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The sudden appearance of graffiti art in Kabul has completely redecorated its austere landscape of rutted roads and debris. Concrete blast-walls splattered with anti-war messages are adding aesthetic appeal to Kabul’s nondescript streets. This is welcome proof that a dynamic mode of expression is being developed to aggressively challenge propaganda and offer therapy to cope with the country’s history of civil warfare and insurgency.
Initially documented by local bloggers and NGOs in January 2010, the graffiti tags were stenciled along the residential and commercial districts of the city and portrayed black, spray-painted visuals of soldiers, dollar signs, poppies, tanks, helicopters and children playing together. As they conjured vivid images of war, they were believed to have immense social significance. Intriguingly, there was a strong enigma associated with the artists of these visual renderings who went by the epithet of Talibanksy (or, students of Banksy, the British vandal artist they sought inspiration from).
It was discovered later that these works were being produced by an anonymous group of western artists called Combat Communications who, through these graphic representations, were protesting the financial and human costs of war.
A thorough observation of the graphics confirms that by attempting to imitate Banksy, Combat Communications is propagating a form of anti-war activism. Through slogans like ‘cost of war’ and silhouetted tags of a trooper wielding a gun and a dollar symbol joined to it by an equal symbol, their message is a clear condemnation of what they perceive as a costly war.
It is interesting to note that unlike the complexity and acerbic touch of Banksy’s art, Talibanksy stencils are executed with far greater simplicity and therefore carry easily understood stenciled slogans. This in itself is a metaphor of how the cruelties of war have stifled intellectual capacity of the masses.
Graffiti on the dusty walls of an army garrison in the Musa Qala District of the Helmand province in southern Afghanistan provide a significant contrast to this stylistic simplicity. Musa Qala is one of the centers of Taliban resistance to Nato ISAF control in Afghanistan and has been inhabited by the Afghan Taliban, the U.S. marines and NATO troops. The graffiti inscribed on the walls of the army barracks is a glaring testimony to this and, to some degree, depicts both sides of the conflict in intricate detail. There is, however, a striking difference in the techniques used by the warring faction to present their point of view through graffiti.
The Afghan warriors have created shoddy tableaux featuring possible war strategies whilst the U.S. and British troop have daubed the walls with inspirational messages that resemble more stylistically appealing tattoo designs.
Lately, there have been efforts to perk up the quality of the graffiti art being produced in Afghanistan. In December 2010, a British graffiti artist named Chu visited Kabul to conduct a one-week workshop and encouraged a new Afghan art collective called Roshd (growth) to paint a 10-feet high mural on the walls of an industrial park. The resulting masterpieces depict innovation and maturity in the approach towards graffiti art. Artistic works by Ommolbanin Shamsia Hassani (which shows veiled women in oceanic colors to suggest their purity and submissiveness) and Farid Khurrami (which is a shrewd commentary on the appalling state of public transport in Afghanistan) indicates the growing use of expressionism to highlight and consequently overcome the all-encompassing social disparities in a war-torn society.
These developments will further enable graffiti art to become a vehicle for a much-needed social catharsis in Afghanistan that will put an end to the repressions of war. 
Taha Kehar is a blogger on social events and has previously worked as Assistant Editor for Slogan magazine. He is currently pursuing Law Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
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