ABSTRACT This article examines the impact of armed conflict on the education system in Afghanistan between 2001–2021. Using critical ethnography as its main research approach, the article draws on the perceptions and experiences of varying educational stakeholders (n = 103) to identify different forms of setbacks, which the wider educational community endured at the intersection of international intervention and an armed conflict. The article builds critical insights into the dynamic and simultaneous processes of interactions and relationships between armed conflict and education and the mechanisms that facilitated their sustenance, and its implications for education. The article illustrates how the education system in Afghanistan was implicated by persistent violence under the disguise of recovery interventions and implicated educational stakeholders’ agency that is crucial for enabling educational transformations amid violence and fragility.