6 hours ago
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Living in London, my elder brother – someone I have always looked up to – makes good use of his relative proximity to our ancestral home in Afghanistan. He travels back and forth so often that, from my base in Melbourne, I sometimes joke he has visited our village more times in the past few years than I have visited any other Australian city.
His most recent trip, however, did not go as planned. Flight disruptions linked to escalating tensions in the Middle East left him stranded in Istanbul for several days. Eventually he gave up and flew back to London, missing both the anniversary of our mother’s death in Kabul and the Eid celebrations many of the family members had hoped to mark together at the end of Ramadan.
While waiting at the airport we spoke on FaceTime and our conversation drifted back to what remains of our ancestral home, which has been largely reduced to ruins now sitting in a mountainous valley in Paktika province in south-eastern Afghanistan.
Time and war have stripped the walls but the memory of what life once looked like inside them remains vivid. What strikes me most when I look at photos he sends me is not the amount of destruction but what endures.
The house played a central role in hosting guests and allowing for community consultation – a process known as the jirga – which was part of our family’s and village’s way of life. The bala khana, the upper guesthouse common in many Afghan homes, was not merely an architectural feature. It was a moral space. This was where disputes were brought to cool down. Neighbours who had quarrelled over land, traders arguing over debts, or relatives caught in family disagreements would gather there, often late into the night. Long before courts or contracts, people sat together in these rooms to listen, argue, reflect and – whenever possible – reconcile.
Hospitality and mediation were intertwined. You could not seek justice without first being offered tea. You could not be heard without first being recognised as a guest.
As a child I played a small role in those gatherings. I would pour tea for visitors and carefully line up their shoes by the door before sitting cross-legged on the carpets to listen. For generations, elders helped settle disputes among traders moving between central and south Asia. Many homes were built with a bala khana designed specifically for hosting travellers and resolving disagreements.
Arguments were slowed with Qur’anic reflection and poetry. For centuries such traditions helped prevent conflicts from spiralling.
But wars rarely respect spaces built for mediation.
During the cold war, Afghanistan became one of its most brutal battlegrounds. The Soviet invasion in 1979 and the decade of fighting that followed uprooted millions of Afghans and destroyed much of the country’s social fabric. After the Taliban government was toppled in 2001 following the US-led invasion – joined by allies including Australia – Afghan civilians again found themselves trapped between powerful armed actors.
In theory, they had choices. In reality, those choices were often illusions.
Across rural Afghanistan, villagers were forced to navigate between international forces.
As Afghan government troops and Taliban fighters moved through the countryside, villagers who offered food to one group might later be interpreted as enemy collaborators by another. A farmer who allowed Taliban fighters to pass through his village risked being labelled an insurgent supporter. A villager who shared information with coalition troops could face retaliation once those troops withdrew.
In such conditions neutrality becomes dangerous. Refusing to take sides can itself become a crime. What outside powers frame as “choosing a side” is, for civilians, usually something closer to a calculation of survival.
Afghanistan is hardly unique in this regard.
Across the Middle East today, civilians are confronting the same shrinking space for neutrality. The widening confrontation involving Iran, Israel and the United States has already demonstrated how quickly conflicts spill across borders. Missile exchanges, airstrikes and proxy attacks have turned entire regions into a battlefield.
Cities far from the frontlines suddenly find themselves under threat. The pressure to pick sides spreads with the conflict itself.
This is made worse by the fact that the institutions meant to restrain such spirals appear increasingly fragile. The United Nations was founded on the promise that international disputes could be mediated before they consumed entire societies. Yet repeated crises – from Syria to Ukraine and Gaza and now tensions around Iran – have revealed how easily geopolitical rivalry paralyses the system.
Donald Trump openly questions the value of alliances and international institutions, accelerating a broader erosion of confidence in global governance. When international mediation weakens, the burden of navigating conflict falls ever more heavily on ordinary people.
For centuries places like our village’s bala khana existed precisely to prevent disputes from escalating into violence. They embodied a belief that even the angriest conflict could still be slowed through conversation. But when wars are driven by powerful states and global rivalries, those local traditions of peace and harmony struggle to survive.
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Shadi Khan Saif is an editor, producer and journalist who has worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Germany and Australia
