstrikes to altered footage , the focus shifts away from facts toward constructing a narrative of preemptive victory and toward manufacturing consent for potential war crimes. In today’s digital world, this misinformation is not limited to local viewers. It moves quickly, heightening tensions and fueling broader cycles of global propaganda. The long-term consequences of such wartime fallacies are deeply damaging. By amplifying rumors and unverified stories, both Indian and Pakistani television media deepened public divisions, pushing citizens into isolated, conflicting realities. A similar situation occurred in 2019, after the killing of Indian paramilitary soldiers in Kashmir. False and misleading images and videos circulating on social media were republished by mainstream media, fuelling the calls for military retaliation against rival Pakistan. This conduct erodes the ethos of journalism. Audiences start to see all media as biased or deceptive. For fact-checkers in the field, debunking these falsehoods is an enormous challenge, and by the time fact-checked content reaches the general public, truth has already become the ultimate casualty. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms AUTHOR A Dhivehi Artists Showcase "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reportage Delhi India-Pakistan Border India Pakistan Conflict Pakistan-India Conflict Armed Conflict Media wars Disinformation Misinformation Virality Viral Clips Soft War Karachi Social Media Manufacturing Consent Nationalism TV Media Landscape State & Media Russia-Ukraine Conflict Gaza AI Artificial Intelligence Imran Khan State Power State Narratives Kashmir Deepfakes War Mongering Ethics of Journalism UZAIR RIZVI is a journalist, formerly with the Agence France Presse (AFP), who covers misinformation, elections, and technology. He is based in Delhi 16 Aug 2025 Reportage Delhi 16th Aug 2025 RAHUL TIWARI grew up in Bhadwar, a small Bhojpuri speaking village in Bihar. Rahul received an MFA from Banaras Hindu University in 2018. Strongly informed by his place of origin, his work examines regional ecologies and folklore as they pertain to both societal and environmental wellbeing, justice, and change. Expunging India's Diamond City Hanan Zaffar · Danish Pandit 2nd Apr How to Grow Flowers in a Bedroom Zara Chowdhary 19th Oct The Lakshadweep Gambit Rejimon Kuttapan 29th Mar Swat Youth Vanguards Manzoor Ali 24th Feb Chokepoint Manipur Makepeace Sitlhou 3rd Oct On That Note:

In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. THE VERTICAL Khabristan AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Reportage Delhi India-Pakistan Border India Pakistan Conflict Pakistan-India Conflict Armed Conflict Media wars Disinformation Misinformation Virality Viral Clips Soft War Karachi Social Media Manufacturing Consent Nationalism TV Media Landscape State & Media Russia-Ukraine Conflict Gaza AI Artificial Intelligence Imran Khan State Power State Narratives Kashmir Deepfakes War Mongering Ethics of Journalism Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Reportage Delhi 16th Aug 2025 On the night of May 9, 2025, I closely tracked the unfolding hostilities between two nuclear-armed neighbours. I was watching a debate on the ongoing border situation on the Times Now Navbhara t news channel when the TV anchor, Sushant Sinha, abruptly paused the discussion to announce with glee that “Indian forces have entered Pakistan.” A panelist in the debate, a retired Indian Army veteran, trying to whip up jingoistic fervour, urged the Indian Navy to launch an attack on Karachi, declaring, “Set fire to Karachi Port and reduce the entire city to ashes.” While India and Pakistan’s firepower echoed on the borders, another battle was taking place inside the television studios. The latest surge in violence came in the aftermath of armed militants killing 26 tourists in the meadows of Indian Kashmir in April. India labelled these as terrorist attacks and blamed Pakistan, an allegation Pakistan denies. Following the attack on Indian tourists, some in the Indian TV media adopted an aggressive nationalistic stance . They further escalated tensions by calling for retaliation against Pakistan. Some newsrooms even openly endorsed military strikes against the country, which ignited a wave of hysteria in India. In the days that followed, I spent even more time on social media monitoring India TV broadcasts, noticing frequent bursts of misinformation. A casual scroll on X (formerly Twitter) revealed a post from an obscure account alleging that India had fired towards Pakistan. Within minutes, I searched the keywords #India and #Pakistan, and my timeline was flooded with similar claims. Indian mainstream media outlets like Aaj Tak and Times Now quickly picked up these unconfirmed posts, and within an hour, they snowballed into a full-blown conflict of speculations as early as day 1. As new events unfolded on the border on successive days, the media kept broadcasting unverified content. The onslaught of misinformation that followed was staggering: images of missile