Until the collapse of Afghanistan’s US-backed government in August 2021, few knew clearly what the Taliban wanted once they had returned to power. Some western officials and observers hoped for a big change from the regime, which had governed the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in the 1990s.
This time, they hoped, a more sophisticated and pragmatic vision might have replaced the Taliban’s previously extremist approach. Some also argued that the rest of the world had a moral responsibility to approach Afghanistan’s new rulers with cautious optimism. Engagement should be the key. Anything else risked condemning the country and its population to isolation and economic hardship.
Others weren’t convinced. During the negotiations that led to the February 2020 Doha agreement, the Taliban’s position on post-settlement Afghanistan’s politics remained ambiguous. The group continued this vague posture during the subsequent intra-Afghan dialogues with the former Afghan government.
Then, appearing in a press conference three days after Taliban forces took control of Kabul, its spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, appeared to give reassurances the new regime would respect women’s rights “within the norms of Islamic law”.
In the ensuing three years, the Taliban’s fundamentalist regime has continued to suffer from weak legitimacy, despite taking pains initially to cultivate a conciliatory image compared to its harsh rule in the 1990s. However, what had appeared to some to be Taliban 2.0 has increasingly looked like the old, harsh and fundamentalist Taliban as the regime has grown more confident in its hold on power.
Since 2021, Hibatullah Akhundzada, the leader of Afghanistan’s Islamic Emirate, has gradually issued more than 50 decrees that affect most areas of society. Many hard-won achievements under the former republic, such as freedom of expression and the press, have been suppressed. The regime has forced into disappearance, imprisoned or murdered many former government members, despite announcing a general amnesty.
In their treatment of women, including forbidding education after the age of 12, restrictions have become so harsh that the resulting subjugation has been labelled “gender apartheid” by many journalists, academics and activists. Many female students have had to flee the country. Most recently a group of women medical students made the news after they were granted scholarships to go to UK to complete their studies….
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Scores of executions feared in Iran as 23-year-old hanged in public killing
Femicides: 2000 Turkish women killed by men since Erdogan left Womens Rights Convention
Nabil Salih: An Iraqi in the capital of the US Empire / Tom Engelhardt: A Nation Unmade by War
Protests in Iran at death of Kurdish woman after arrest by morality police
The Amini effect: The impact of a single life and the importance of accountability
Book review: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi
Sabry Hafez: the Novel, Politics and Islam – Haydar Haydar’s Banquet for Seaweed
The Disappeared: How the fatwa changed a writer’s life
Book review: Kabir and the Question of Modernity
Taliban’s war on women must be formally recognized as gender apartheid
Afghan women are being ‘erased from everything’
The Taliban’s fear of art is killing Afghan culture
‘We can’t remain silent’: journalists refuse to give up despite Taliban terror
One Afghan refugee’s stunning photographs of the country’s ‘many stories that need to be told’
After the truth-shower 