By Hamayon Rastgar
Two years of crippling economic decline; famine and near universal poverty haunting the country. Half of the population enduring severe hunger, with malnutrition rates at record highs. Women and girls banned from education and work, and not allowed to leave their homes without a male chaperone. The regime regularly orchestrates public spectacles of torture and execution. Afghans are so desperate to leave that the passport office has turned into a goldmine for the Taliban, with the bribe price for that precious document reportedly US$2,500.
Given the unceasing barrage of grim news coming out of Afghanistan, how do the regime’s mullahs attempt to gain even a modicum of good publicity? Perhaps by unveiling a sports car, at a time when this unlikeliest locale of automotive design excellence is in the grip of a brutal winter and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people are dying of hunger and cold.
The “supercar,” first named Mada 9 now relabelled the Helmet, was launched in a cinematic video that opens with images of spent shells littering the ground. Then, to the pulse of electronic dance music, a man wearing traditional Afghan clothing unveils the sensuous curves of a black sports car gleaming at sunset. To emphasize its Afghan origins, the Helmet was shot at the Bagram Air Base, once home to the U.S.-led military coalition that hurriedly left in August 2021 as the Taliban took over the country.
The car is an engineering collaboration between a firm called Entop and Kabul’s Afghanistan Technical Vocational Institute (ATVI), Entop’s CEO Mohammad Reza Ahmadi, the star of that slick video, told local media. Reportedly, it took five years to build. Zan Times reached out to Ahmadi for comment but he has not responded. His operations manager, Ali Salmanian, said to Zan Times that the car was a private endeavour that was aided by the Taliban, which allowed it to use the ATVI facility, the air base, as well as help with publicity.
The Taliban are publicly eager to be associated with the sports car. On January 10, the regime’s top brass took part in a launch event for the Mada 9. The Taliban even devoted a primetime TV program on the state-run Radio Television Afghanistan to what it called a “celebration” of a “landmark” supercar.
Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban chief spokesman, posted a video in which the slick black car makes doughnuts in the snow to the sound of even more pounding electronic music, while quoting the Taliban economic minister, who called the car “a matter of honour for the entire nation.”
The Taliban’s minister of defence, Mullah Yaqoub Mujahid, was one of the several Taliban top brass who visited the car and handed Ahmadi a pile of cash. Mujahid also claimed that “some countries have shown interest to work jointly with us, to establish factories here, countries like the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Russia, Saudi, China, and Pakistan.”
David Booth, a Canadian automotive journalist, doubts the success of car’s mass production. “Its exterior shape is quite good,” he tells Zan Times. “It is the rest of the car that is going to be difficult. Making a supercar that performs well, and is competitive with all the other supercars in the world is very, very difficult. I just don’t see how they can do it from a country with little history of automotive production, in general, and also no history of supercars.”
Booth added, “The process of designing, engineering and building a car is so intricate that it can take years, if not decades, even in Italy, the heart of the supercar industry.”
While the sports car generated plenty of attention on social media, the vast majority of world press ignored the story, while others wrote car-focused items and the rest treated it with skepticism. “My first thought is it is a publicity stunt,” says David Booth, the automotive journalist. “If you are going to try to repair your image as an autocratic regime, how would you stumble on a supercar? Why not a boat, an airplane, a helicopter?”
Certainly, Taliban leaders seem enamoured with the car. At the event celebrating the car, Ghulam Haidar Shahamat, the head of ATVI, bragged, “In the same way we have been able to defeat empires militarily, we can defeat them in the fields of politics and economics.” Shahamat told Tolo News, “The car is made in a way that if you increase the speed, the engine is powerful enough to take it.”
Yet, Ahmadi says the engine came from a 2000 Toyota Corolla. That is far from what buyers of such supercars will want, Booth says. “The car may look like a million bucks, but if it’s got a Corolla engine, then it will go like it costs $20,000,” he explains. Perhaps that is why the videos of the car don’t show what’s under the hood or its interior finishes and design, which are essential to determining the potency and quality of any vehicle.
To one columnist in Arab News, that dichotomy between a flashy exterior and basic interior is symbolic of the Taliban itself: “A smart looking sports car with a Corolla engine sums up the Taliban. The group says whatever its international audience wants to hear to create a superficial impression, but a closer look under the hood shows something else.”
