Name: Why Tourists Are Flocking to Afghanistan Now
Uploaded: 2026-01-12T17:11:51.000Z
Duration: 24 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Something strange is happening in Afghanistan.

Ever since the Taliban regained their power in the country over the summer of 2021, tourism to the country has been spiking higher with every passing year.

And now there's more people visiting the country than in decades.

In 2021, the year that the Taliban triumphantly returned back to power again through a shocking military offensive, only 691 people from abroad were brave enough to visit the country as tourists.

The next year in 2022, those numbers more than tripled to about 2,300 tourist visits.

And in 2023, the numbers tripled again to around 7,000 tourist visits.

In 2024, the numbers continued increasing with 9,000 tourist visits.

And in just the first three months of 2025 alone, more than 3,000 tourists have visited the country, exceeding the numbers who visited throughout the entire year of 2022 and setting Afghanistan on track to to break 2024's record with the fourth year in a row of continuous tourism growth since the Taliban reconquest.

And with promotional tourism ads to the country the Taliban is pumping out like this one.

Now, that is a great ad, if you ask me, but

all of these tourist visits to Afghanistan are taking place despite the fact that virtually all Western governments, including the US and uk, still maintain the highest level of travel advisory for the country and urge all of their citizens to avoid all travel there.

Why are so many Westerners suddenly traveling to Afghanistan in the thousands?

And why does the Taliban, infamously reclusive and totalitarian, even want all of these Westerners visiting in the first place?

Tourism to Afghanistan used to be a lot more popular with Westerners in the past.

Setting aside all of the political turmoil and strife, the country's landscape is spectacularly beautiful, with soaring mountains, wide valleys, and

Among the most gorgeous landscapes in the country that rivals all of the best national parks in the United States is Bandi Amir national park, which was the first national park established in Afghanistan during the US occupation era in 2009.

It is sometimes known as the Grand Canyon of Water, and

its shimmering crystal blue waters contrast magically with the surrounding rock cliffs.

But in a sign of what makes visiting Afghanistan so troublesome, today, the Taliban has banned all of their women from ever visiting this national park and restricts it only for men.

Between the 1950s and 70s, there was a popular overlanding journey developed among the hippie subculture in Europe that came to be known as the Hippie Trail, which took thousands of Westerners through Afghanistan on their way to India and Thailand.

This route introduced tons of western tourists to Afghanistan for decades.

But of course, this journey was only possible during a relative era of stability in Western and Central Asia that wouldn't last for long.

It all began falling apart in the late 1970s with the communist revolution in Afghanistan in 1978, the Islamic revolution in Iran the following year in 1979.

That overthrew the previously pro Western regime there, and then the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan later that year.

That threw the country into more than four decades of continuous warfare, all of which basically eliminated the path for hippies to take directly overland anymore.

It also didn't help that after the Taliban first took over Afghanistan later in the 1990s, they basically just did about everything they could to discourage tourism even further.

At the crossroads of civilizations for thousands of years in Central Asia, Afghanistan has an extremely rich culture and an abundant potential for historical tourism too.

Perhaps the most well known historical wonder in the country that could have attracted a large amount of tourism in an alternate timeline were the Bamiyan Buddhas, A pair of monolithic Buddha statues carved into the side of a mountain relatively nearby to the Afghan capital Kabul.

The first centuries were among the tallest statues found anywhere in the world.

They are believed to have been painstakingly carved out of the mountain face more than 1600 years ago, sometime around the 6th century A.D.

with a shorter Buddha standing about 38 meters high and a taller Buddha standing about 55 meters high, substantially taller than the Statue of Liberty itself is.

This taller Buddha was probably the second tallest statue in the world for more than 1500 years, until the mid 20th century when modern technology finally enabled the construction of a bunch of taller statues.

The only other statue had remained behind for Most of those 1500 years of history was the Leshan Giant Buddha.

The which was itself also painstakingly carved out of a mountain across an entire century in China that was completed in 803 AD and which stands at 71 meters in height.

Historically, Buddhism had been a major religion present in Afghanistan for well over a millennia, until it was weakened by the Islamic conquest in the 8th century and was finally extinguished by the Mongol invasions in the 13th century, leaving Islam behind as the overwhelmingly dominant faith in the country ever since.

For nearly all of the history of Islamic rule in Afghanistan, the Bamiyan Buddhas were either accepted or tolerated due to their historical significance, but

controversy still persisted over their presence.

Nonetheless, owing to Islam's own general restrictions on depicting the human form in art and statues, and

the fact that the statues eventually came to represent idols from a long gone religion in the region.

In the 17th century, long before the Taliban, the Muslim Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was the first to order the statue's destruction on religious grounds and briefly had his artillery open fire on them.

They weren't powerful enough to destroy the statues outright since they were carved out of a literal mountain.

And so Aurangzeb essentially gave up trying.

But his attempt to do so would later be invoked as a precedent by the Taliban centuries later in the 1990s, during their own decision to destroy the statues too.

During Afghanistan's communist era in the 1980s, the Soviet backed government applied to make the Babylon Buddhas a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which was never formalized because this government collapsed just a few years later and Afghanistan fell apart into civil war in the 1990s.

During this period of the early 1990s, before the Taliban seized power in 1996, there were multiple instances of attempted Taliban attacks on the statues based on religious grounds.

Some Taliban members attempted to blow the Buddha's heads up with explosives.

Others fired RPG rockets at them, and some others burned tires around their heads.

