Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan August 2026-

The West Still Doesn’t Understand the Taliban
How to Engage With the New Afghan Regime

The Taliban seized power on Aug. 15, 2021, as U.S. and NATO forces withdrew from the country after two decades of war.

Sun 15 Aug 2021
The fall of Kabul: a 20-year mission collapses in a single day
President Ashraf Ghani flees Afghanistan as Taliban sweep into city to seize control of country
The final collapse of the 20-year western mission to Afghanistan took only a single day as Taliban gunmen entered the capital, Kabul, on Sunday, President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and America abandoned its embassy in panic.
Even the militants themselves were surprised by the speed of the takeover, co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar admitted in a video statement in the evening. Now the group faces the challenge of ruling, he added. They are expected to proclaim a new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan soon.
Many in Kabul do not trust promises made by the former insurgents of an amnesty for their old enemies and those, like women’s rights activists, who sought a different future for Afghanistan. The airport was mobbed with thousands of people desperate to escape. In the evening they flooded on to the runway, halting all air traffic.
In deeply humiliating scenes for the Biden administration, less than a month before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, smoke spiralled from the embassy compound as staff hastily destroyed documents, before a final group took down the stars and stripes flag and headed to the airport by military helicopter. —The Guardian)

Women’s prize for non‑fiction winner, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, gives voice to the people of Afghanistan
The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan is about an institution tasked with the job of housing strangers – Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel. Through this hotel, which sits high on a hill, and the people within it, seasoned BBC journalist and current foreign affairs editor, Lyse Doucet, attempts [to] tell an immersive history of the sweeping changes that have faced Afghanistan since it opened in 1969. —The Conversation

15 August
Concerns grow over increased global ties with Taliban in Afghanistan
Campaigners fear deeper diplomatic contacts are undermining demands for improvements in human rights
(The Guardian)  The Taliban in Afghanistan have launched a diplomatic effort to end their isolation as major regional and international powers show a readiness to engage more closely with the repressive regime despite its systematic human rights abuses.
The new contacts stem from a combination of regional security concerns, pressure in the west to reduce illegal immigration and a general recognition that the Taliban are unlikely to be forced from power in the foreseeable future.
Five years after the Taliban took power, an increasing number of countries are renewing ties or scaling up diplomatic contacts with the hardline Islamists, who seized power in Kabul in 2021 after 20 years of brutal insurgent warfare.
Campaigners fear that the individual contacts by different countries risk undermining “coherent, consistent” demands for an improvement in human rights in return for any diplomatic concession
The United Nations described a recent “cascade of [Taliban] edicts and laws” that have banned women from universities and most employment, denied teenage girls education and imposed strict dress codes. Minorities have been persecuted, while activists and journalists face repression. Afghanistan has become a “graveyard for human rights,” the UN said in March.
India, Qatar, China, Iran and several central Asian states all recently welcomed Taliban officials or opened new channels of communication. Russia, which recognised the Taliban government in Kabul just over a year ago, signed a military cooperation agreement last month. In June, the European Union held talks with Taliban officials in Brussels about returning failed asylum-seekers to Afghanistan. Individual European countries have also deepened their own contacts with Kabul.

The Afghanistan Reckoning
Forever Wars and the Costs of Collective Forgetting
Foreign Affairs July/August)
When the United States completed its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan five years ago, many Americans feared that the country would once again become a safe haven for terrorists. But as Carter Malkasian wrote in an essay earlier this year, “nothing of the sort occurred.” In fact, the Taliban have largely contained terrorism, refrained from ruthless oppression, and ushered in the country’s longest stretch of peace since 1979. Malkasian, who advised U.S. officials on and off during the war, writes movingly on why so many American leaders and policy advisers, himself included, “so badly misjudged the risk of withdrawing”—and what the United States risks today by collectively forgetting the “anguish” of Afghanistan.

12 August
Is it time to talk to the Taliban?
The West’s Afghanistan strategy has failed. In 2021, America withdrew from the country, ending two decades of fighting and nation-building with almost nothing to show for it. The Taliban swiftly reclaimed power and imposed a brutal regime; Western countries opted to isolate the country and do their best to forget the whole sorry misadventure. Five years on, this shun-and-shrug approach has achieved little. Is it time to try something new?
Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-chief
(The Economist) … Afghanistan[‘s]’ …recent history marks a humiliation for Western liberal interventionism, just as in generations past it was the graveyard of empires. The Taliban’s repression of women and girls, repression that if anything is intensifying, is a shocking moral stain.
This week, to mark the fifth anniversary of America’s embarrassing and chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, we are going to focus The Insider on what is going on inside Afghanistan. Has the strategy of isolating the country’s regime by way of sanctions, frozen assets and withholding diplomatic recognition worked? What is life like today for ordinary Afghans? And, when it comes to the world’s approach to dealing with the Taliban, is it time to try something new?
Tom Sasse, The Economist’s South Asia bureau chief, recently returned from a 1,000km road trip inside Afghanistan. He travelled from Kabul to Herat and Kandahar, meeting Taliban officials, business figures, village elders and school girls. He will join us from Delhi tomorrow to explain what he learnt from his travels. …
In the first part of tomorrow’s discussion we’ll explore what Afghanistan is like today. I’ll be relying heavily on Tom’s insights. In conversations since his trip, he has described to me a country gripped by a grim calm: heavily armed men patrol the streets, music is banned, poverty and unemployment are rife. We’ll also examine how countries are behaving towards the Taliban regime. Only Russia formally recognises the de facto government, but others are also in contact with it. The European Union, hypocritically, won’t offer recognition, but recently invited Taliban officials to Brussels to discuss migrant repatriation. …
In the second half of the show, we’ll ask what needs to change. Is it time to end the policy of isolation? How can we best encourage moderation? What’s in the interests of Western democracies? And, most important, what is most likely to help the Afghan people? …

11 August
2.4 million Afghan girls shut out of secondary school 5 years after Taliban takeover, UN says
(AP) — An estimated 2.4 million Afghan girls remain excluded from secondary education five years after the Taliban took over the country, a U.N. agency said Tuesday, renewing a call for an immediate restoration of their right to education.
UNESCO, the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said the continued exclusion of women and girls from education amounted to a grave violation of their fundamental rights.
“Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls and women are formally banned from secondary and higher education,” Hoda Jaberian, UNESCO’s program coordinator for education in emergencies, said in a news conference by video. “Five years is not a temporary interruption in a child’s education. It is clearly almost an entire secondary school cycle.”
Jaberian said: “UNESCO continues to call for the immediate and unconditional restoration of girls and women’s right to secondary and higher education. It is not negotiable. It’s a basic human right and we reiterate that there is no substitute for this.”