strikes, anti-air defence guns firing at targets, and armed forces downing each other's fighter jets. Editors and readers alike seemed unaware that the information was from a popular tactical shooter simulation video game, Arma 3 . Archival clips also resurfaced and were presented as proof of Pakistan’s devastation of the Indian military . Many of these images and videos were not of real-time offenses but came from the Russia–Ukraine war and Israeli air raids on Gaza. As the conflict escalated on days two and three, the deluge of misinformation went into full throttle. In these moments of crisis, both the Indian and Pakistani television media ditched accuracy altogether. They deceived audiences with unverified claims , manipulated visuals, and emotionally charged distortions of the ground reality. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. India Today reported a breaking news story that claimed that the Karachi port had been attacked by the Indian Navy; Zee News told viewers that the capital city of Islamabad had been captured. The latter even claimed that the Prime Minister of Pakistan had surrendered . ABP and NDTV news showed exclusive visuals of India’s air defence downing Pakistan drones, even though the original video was from Israel. Beyond mainstream English and Hindi media, regional TV channels also joined the bandwagon, amplifying the misinformation. The Karachi Port Trust posted on X, denying that an attack had occurred. However, some of the newspapers had already picked up and published this news in the following day's edition.A report from the Reuters Institute said that almost half of Indian online users receive their news from television, which makes these instances of misinformation especially egregious and impactful. One of the anchors at an Indian television station apologized for an “error”—but the apology came nearly 12 hours after millions of viewers in India had seen the segment. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the media passed off old visuals of fighter plane crashes as evidence of recent strikes on Indian fighter planes by Pakistan. Things escalated beyond newsrooms when an official X (Twitter) account of the Government of Pakistan posted footage from Arma 3 of what it claimed was real videotape of Pakistan downing India’s Rafale fighter jet. The rise of artificial intelligence played a significant role in augmenting the falsification of the conflict. AI-generated disinformation, including a deepfake video of a Pakistani military officer admitting that the country lost some of its fighter jets, was widely circulated in Indian media. Another AI-generated clip featured US President Donald Trump promising to “wipe out Pakistan,” giving fodder to Indians who believed that the United States would enter the war against Pakistan. Other AI-generated images claimed to show Pakistan’s defeat, while pictures of a Turkish pilot were falsely presented as proof that India had captured a Pakistani air force officer. A doctored version of a letter was also shared. It was falsely positioned to be from Pakistan’s government and claimed that Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, had died in judicial custody. TV media do not operate in a vacuum, these viral clips quickly find their way to social media platforms and instant messaging mobile applications like WhatsApp. Social media users on both sides consume and share misinformation at lightning speed, especially when it aligns with nationalistic sentiment. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. The World Economic Forum ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation, which is defined as incorrect information shared to purposefully obfuscate the truth. But, false reports surged in Pakistan during the crisis as well. A Pakistani politician praised —in Parliament—about the might of his country’s air force based on an AI-generated image of a British newspaper. Of course, most military crises lead to a surge in falsehoods and unverified claims. While the media is supposed to inform the public, during these delicate moments, much of the television coverage descends into a spectacle of exaggeration, rumor, and nationalistic war mongering . From fabricated airstrikes to altered footage , the focus shifts away from facts toward constructing a narrative of preemptive victory and toward manufacturing consent for potential war crimes. In today’s digital world, this misinformation is not limited to local viewers. It moves quickly, heightening tensions and fueling broader cycles of global propaganda. The long-term consequences of such wartime fallacies are deeply damaging. By amplifying rumors and unverified stories, both Indian and Pakistani television media deepened public divisions, pushing citizens into isolated, conflicting realities. A similar situation occurred in 2019, after the killing of Indian paramilitary soldiers in Kashmir. False and misleading images and videos circulating on social media were republished by mainstream media, fuelling the calls for military retaliation against rival