Three hostages kneel in front of the cameratheir hands are tied behind their backs and their heads are covered with black plastic bags covering their faces. Behind them looms a group of bearded, angry fighters dressed in tunics and turbans, some with machine guns.
“We have one message for America,” says the man standing in the middle, placing one hand on the shoulder of the kneeling figure in front of him and jabbing the other hand into the air to emphasize his point. To people of a certain age, this scene is immediately recognizable. The stares, the polemical script, the stillness of the kneeling bodies—it was all eerily reminiscent of the video of Daniel Pearl and James Foley being beheaded by Islamic figures.
Luckily, this video took a different turn. The speaker removes the bag from the face of the man kneeling in front of him, who then begins to flash a Hollywood smile and give a determined thumbs up. “Welcome to Afghanistan!” he says directly to the camera, before a montage of Westerners posing for photographs in mountain valleys and pulling themselves up on the barrels of tank guns begins to play.
Yosaf Aryubi, an Afghan-American in his early twenties, made video as an advertisement for his travel agency, Raza Afghanistan, which organizes tours around the country. Aryubi, who lives between Afghanistan and California, plays the role of the would-be executor, and Jake Youngblood Dobbs, an American travel influencer who was on tour with Raza at the time, is the ersatz victim that Aryubi reveals. The video is both a provocative advertisement for Aryubi's company and an appeal to tourists to visit Afghanistan. Pro-Taliban social network account @Afghan Arabic shared the post, indicating at least official approval for Aryubi's stunt. (The account also posts other videos in English, including clip from the Tucker Carlson Show, in which he positively contrasts punitive drug treatment programs in Afghanistan with American programs.)
I hate to admit it, but when I first saw this video a couple of months ago, it made me laugh. The tonal punch gave it a vacuous, dark irony similar to what a particularly cynical Tim Robinson might create. Youngblood and the others even gave their masters an affectionate nickname: Talibros. There were some really funny moments in the “dude rock” montage that followed the execution sketch. Some guys are fooling around with a machine gun that has “Property of the United States Government” engraved on the side. “This is an American souvenir,” someone jokes. “Oh, it’s not even on safety right now,” says the white tourist holding the gun, before the whole group bursts into the familiar laughter of a group of guys doing something stupid and dangerous and therefore fun.
However, the first scene stuck with me, and in the weeks that followed I began to interpret it as something less funny and more sinister. The videotaped beheadings were the indelible images of the wars of my childhood and youth in the two thousand graphic pieces of contraband we searched on pirate websites. Thinking back on those videos made me feel sick: a violent reaction that I suspect was the goal of this group of young influencers. Arubi's irreverent references to years of violence in Afghanistan are part of a growing library of irony-laced travel content that both asks viewers to stop believing everything the mainstream media tells them about the country while advising them not to take what influencers say too seriously. Call it Frommer for edge lords. Several other content creators traveled through Afghanistan, enthusiastically sharing stories of how men can still be men given the Taliban's persistence of traditional values. Some ridicule Western ideas about how women are treated in the country. Extremely popular American YouTuber Addison Pierre Maalouf, better known as Arab to his nearly two million followers, toured Afghanistan last winter. In one video he and his comrades visit the women's market.