Nonetheless, in 1999, a few years after the Taliban took over the country, the Taliban's absolute leader at the time, a reclusive man named Mullah Omar, initially ordered that the statues be preserved, and

he even expressed their value as a potential asset for tourism.

Nonetheless, just a couple years later, In March of 2001, the Taliban suddenly reversed its course and declared that all statues depicting humans throughout the entire country would be destro based on the religious grounds that they were idolatrous, including the by then 1600 year old Bamiyan Buddhas.

This sparked a major, major international crisis at the time that was quickly forgotten about because it was almost immediately overshadowed by the 911 attacks just a few months later.

There has also been a huge amount of speculation as to why the Taliban suddenly changed its mind on destroying the statues in 2001 after having decided to protect them just a couple years previously in 1999.

One of the more interesting theories is that destroy the statues and to destroy arguably the country's most important tourism site was heavily influenced by Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden in order to deliberately isolate the Taliban from the rest of the international community even further, and

thus to strengthen the Taliban's dependence on Al Qaeda.

At the same time, it's been theorized that Al Qaeda might have threatened to cause trouble in the country unless the Taliban relented on destroying the statues.

Years later, Mullah Omar himself would claim that he ordered the statues destruction because he was deeply offended by the international attention towards them.

He said that after Western governments and NGOs approached him with offers to help with restoration work at the statues, he was outraged that they wanted to help with the statues, but

not the countless Afghan human beings who were dying of hunger.

So to him, blowing up the statues apparently seemed like both a point of spite and a way to eliminate them for good in order to refocus international aid efforts on Afghanistan's own struggling pop.

Beginning in April of 2001, the Taliban began making preparations to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas.

That went on for weeks, while the horrified international community made just about every appeal to save them that you can possibly imagine.

Every single member state of the Organization of the Islamic Conference intervened in protest against the Taliban to try and save the statues, including the only three governments that recognized the Taliban at the time, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Pakistani government even went so far as to send a delegation to Afghanistan to stop the destruction and argue that doing so was against Islamic principles, citing that the statues had predated Islam and coexisted with Muslims for more than a thousand years who had never sought the statues destruction.

Mullah Omar reportedly callously responded to the Pakistanis by simply saying that the statues were never destroyed by previous Muslims because they lacked the technology and means to do so, not the will to do so.

The Indian government offered to transfer the Bamiyad Buddhas to India for safekeeping, while the Japanese government suggested a plethora of different solutions than just blowing them up for good, including relocating the statues in full to Japan, covering the statues up in order to hide them from view, or a lump sum of money to preserve them.

Dozens of letters from countries all around the world urged the Taliban to spare the statues.

But the Taliban's mind was already made up.

The Bamiyan Buddhas that had stood for 16 centuries would be no more.

The destruction of the statues was conducted methodically.

The Taliban fired anti aircraft guns, RPGs and heavy artillery at them, blew up their feet with anti tank mines and finally drilled holes into them where they planted explosives to finish the job.

By the end of April, the two statues had been completely obliterated forever.

And Afghanistan's greatest historical wonder that could have attracted tourists for generations to come was lost and will never again be replaced.

The site where they used to exist is still one of the most popular places to visit by tourists in Afghanistan today.

But one has to wonder just how much more popular the site would be had the Taliban never done what they did to them in 2001.

The fact that the Taliban themselves were the ones who destroyed the statues is an awkward subject in the country still today when they are trying to actually attract tourists to come into the area.

During a recent press conference in 2024, the Taliban's acting tourism director Aubayan was asked about the Buddhas and he simply replied, no.

But the Taliban did a lot more to undermine Afghanistan's long term tourism potential in the 90s besides for just blowing up those statues.

You see, one of the most attractive things about Afghanistan during the 90s to a specific kind of tourist was that there basically weren't any laws and you could get away with things there that you couldn't anywhere else.

To a cadre of wealthy Gulf Arabs, 90s Afghanistan became the place to go to hunt and poach whatever you wanted, especially rare endangered birds.

Afghanistan sits along major migratory flyways for many species of birds flying between Siberia and the Indian subcontinent, and

is an especially important habitat for the Asian hubara, a now vulnerable species that was nearly driven to the point of extinction in the 90s by these wealthy poachers from the Gulf who came to Afghanistan to blast all the birds they could find.

The Taliban basically didn't enforce any environmental regulations whatsoever, and

they tolerated all of these Gulf state poachers coming to the country because they brought in both cash and diplomatic clout for their struggling regime.

The long term environmental consequences associated with destroying the country's wildlife was apparently not heavily considered.

And Afghanistan's bird and mammal species have still not recovered from this time period, undermining the country's potential for wildlife tourism as well.

The continuation of the Afghan civil war Even after the Taliban seized power in 1996, the regime's brutal treatment of women, its international isolation and their hosting of Al Qaeda all meant that tourism to the country by Westerners remained very low.

And then came the 911 attacks, the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan and another 20 years of occupation and warfare where the Taliban became an insurgent force.

That disincentivized tourism even further.

After more than four decades of nearly constant warfare and strife, the Taliban managed to overthrow the US backed government in Afghanistan over the summer of 2021 and returned back to power again, bringing a sort of brutal stability to the country for the first time in gener.

Rapidly after regaining control, the Taliban began reinforcing their extremely harsh restrictions on women and girls in the country again to the point where some observers have labeled it a form of gender based apartheid, it goes far beyond simply banning women from the country's national parks.

The Taliban have banned women from all public parks in the country, as well as gyms, reserving them all exclusively for men.