Pakistan. This conduct erodes the ethos of journalism. Audiences start to see all media as biased or deceptive. For fact-checkers in the field, debunking these falsehoods is an enormous challenge, and by the time fact-checked content reaches the general public, truth has already become the ultimate casualty. ∎ Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. THE VERTICAL Khabristan In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. GENERAL REPORTAGE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Reportage Delhi 16th Aug 2025 Reportage Delhi India-Pakistan Border India Pakistan Conflict Pakistan-India Conflict Armed Conflict Media wars Disinformation Misinformation Virality Viral Clips Soft War Karachi Social Media Manufacturing Consent Nationalism TV Media Landscape State & Media Russia-Ukraine Conflict Gaza AI Artificial Intelligence Imran Khan State Power State Narratives Kashmir Deepfakes War Mongering Ethics of Journalism Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. On the night of May 9, 2025, I closely tracked the unfolding hostilities between two nuclear-armed neighbours. I was watching a debate on the ongoing border situation on the Times Now Navbhara t news channel when the TV anchor, Sushant Sinha, abruptly paused the discussion to announce with glee that “Indian forces have entered Pakistan.” A panelist in the debate, a retired Indian Army veteran, trying to whip up jingoistic fervour, urged the Indian Navy to launch an attack on Karachi, declaring, “Set fire to Karachi Port and reduce the entire city to ashes.” While India and Pakistan’s firepower echoed on the borders, another battle was taking place inside the television studios. The latest surge in violence came in the aftermath of armed militants killing 26 tourists in the meadows of Indian Kashmir in April. India labelled these as terrorist attacks and blamed Pakistan, an allegation Pakistan denies. Following the attack on Indian tourists, some in the Indian TV media adopted an aggressive nationalistic stance . They further escalated tensions by calling for retaliation against Pakistan. Some newsrooms even openly endorsed military strikes against the country, which ignited a wave of hysteria in India. In the days that followed, I spent even more time on social media monitoring India TV broadcasts, noticing frequent bursts of misinformation. A casual scroll on X (formerly Twitter) revealed a post from an obscure account alleging that India had fired towards Pakistan. Within minutes, I searched the keywords #India and #Pakistan, and my timeline was flooded with similar claims. Indian mainstream media outlets like Aaj Tak and Times Now quickly picked up these unconfirmed posts, and within an hour, they snowballed into a full-blown conflict of speculations as early as day 1. As new events unfolded on the border on successive days, the media kept broadcasting unverified content. The onslaught of misinformation that followed was staggering: images of missile strikes, anti-air defence guns firing at targets, and armed forces downing each other's fighter jets. Editors and readers alike seemed unaware that the information was from a popular tactical shooter simulation video game, Arma 3 . Archival clips also resurfaced and were presented as proof of Pakistan’s devastation of the Indian military . Many of these images and videos were not of real-time offenses but came from the Russia–Ukraine war and Israeli air raids on Gaza. As the conflict escalated on days two and three, the deluge of misinformation went into full throttle. In these moments of crisis, both the Indian and Pakistani television media ditched accuracy altogether. They deceived audiences with unverified claims , manipulated visuals, and emotionally charged distortions of the ground reality. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. India Today reported a breaking news story that claimed that the Karachi port had been attacked by the Indian Navy; Zee News told viewers that the capital city of Islamabad had been captured. The latter even claimed that the Prime Minister of Pakistan had surrendered . ABP and NDTV news showed exclusive visuals of India’s air defence downing Pakistan drones, even though the original video was from Israel. Beyond mainstream English and Hindi media, regional TV channels also joined the bandwagon, amplifying the misinformation. The Karachi Port Trust posted on X, denying that an attack had occurred. However, some of the newspapers had already picked up and published this news in the following day's edition.A report from the Reuters Institute said that almost half of Indian online users receive their news from television, which makes these instances of misinformation especially egregious and impactful. One of the anchors at an Indian television station apologized for an “error”—but the apology came nearly 12 hours after millions of viewers in India had seen the segment. