A Country Only Men Can See: Tourism with the Taliban
After the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, women and men fleeing the country flooded the global news cycle. Footage from the Kabul Airport of women and men hanging on to the American jets and falling from the sky went viral around the world. However, four years later, young male travel influencers have found refuge in the country, branding Afghanistan as the new hotspot for “Boys’ Trips”. The content may appear harmless, but it raises serious ethical questions. While women in Afghanistan live under a system of gender apartheid, foreign male influencers freely film Kabul’s markets and Afghanistan’s landscapes. Their mobility highlights a stark contradiction: this form of tourism relies on freedoms granted to foreign men but systematically denied to Afghan women.
As tensions have eased in Afghanistan, the Taliban has slowly started opening the country to foreign visitors. When the Taliban seized power in 2021, international tourism to Afghanistan unexpectedly increased. In the past few years, the group has begun reopening the country to foreign visitors, drawing close to 10,000 tourists since 2021. Many of these tourists come to visit the country with good intentions, underscoring the importance of seeing a country that has been and remains often vilified by Western countries. Tourists make contact with the people of Afghanistan, speaking highly of their warm hospitality and openness to foreign visitors, bridging connections with local populations beyond their government. Typical itineraries include eight- to ten-day visits to the country’s most popular cities and areas, such as Kabul, Bamyan, Ghazni, Kandahar, and Herat, from prices starting at $1,800 USD per person.
This surge in tourism has more troubling origins, increasingly rooted in social media exposure. Instagram and TikTok have seen a boom in videos filled with influencers visiting the country. This content has gone viral due to its controversial nature. Influencers such as Kieran Brown have contributed to this virality, with his videos hitting close to 385,000 likes. He shows himself and fellow travellers playing with the Taliban on swings, with Taliban members giving them their guns to pose with. Although these men are showing a new perspective on a country often obscured by Western narratives, the problem lies in the framing: male influencers marketing Afghanistan as an adventure destination. Brown, for instance, has called his trip to Afghanistan: “A Lads’ Trip”. This type of wording and description captures both the gendered nature of this tourism and the exclusion of women it glosses over. This harmless thrill-seeking is built on a foundation of privilege: the ability to move, film, and access spaces that only men are permitted to enter and enjoy.
This carefully curated image stands in sharp contrast with the realities facing Afghan women. Under Taliban rule, women and girls face mobility restrictions, education bans and systemic discrimination. Education bans affect young Afghan women disproportionately, with 78 per cent of them not being in education, employment or training, which is four times the rate of young men in the country. Only one in four women is working or seeking work, compared with nearly 90 per cent of men. This is due to the Taliban banning women from working in sectors such as civil service, national and international NGOs, and beauty salons. In cities such as Kandahar, where tourists visit, shopkeepers are asked to report women unaccompanied by a guardian and deny them entry into shops, and hospitals are even ordered not to provide care for unaccompanied female patients.
These restrictions are not enforced as rigorously against women who are not Afghan citizens. With rising tourism, hotels in Kabul have reopened, including the Kabul Serena Hotel, which the Taliban has owned since 2025. Originally the Kabul Grand Hotel, it was inaugurated in 2005 by President Hamid Karzai and Aga Khan IV, but a German company bought and began managing it in February 2025. This prominent establishment has reopened its spa and salon for female foreign visitors. However, access comes with a condition: guests must present identification; anyone born in Afghanistan can be turned away. The Taliban has extended these privileges only to foreign visitors, showing great hypocrisy in an attempt to make the country appealing under their rule. These restrictions not only show the extent of gender segregation in Afghanistan but also the double standard of the Taliban, which is willing to sacrifice its gender apartheid system for foreign appeal. Afghan women, including those with foreign passports, are excluded from spaces that welcome foreign women without question. By easing restrictions for foreign women, the Taliban seeks to create an appearance of normality while maintaining an otherwise highly repressive system.
This divide mirrors a broader reality across the country: foreign men move through Afghanistan with a level of freedom entirely inaccessible to Afghan women. While male tourists have the privilege of filming themselves strolling through Kabul, sipping tea in bazaars, and visiting historic landmarks, Afghan women cannot walk alone, study at university, or enter many public spaces at all. A woman in the country must consider a male guardian to accompany her, whether her presence in public could attract harassment, and whether she can enter public places. For many, the boundaries of daily life have shrunk to the home, leaving them shunned from society and public life in their own lands. Foreign men, meanwhile, can document their experiences openly and speak to local men freely. The same streets that function as filming grounds for influencers are for Afghan women a place of fear, scrutiny and prohibition. Male tourists experience Afghanistan positively because they move through a system designed around their presence. This inherently downplays the very real struggles of women inside the country.
Afghanistan’s newfound appeal as a destination for foreign men reveals far more about male and global privilege than it does about local reality. Influencers might believe they are offering a counter to Western media coverage, but their perspective is shaped by a freedom that Afghan women no longer have. The absence of women in these videos is not an oversight, but actively contributes to a system that has pushed its women out of public life and out of sight. The experiences of male travellers continue to obscure the conditions of women who cannot walk the same streets, enter the same buildings or share the same spaces. What looks like adventure for outsiders is for Afghan women the daily cost of life under the Taliban.
Edited by Aubrey Nan
Featured Image: “Trying a Burqa in Herat, Afghanistan” by Marius Arnesen is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
