The Taliban Is Just as Bad as It Always Was
As international attention subsides, the group is reverting to its old tactics.
By Yasmeen Serhan
Staff Writer
October 18, 2021 04:26 PM ET
From the moment when scores of Afghans were filmed clinging to an American aircraft in a desperate bid to escape Taliban rule to the day of the departure of the last American soldier, international attention was trained almost exclusively on Afghanistan—until it wasn’t. By mid-September, just weeks after the Taliban took control of Kabul, the sense of crisis that had galvanized the world’s focus began to wane. Today, Afghanistan has all but disappeared from daily headlines.
This is the opportunity that the Taliban has likely been waiting for. In the initial days and weeks that followed the group’s recapture of Kabul, it reaffirmed its commitment, set out in a 2020 peace deal with the United States, to leave its old way of doing things in the past. The Taliban pledged that under new leadership, women, who were once subject to some of the group’s most hard-line restrictions, would have their rights respected (albeit within a strict interpretation of Islamic law). The press would not be inhibited from doing its work so long as it didn’t go against “national values.” Those who had worked with the former Afghan government, or alongside the U.S. and other NATO forces, would not be subject to reprisals.
Such promises were expedient then, when foreign militaries were in the process of leaving Afghanistan—a departure that the Taliban was keen to see happen without delay. They were also welcomed by the U.S. and others, who seemed to believe that the group could be pressured into keeping its word.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/10/taliban-just-bad-it-always-was/186158/