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the media passed off old visuals of fighter plane crashes as evidence of recent strikes on Indian fighter planes by Pakistan. Things escalated beyond newsrooms when an official X (Twitter) account of the Government of Pakistan posted footage from Arma 3 of what it claimed was real videotape of Pakistan downing India’s Rafale fighter jet. The rise of artificial intelligence played a significant role in augmenting the falsification of the conflict. AI-generated disinformation, including a deepfake video of a Pakistani military officer admitting that the country lost some of its fighter jets, was widely circulated in Indian media. Another AI-generated clip featured US President Donald Trump promising to “wipe out Pakistan,” giving fodder to Indians who believed that the United States would enter the war against Pakistan. Other AI-generated images claimed to show Pakistan’s defeat, while pictures of a Turkish pilot were falsely presented as proof that India had captured a Pakistani air force officer. A doctored version of a letter was also shared. It was falsely positioned to be from Pakistan’s government and claimed that Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, had died in judicial custody. TV media do not operate in a vacuum, these viral clips quickly find their way to social media platforms and instant messaging mobile applications like WhatsApp. Social media users on both sides consume and share misinformation at lightning speed, especially when it aligns with nationalistic sentiment. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. The World Economic Forum ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation, which is defined as incorrect information shared to purposefully obfuscate the truth. But, false reports surged in Pakistan during the crisis as well. A Pakistani politician praised —in Parliament—about the might of his country’s air force based on an AI-generated image of a British newspaper. Of course, most military crises lead to a surge in falsehoods and unverified claims. While the media is supposed to inform the public, during these delicate moments, much of the television coverage descends into a spectacle of exaggeration, rumor, and nationalistic war mongering . From fabricated airstrikes to altered footage , the focus shifts away from facts toward constructing a narrative of preemptive victory and toward manufacturing consent for potential war crimes. In today’s digital world, this misinformation is not limited to local viewers. It moves quickly, heightening tensions and fueling broader cycles of global propaganda. The long-term consequences of such wartime fallacies are deeply damaging. By amplifying rumors and unverified stories, both Indian and Pakistani television media deepened public divisions, pushing citizens into isolated, conflicting realities. A similar situation occurred in 2019, after the killing of Indian paramilitary soldiers in Kashmir. False and misleading images and videos circulating on social media were republished by mainstream media, fuelling the calls for military retaliation against rival Pakistan. This conduct erodes the ethos of journalism. Audiences start to see all media as biased or deceptive. For fact-checkers in the field, debunking these falsehoods is an enormous challenge, and by the time fact-checked content reaches the general public, truth has already become the ultimate casualty. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. | · THE VERTICAL Reportage · Delhi Khabristan In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. On the night of May 9, 2025, I closely tracked the unfolding hostilities between two nuclear-armed neighbours. I was watching a debate on the ongoing border situation on the Times Now Navbhara t news channel when the TV anchor, Sushant Sinha, abruptly paused the discussion to announce with glee that “Indian forces have entered Pakistan.” A panelist in the debate, a retired Indian Army veteran, trying to whip up jingoistic fervour, urged the Indian Navy to launch an attack on Karachi, declaring, “Set fire to Karachi Port and reduce the entire city to ashes.” While India and Pakistan’s firepower echoed on the borders, another battle was taking place inside the television studios. The latest surge in violence came in the aftermath of armed militants killing 26 tourists in the meadows of Indian Kashmir in April. India labelled these as terrorist attacks and blamed Pakistan, an allegation Pakistan denies. Following the attack on Indian tourists, some in the Indian TV media adopted an aggressive nationalistic stance . They further escalated tensions by calling for retaliation against Pakistan. Some newsrooms even openly endorsed military strikes against the country, which ignited a wave of hysteria in India. In the days that followed, I spent even more time on social media monitoring India TV broadcasts, noticing frequent bursts of misinformation. A casual scroll on X (formerly Twitter) revealed a post from an obscure account alleging that India had fired towards Pakistan. Within minutes, I searched the keywords #India and #Pakistan, and my timeline was flooded with similar claims. Indian mainstream media outlets like