What’s missing? Any sign the Taliban will fulfill their end of the bargain. They got the troop withdrawal, and many of those prisoners who were released have since taken up arms and helped the group seize power across the country. In exchange, the Taliban pledged to cut ties with all terrorists, prevent Afghan territories from becoming militant havens and to engage in peace talks that were meant to lead to a ceasefire and an end to decades of war.
troops and the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners. It called for an initial drawdown of U.S. 29 last year - that excluded the elected Afghan government, the writing was on the wall. From the moment former President Donald Trump approved the deal between the U.S. “The glare of the whole world is on Afghanistan, on Kabul, on Taliban and what they do.” We will not be afraid,” Dastageer tweeted to Suhail Shaheen, a member of the group’s negotiating committee. ‘Done being victims’ĭespite the very real risk, many Afghans are continuing to speak out, with some, like Muska Dastageer, a lecturer at the Kabul-based American University of Afghanistan, directly engaging with Taliban spokesmen on Twitter. In the tried and true playbook of militia all over the world, young men are pressured to join their ranks, their dreams of a better future evaporating with those of their sisters. It has instructed its fighters to stay at the gates of Kabul until talks have concluded.īut that is cold comfort for Afghans, including the thousands of displaced people who’ve poured into the capital to escape the group’s draconian rule, as reports filter in of ugly reprisal killings, women ordered from their workplaces and into their homes, men told to grow beards and girls forbidden from attending school.
So this is where we are: The Taliban now hold most of the country, from the provinces to the regional capitals, the border crossings with most of the six neighboring countries and now, the capital, well before the full withdrawal of U.S. and other nations rushed to evacuate their citizens, leaving Afghans to their fate. There were reports Sunday of dozens of helicopter flights over Kabul as the U.S. All the citizens of Afghanistan can do is wait and worry. There’s a meeting of Taliban and Afghan government leaders in Doha on Monday, where negotiations are expected to take place for a peaceful transfer of power. This generation formed the modern Afghanistan.”
Now they are all sitting at home wondering what will happen. “I do not know what will happen to the younger generation of Afghan women. “I am seeing a lot of women who did not experience the previous Taliban period who are saying ‘we will not adopt this oppressive dress,’ ” says Khurram, who was the Afghan Youth Representative to the United Nations in 2019. In the provinces, burqa shops are reopening and the thick, blue garments that cover a woman’s body from head to toe - the repressive symbol of the Taliban’s previous rule - are becoming an expensive, must-have item. There is, however, one business that is booming. In Herat, the country’s third largest city, which fell to the Taliban on Thursday, girls who showed up at their universities were turned away, Khurram says. Just one more thing the world will be deprived of now the Taliban are back in power. With just two months left, she says, “now it seems I will never graduate.” Her monograph was on United Nations Security Council reforms and how they’ll affect special missions in countries like Afghanistan. The 22-year-old is in the final semester of her international relations degree at Kabul University. I spoke by phone with Aisha Khurram, one of those students whose academic dreams have been cut short.
Telling the shocked young women “we may not meet again,” the lecturers, along with everyone else, were evacuated, and the universities, along with schools, offices and shops, were shuttered. As the Taliban entered the Afghan capital of Kabul on Sunday, university lecturers gathered their female students for some final goodbyes.