With Afghanistan In Their Hands The Taliban Are Turning Back The Clock

KABUL, Afghanistan — Girls are barred from secondary schools and women are barred from traveling any significant distance without a male relative. Men in government offices are asked to grow beards, wear traditional Afghan clothing and prayer caps and stop working for prayers. Music is officially banned and foreign news, TV shows and movies have been removed from the public airwaves. At checkpoints along the roads, the morality police punish women who are not covered from head to toe with completely hidden burqas and headscarves in public. A year after the Taliban took over, Afghanistan seemed to be going back in time. The country’s new leaders, triumphant after two decades of rebellion, have re-established an emirate governed by a strict interpretation of Islamic law and issued a flood of decrees curtailing women’s rights, institutionalizing patriarchal customs, restricting journalists and effectively erasing many vestiges American occupation and nation building effort. Subscribe to The Morning newsletter from The New York Times For many Afghans—especially women in the cities—the sense of loss was devastating. Before the Taliban seized power, some young people realized aspirations to become doctors, lawyers and government officials, and also explored international opportunities. “Now they’re gone – all of that,” said Zakia Zahadat, 24, who worked in a government ministry after earning a college degree. She is mostly confined to the house these days, he said. “We have lost the power to choose what we want.” To enforce their edicts and stamp out dissent, the new Taliban government has used police state tactics such as door-to-door searches and arbitrary arrests — prompting widespread condemnation from international human rights monitors. These tactics have instilled an undercurrent of fear in the lives of those who oppose their rule and cut the country off from millions in development aid and foreign aid as it slides back into pariah status. The story continues That international isolation is compounding an economic and humanitarian crisis that has engulfed the country since the fall of its Western-backed government last year, and the country’s alienation is likely to deepen as US officials accuse the Taliban of harboring the al-Qaida leader this month. . Millions have been left jobless after jobs in foreign embassies, armies and non-governmental organizations disappeared almost overnight, malnourished children have flooded Kabul’s hospitals in recent months and more than half the population faces life-threatening food insecurity, according to United Nations. In one way, however, the country was better off: It is largely at peace, after decades of war that tore families apart and left no corner of Afghanistan untouched. When Western troops withdrew last year and the war ended, so did a plague that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Afghan civilians. Gone are the US raids and airstrikes, the crossfire between Afghan security forces and insurgents, the Taliban’s indiscriminate bombings and devastating suicide attacks. The relative calm has provided a welcome respite for Afghans living in rural areas, particularly in the south, whose lives have been upended by fighting for the past two decades. So far, the Taliban have also avoided returning to the brutal public spectacles of floggings, mutilations and mass executions that marked their first rule in the 1990s and widely turned international opinion against their rule. However, the Taliban’s restrictions and the economic collapse that accelerated after seizing control of the country in August 2021 have had a huge impact on the capital, Kabul, where the long occupation by Western powers has deeply affected daily life in the city. . Before the Taliban took power, men and women picnicked together in parks on weekends and chatted over cappuccinos in their cafes. Girls in knee-length dresses and jeans tore around skate parks and built robots at after-school programs. Shaved men wore western suits to work in government offices, where women held certain high positions. For the past two decades, Western donors have touted many of these aspects of life as hallmark achievements of their intervention. Now the Taliban’s vision for the country is once again reshaping the social fabric. Thousands of women who served as lawyers, judges, soldiers and police are no longer in their positions. Most working women have been confined to jobs in education or health care, serving their colleagues. The Taliban’s scrubbing of women from public spaces today feels like going back in time, many say, as the lives they’ve built over the past 20 years seem to fade away more with each passing day. Marghalai Faqirzai, 44, came of age during the first Taliban government. She got married at 17 and spent most of her time at home. “Women didn’t even know they had rights back then,” she said. But in recent years, Faqirzai earned a university degree, attending school with one of her daughters. Another daughter, Marwa Quraishi, 23, attended university and worked in a government ministry before being fired by the Taliban last summer. “I always thought my life would be better than my mother’s,” Quraishi said. “But now I see that life is going to get a lot worse for me, for her – for all of us.” With restrictions on women, a crackdown on freedom of expression and policy-making in the Taliban interim government limited to a select few men and religious scholars, most Afghans have lost all hope of helping shape their country’s future. “A lot of people have lost their sense of safety, their ability to express themselves,” said Heather Barr, deputy director of women’s rights at Human Rights Watch. “They have lost their voice – any sense that they could participate in building a country that looks like what they want.” Before the Western government collapsed last year, Fereshta Alyar, 18, was in the 12th grade and preparing to take the national university entrance exam. Every day she spent her mornings doing her homework, went to school and an after-school math program in the afternoons, and then came home to study more. For months after the Taliban seized power and closed the girls’ secondary schools indefinitely, she fell into a deep depression—the seemingly endless possibilities for her future vanished in an instant. Now she spends her days at home, trying to muster the willpower to study her old English language books on her own. Like many of her former classmates, Ayar survives with the hope of one day leaving the country, she said. The Taliban insist they have deep public support for these changes. The Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention, which issued the decrees, says the decrees helped restore Afghanistan’s traditional status as a strictly Islamic nation. “All these decrees are for the protection of women, not for the oppression of women,” said Mohammad Sadiq Akif, a ministry spokesman. Asked about the women’s travel ordinance, Akif, 33, replied: “A woman is a helpless and powerless creature. If a woman goes on a trip alone, during the trip she could face a problem that she cannot solve on her own.” He said long-distance buses and taxis had been instructed not to carry women traveling alone. Music had been banned, Akif said, “because the Prophet tells us that listening to music develops hypocrisy in the human heart.” Foreign news and entertainment programs “turned people against Afghan culture,” Akif said. Men can only visit parks on men’s days, he said, because “a man going to a park with his family might look at other women in the park, which is not good.” The Taliban’s initial promise to open secondary schools for girls across the country was seen by the international community as an important indicator of the Taliban government’s willingness to moderate. When the group’s top religious ideologues reneged on that promise in March, many Western donors halted plans to invest in long-term development programs, aid workers say. “There is a discussion among the donor community before March and after March,” said Abdallah Al Dardari, the United Nations Development Program’s resident representative in Afghanistan. In rural areas, where conservative, patriarchal social mores have dominated life for decades, many Afghans suffered under the US-backed government, which was tainted by corruption and often unable to provide public services or security. And there is no doubt that the sense of constant danger that has gripped the country both in the cities and in the countryside through 20 years of war has dissipated. “Now I can walk freely, the change is like the difference between the ground and the sky for me,” said Mohammad Ashraf Khan, 50, a resident of the Zari district of Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan. For most of the past two decades, Khan has been unable to escape the brutality of war. His 27-year-old grandson was killed on his farm after former government soldiers mistook him for a Talib militant, he said. His 17-year-old nephew was killed by a roadside bomb. The gas station he once owned burned down after fights broke out on the highway next to it. Now he can drive for hours on the road to Kandahar city without the fear that he could be killed in a sudden flash of battle. His modest income has been cut by more than 70 percent with the recession, he said, but that means less to him than the freedom that came with the end of the war. “I’m just glad the fighting is over,” he said. But for many Afghans, the sudden economic collapse, rising food prices and…