Aaj Tak and Times Now quickly picked up these unconfirmed posts, and within an hour, they snowballed into a full-blown conflict of speculations as early as day 1. As new events unfolded on the border on successive days, the media kept broadcasting unverified content. The onslaught of misinformation that followed was staggering: images of missile strikes, anti-air defence guns firing at targets, and armed forces downing each other's fighter jets. Editors and readers alike seemed unaware that the information was from a popular tactical shooter simulation video game, Arma 3 . Archival clips also resurfaced and were presented as proof of Pakistan’s devastation of the Indian military . Many of these images and videos were not of real-time offenses but came from the Russia–Ukraine war and Israeli air raids on Gaza. As the conflict escalated on days two and three, the deluge of misinformation went into full throttle. In these moments of crisis, both the Indian and Pakistani television media ditched accuracy altogether. They deceived audiences with unverified claims , manipulated visuals, and emotionally charged distortions of the ground reality. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. India Today reported a breaking news story that claimed that the Karachi port had been attacked by the Indian Navy; Zee News told viewers that the capital city of Islamabad had been captured. The latter even claimed that the Prime Minister of Pakistan had surrendered . ABP and NDTV news showed exclusive visuals of India’s air defence downing Pakistan drones, even though the original video was from Israel. Beyond mainstream English and Hindi media, regional TV channels also joined the bandwagon, amplifying the misinformation. The Karachi Port Trust posted on X, denying that an attack had occurred. However, some of the newspapers had already picked up and published this news in the following day's edition.A report from the Reuters Institute said that almost half of Indian online users receive their news from television, which makes these instances of misinformation especially egregious and impactful. One of the anchors at an Indian television station apologized for an “error”—but the apology came nearly 12 hours after millions of viewers in India had seen the segment. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the media passed off old visuals of fighter plane crashes as evidence of recent strikes on Indian fighter planes by Pakistan. Things escalated beyond newsrooms when an official X (Twitter) account of the Government of Pakistan posted footage from Arma 3 of what it claimed was real videotape of Pakistan downing India’s Rafale fighter jet. The rise of artificial intelligence played a significant role in augmenting the falsification of the conflict. AI-generated disinformation, including a deepfake video of a Pakistani military officer admitting that the country lost some of its fighter jets, was widely circulated in Indian media. Another AI-generated clip featured US President Donald Trump promising to “wipe out Pakistan,” giving fodder to Indians who believed that the United States would enter the war against Pakistan. Other AI-generated images claimed to show Pakistan’s defeat, while pictures of a Turkish pilot were falsely presented as proof that India had captured a Pakistani air force officer. A doctored version of a letter was also shared. It was falsely positioned to be from Pakistan’s government and claimed that Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, had died in judicial custody. TV media do not operate in a vacuum, these viral clips quickly find their way to social media platforms and instant messaging mobile applications like WhatsApp. Social media users on both sides consume and share misinformation at lightning speed, especially when it aligns with nationalistic sentiment. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. The World Economic Forum ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation, which is defined as incorrect information shared to purposefully obfuscate the truth. But, false reports surged in Pakistan during the crisis as well. A Pakistani politician praised —in Parliament—about the might of his country’s air force based on an AI-generated image of a British newspaper. Of course, most military crises lead to a surge in falsehoods and unverified claims. While the media is supposed to inform the public, during these delicate moments, much of the television coverage descends into a spectacle of exaggeration, rumor, and nationalistic war mongering . From fabricated airstrikes to altered footage , the focus shifts away from facts toward constructing a narrative of preemptive victory and toward manufacturing consent for potential war crimes. In today’s digital world, this misinformation is not limited to local viewers. It moves quickly, heightening tensions and fueling broader cycles of global propaganda. The long-term consequences of such wartime fallacies are deeply damaging. By amplifying rumors and unverified stories, both Indian and Pakistani television media deepened public divisions, pushing citizens into isolated, conflicting realities. A similar situation occurred in 2019, after the killing of Indian paramilitary soldiers in Kashmir. False and misleading images and videos circulating on social media were republished by mainstream media, fuelling the calls for military retaliation against rival Pakistan. This conduct erodes the ethos of journalism. Audiences start to see all media as biased or deceptive. For fact-checkers in the field, debunking these falsehoods is an enormous challenge, and by the time fact-checked content reaches the general public, truth has already become the ultimate casualty. