During an official road inauguration ceremony in Badakhshan province, prominent religious scholar Maulvi Abdul Qadir Hami publicly criticized the de facto administration’s skewed development priorities and widespread infrastructure neglect in non-southern regions. Speaking at the opening of a minor two-kilometer road project, Hami expressed deep frustration over the glaring disparities in state funding and public service allocation across different provinces.
Drawing a direct contrast with major urban centers, Hami noted that traveling through provinces like Kandahar, Herat, and Jalalabad reveals significant road construction and development investments, whereas entering Badakhshan evokes profound disappointment. He emphasized that northern and northeastern communities remain severely deprived of basic civic infrastructure, urgently requiring functional road networks, bridges, public healthcare facilities, and access to reliable drinking water systems.
These rare public critiques from within religious circles highlight deepening domestic resentment toward the regime’s unequal distribution of national resources. The administrative favoring of southern strongholds over northeastern provinces underscores structural governance failures, systemic regional discrimination, and tribal favoritism operating within Kabul’s decision-making apparatus.
For neighboring states, including Pakistan, persistent administrative imbalance and systemic neglect across northern Afghanistan pose critical cross-border security concerns. Disfranchised regional populations, combined with severe economic distress and decaying public infrastructure, fuel localized grievances, creating fertile ground for anti-regime turmoil and long-term regional instability.
International development observers stress that durable stability requires equitable state governance and transparent resource distribution. The regime’s continued failure to address basic infrastructure needs in northern provinces further erodes state legitimacy, driving internal fragmentation and complicating South Asian cross-border peace efforts.