Taliban’s push to the past

EDITORIAL: No beard, no work: Taliban ordered government employees on Monday. A day before they off-loaded from a national airliner the female passengers who were not escorted by ‘mehram’ or adult male relatives, and they also banned entry of girl and women into the public park when men are there and vice versa. Restrictions on foreign media have been tightened and local media houses warned that their women staff shouldn’t come on screen without wearing hijab.

All of it was unexpected, given the Talban leadership’s assurances as Kabul fell to the Taliban militia in August last year. Assurances were given that the Taliban government would not revisit its forbidding socio-cultural past as it obtained during their first stint in power and pledges were made that there would be no political vendetta. Of particular interest to the women folk in Afghanistan was the Taliban’s commitment that girls would go to schools, women will work in offices along with men and they need not have male escorts as they leave their homes. But that appears to be no more the case. Taliban rulers have now imposed sweeping restrictions on freedoms, mostly targeting girls and women.

Why this stunning U-turn? Why Taliban are turning back the clock in Afghanistan with a flurry of repressive edicts? The answer to these questions is not available so far, except for two conjectures. Firstly, the pragmatists who constitute the young battle-winners and want Afghanistan to be a normal society as around the world, have lost to the old-timers who still cherish to revive the Mulla Omar’s Emirate of 1996-2001.

According to some reports, the push to the past emerged from a meeting in Kandahar last week that was chaired by the supreme leader Habitullah Akhundzada and a decision was made to revive the spirit and action that prevailed in Mulla Omar’s emirate. Secondly, it is the Talban’s reaction to the world community’s unanimous decision to deny recognition and lingering imposition of sanctions. To put it crudely, they say even when on assumption of power in Kabul they changed their socio-cultural and political mindset the international community remained indifferent; rather it worked out a joint stand against their government. So, why not to remain stuck in the groove? And the net sufferers of this disagreement are the ordinary people of Afghanistan, and not the Taliban per se. Even when some foreign governments and humanitarian organizations bypassed the Taliban government and reached the people the relief that reaches the people is very little. There got to be an out-of-box solution.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022