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Delhi India-Pakistan Border India Pakistan Conflict Pakistan-India Conflict Armed Conflict Media wars Disinformation Misinformation Virality Viral Clips Soft War Karachi Social Media Manufacturing Consent Nationalism TV Media Landscape State & Media Russia-Ukraine Conflict Gaza AI Artificial Intelligence Imran Khan State Power State Narratives Kashmir Deepfakes War Mongering Ethics of Journalism Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 16th Aug 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. THE VERTICAL Khabristan Uzair Rizvi In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, sensationalist television coverage amplified misinformation, turning a volatile border crisis into a media-fueled spectacle. As fact-checks lagged behind viral falsehoods and unverified claims of tactical victories, nationalist fervor surged on both sides of the border, eroding the credibility of journalism before the public’s eyes. On the night of May 9, 2025, I closely tracked the unfolding hostilities between two nuclear-armed neighbours. I was watching a debate on the ongoing border situation on the Times Now Navbhara t news channel when the TV anchor, Sushant Sinha, abruptly paused the discussion to announce with glee that “Indian forces have entered Pakistan.” A panelist in the debate, a retired Indian Army veteran, trying to whip up jingoistic fervour, urged the Indian Navy to launch an attack on Karachi, declaring, “Set fire to Karachi Port and reduce the entire city to ashes.” While India and Pakistan’s firepower echoed on the borders, another battle was taking place inside the television studios. The latest surge in violence came in the aftermath of armed militants killing 26 tourists in the meadows of Indian Kashmir in April. India labelled these as terrorist attacks and blamed Pakistan, an allegation Pakistan denies. Following the attack on Indian tourists, some in the Indian TV media adopted an aggressive nationalistic stance . They further escalated tensions by calling for retaliation against Pakistan. Some newsrooms even openly endorsed military strikes against the country, which ignited a wave of hysteria in India. In the days that followed, I spent even more time on social media monitoring India TV broadcasts, noticing frequent bursts of misinformation. A casual scroll on X (formerly Twitter) revealed a post from an obscure account alleging that India had fired towards Pakistan. Within minutes, I searched the keywords #India and #Pakistan, and my timeline was flooded with similar claims. Indian mainstream media outlets like Aaj Tak and Times Now quickly picked up these unconfirmed posts, and within an hour, they snowballed into a full-blown conflict of speculations as early as day 1. As new events unfolded on the border on successive days, the media kept broadcasting unverified content. The onslaught of misinformation that followed was staggering: images of missile strikes, anti-air defence guns firing at targets, and armed forces downing each other's fighter jets. Editors and readers alike seemed unaware that the information was from a popular tactical shooter simulation video game, Arma 3 . Archival clips also resurfaced and were presented as proof of Pakistan’s devastation of the Indian military . Many of these images and videos were not of real-time offenses but came from the Russia–Ukraine war and Israeli air raids on Gaza. As the conflict escalated on days two and three, the deluge of misinformation went into full throttle. In these moments of crisis, both the Indian and Pakistani television media ditched accuracy altogether. They deceived audiences with unverified claims , manipulated visuals, and emotionally charged distortions of the ground reality. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. India Today reported a breaking news story that claimed that the Karachi port had been attacked by the Indian Navy; Zee News told viewers that the capital city of Islamabad had been captured. The latter even claimed that the Prime Minister of Pakistan had surrendered . ABP and NDTV news showed exclusive visuals of India’s air defence downing Pakistan drones, even though the original video was from Israel. Beyond mainstream English and Hindi media, regional TV channels also joined the bandwagon, amplifying the misinformation. The Karachi Port Trust posted on X, denying that an attack had occurred. However, some of the newspapers had already picked up and published this news in the following day's edition.A report from the Reuters Institute said that almost half of Indian online users receive their news from television, which makes these instances of misinformation especially egregious and impactful. One of the anchors at an Indian television station apologized for an “error”—but the apology came nearly 12 hours after millions of viewers in India had seen the segment. