The shooting of a group of tourists on Friday in Afghanistan raises a reasonable question. Considering the political and security situation of this conflicted country and the warnings of Western authorities to step on it, why are there tourists in Afghanistan?
The explanation is simple: the Taliban want to open up and whitewash their regime through tourism. In fact, Friday’s attack can be read as a hard blow to the Government’s recent effort to promote tourism in order to boost the economy and clean up its international image. And in fact, the attack is the first that some foreigners have suffered since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. This breaks a relative peace (since the attacks on Afghans have not stopped) , imposed by the regime, which had encouraged, albeit timidly, the return of visitors.
The Taliban recently inaugurated a tourism and hospitality institute to improve the country’s tourism infrastructure. Foreigners “feel that Afghanistan is backward, that it is poor and that everything has to do with the war. But we have 5,000 years of history. We should start a new page for Afghanistan”, said Samir Ahmadzai, a student at the institute, to the AP agency a few weeks ago.
The government has sought to reassure tourism agencies that Afghanistan is safe for visitors, despite the ongoing threat from a group affiliated with the Islamic State, which has carried out sporadic attacks aimed at destabilizing the Taliban government The spokesman for the Ministry of Information and Culture, Habib Ghafran, emphasized at the beginning of the month that the Taliban had the cooperation of security personnel to guarantee the safety of travelers in all regions of the country.
Afghanistan’s rulers are considered pariahs on the world stage, largely because of their draconian laws against women and girls (which are more lax for foreign tourists). The economy has problems – with difficulties in responding to the humanitarian crisis –, the infrastructure is poor, which makes internal displacement difficult, and poverty abounds.
Likewise, Western governments warn of the dangers of visiting the country. Since January, the Spanish Government “very seriously advises against” traveling to Afghanistan, “under any circumstances”. This is what the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, recalled yesterday, who was “horrified and shocked” but not surprised.
And yet, foreigners are visiting the country, encouraged by the slight drop in violence or the increase in air connections to centers such as Dubai. The figures are not very significant, but there is a certain commotion surrounding Afghan tourism. In 2021, 691 foreign tourists were registered, a number that increased to 2,300 in 2022 and up to 7,000 in 2023, according to AP.
And visits have continued to grow. According to a report published by the statistics department of the Taliban government to which the Russian agency Sputnik had access, a total of 14,478 men and 675 women of foreign nationality arrived in Afghanistan between April 2023 and April of 2024.
Muhammad Saïd, head of the Kabul Tourism Directorate, told AP that the biggest market for foreign visitors is China because of its proximity and large population. Saïd commented to the news agency, at the end of last month, that Chinese and Japanese tourists told him that they preferred to go to Afghanistan rather than to their neighbor Pakistan because “it is dangerous and they attack them”.
Among all the country’s attractions, the Bamian Valley, 130 kilometers from Kabul, is the “most prominent tourist destination”, the Afghan embassies state on their web portals. In the middle of the Silk Road, this valley houses the remains of two giant Buddha statues from the 6th century, has thousands of caves, monastic complexes and Buddhist shrines and has been declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco.
