When the United States and the Taliban signed the Doha deal in 2020, there were a lot of assumptions regarding the Taliban 2.0— many of these were to be proved wrong later. A key among them was the group’s supposed realization about a changed Afghanistan, with freedom of speech, vibrant media, and women’s rights to education and work.

However, many analysts and experts failed to read the Taliban’s own determination to roll back all this hard-earned democratic and social progress—now gone, almost at the speed at which the Taliban swept each of Afghan provincial capitals in the month of August. Last week, the group abolished a number of institutions and ministries, including the Independent Election Commission and Electoral Complaint Commission, terming them all “unnecessary”. 

With the Republic long gone, these elections bodies had been existing only on paper and were also among the key remnants of the old regime. Furthermore, the Taliban has never hidden their aversion to what they call the western values of democracy through free elections. 

Bilal Karimi, one of the Taliban’s spokesperson, said that these “institutions” were unnecessary in “the present context.” He, however, added, carefully, that the Islamic Emirate (the Taliban) would revive them in the future if they ever feel need in the future— an assurance that finds little takers now. 

Zabiullah Mujahid, the group’s deputy minister for information and culture, said the closure was because of economic woes, terming them “a burden on the government,” according to local reports. 

Mujahid added that they would form a grand and common council to govern the country. Going through the group’s own record in the last four months, it is unlikely the group would let leaders from non-Taliban backgrounds to these councils.

Despite offering repeated assurances on women’s rights, the Taliban’s actions run contrary to its words. The Taliban’s Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice— largely a moral policing body thats came up replacing the earlier Ministry of Women Affairs—issued fresh instruction to taxi drivers, barring them from picking up female passengers without hijab.

Drivers were also instructed not to pick up women passengers without male relatives for more than 45 miles. The new rulers seem ignorant about the fact that in Afghanistan, a country at war for almost 42 years, there are thousands of displaced women, raising their children, on their own. 

Despite intense pressure from the international community, the Taliban is yet to make an announcement allowing girls of higher secondary level at a nationwide scale to schools. Within the country, there have been sporadic protests on the issue. Although the group has so far allowed small protests, it has clamped down hard both on media as well as on protestors whenever the size and intensity of a protest grow. 

Sanctions and severity of the unfolding humanitarian crisis are failing to change the regime behavior. Instead, the Taliban has been seen using the humanitarian crisis, in its propaganda to advance its own domestic legitimacy, to project it as a deliberate act of punishing Afghans for the US defeat 

(SAM)