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the media passed off old visuals of fighter plane crashes as evidence of recent strikes on Indian fighter planes by Pakistan. Things escalated beyond newsrooms when an official X (Twitter) account of the Government of Pakistan posted footage from Arma 3 of what it claimed was real videotape of Pakistan downing India’s Rafale fighter jet. The rise of artificial intelligence played a significant role in augmenting the falsification of the conflict. AI-generated disinformation, including a deepfake video of a Pakistani military officer admitting that the country lost some of its fighter jets, was widely circulated in Indian media. Another AI-generated clip featured US President Donald Trump promising to “wipe out Pakistan,” giving fodder to Indians who believed that the United States would enter the war against Pakistan. Other AI-generated images claimed to show Pakistan’s defeat, while pictures of a Turkish pilot were falsely presented as proof that India had captured a Pakistani air force officer. A doctored version of a letter was also shared. It was falsely positioned to be from Pakistan’s government and claimed that Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, had died in judicial custody. TV media do not operate in a vacuum, these viral clips quickly find their way to social media platforms and instant messaging mobile applications like WhatsApp. Social media users on both sides consume and share misinformation at lightning speed, especially when it aligns with nationalistic sentiment. "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. The World Economic Forum ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation, which is defined as incorrect information shared to purposefully obfuscate the truth. But, false reports surged in Pakistan during the crisis as well. A Pakistani politician praised —in Parliament—about the might of his country’s air force based on an AI-generated image of a British newspaper. Of course, most military crises lead to a surge in falsehoods and unverified claims. While the media is supposed to inform the public, during these delicate moments, much of the television coverage descends into a spectacle of exaggeration, rumor, and nationalistic war mongering . From fabricated airstrikes to altered footage , the focus shifts away from facts toward constructing a narrative of preemptive victory and toward manufacturing consent for potential war crimes. In today’s digital world, this misinformation is not limited to local viewers. It moves quickly, heightening tensions and fueling broader cycles of global propaganda. The long-term consequences of such wartime fallacies are deeply damaging. By amplifying rumors and unverified stories, both Indian and Pakistani television media deepened public divisions, pushing citizens into isolated, conflicting realities. A similar situation occurred in 2019, after the killing of Indian paramilitary soldiers in Kashmir. False and misleading images and videos circulating on social media were republished by mainstream media, fuelling the calls for military retaliation against rival Pakistan. This conduct erodes the ethos of journalism. Audiences start to see all media as biased or deceptive. For fact-checkers in the field, debunking these falsehoods is an enormous challenge, and by the time fact-checked content reaches the general public, truth has already become the ultimate casualty. ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 "Across Bodies and Land" (2024), graphite on handmade paper, courtesy of Rahul Tiwari. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Reportage Delhi India-Pakistan Border India Pakistan Conflict Pakistan-India Conflict Armed Conflict Media wars Disinformation Misinformation Virality Viral Clips Soft War Karachi Social Media Manufacturing Consent Nationalism TV Media Landscape State & Media Russia-Ukraine Conflict Gaza AI Artificial Intelligence Imran Khan State Power State Narratives Kashmir Deepfakes War Mongering Ethics of Journalism UZAIR RIZVI is a journalist, formerly with the Agence France Presse (AFP), who covers misinformation, elections, and technology. He is based in Delhi Reportage Delhi 16th Aug 2025 RAHUL TIWARI grew up in Bhadwar, a small Bhojpuri speaking village in Bihar. Rahul received an MFA from Banaras Hindu University in 2018. Strongly informed by his place of origin, his work examines regional ecologies and folklore as they pertain to both societal and environmental wellbeing, justice, and change. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct