{"id":32302,"date":"2021-08-17T07:13:34","date_gmt":"2021-08-17T03:13:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/?p=32302"},"modified":"2021-08-17T07:13:34","modified_gmt":"2021-08-17T03:13:34","slug":"afghanistans-unfolding-tragedy-afghan-government-collapses-taliban-seize-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/afghanistans-unfolding-tragedy-afghan-government-collapses-taliban-seize-control\/","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan’s Unfolding Tragedy – Afghan government collapses, Taliban seize control"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Taliban \u2018expect a complete handover of power.\u2019 Experts explain who the Taliban are, what life is like under their rule and how the U.S. may bear responsibility for Afghanistan\u2019s collapse<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/span>Taliban sweep into Afghan capital after government collapses. Pic – WBNG<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Panic and turmoil grip Afghanistan after Taliban insurgents captured the capital city of Kabul and the president fled on Aug. 15, 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n

There would be \u201cno transitional government in Afghanistan,\u201d Taliban officials told Reuters news service. The insurgent group \u201cexpects a complete handover of power\u201d \u2013 though many nations may not recognize a Taliban government that took power through armed struggle rather than by continuing the now-failed internationally mediated peace negotiations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fearful citizens aiming to escape the rule of radical Islamic fighters were \u201clining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings,\u201d according to the Associated Press, and overrunning the Kabul airport\u2019s tarmac as U.S. military evacuation flights tried to take off.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fall of Afghanistan came just three months after the U.S. began to withdraw its troops from the country following a 20-year war that killed 2,448 U.S. service members, 3,846 U.S. military contractors and some 66,000 Afghan national military and police.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Afghans and international observers of a certain age, history is repeating itself in Afghanistan.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Taliban \u2013 which means \u201cthe students\u201d in Pashto \u2013 seized control of Afghanistan in 1996 after capturing Kabul in the Afghan civil war. They established a government based on their extreme interpretation of Islamic Sharia law and ruled for five years. The Taliban regime was then toppled in 2001 by the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here, Afghanistan experts offer insight into the Taliban \u2013 then and now \u2013 and explain the United States\u2019 role in Afghanistan\u2019s collapse.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Taliban regime<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Have the Taliban changed since 2001?<\/span><\/p>\n

    That\u2019s the question Sher Jan Ahmadzai, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, set out to answer in his July 2021 story on the Taliban.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Ahmadzai, who is from Afghanistan, explained that, \u201cDuring the Taliban\u2019s five-year rule, women were prohibited from working, attending school or leaving home without a male relative. Men had to grow beards and wear a cap or turban.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

    Anyone not abiding by this code could be lashed, beaten or humiliated.<\/span><\/p>\n

    The rhetoric of the Taliban has moderated since 2001, Ahmadzai wrote, but their extremist beliefs have not changed.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u201cAll evidence suggests the Taliban still believe in restoring their old system of emirate, in which an unelected religious leader, or emir, was the ultimate decision-maker,\u201d given authority from God.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Already, in Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan, Ahmadzai wrote, Taliban have rulers \u201chave asked families to marry off one girl per family to their fighters; said women should not leave home without a male relative; and ordered men to pray in mosques and grow beards.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Women under \u2018fundamentalist\u2019 rule<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Afghan women may have the most to fear from the Taliban\u2019s victory.<\/span><\/p>\n

      Scholars Homa Hoodfar and Mona Tajali interviewed 15 Afghan women activists, community leaders and politicians over the past year. Few of them felt the Taliban believed in gender equality.<\/span><\/p>\n

      \u00a0\u201cReform of the Taliban is not really possible. Their core ideology is fundamentalist, particularly towards women,\u201d one 40-year-old women\u2019s rights activist from Kabul told Hoodfar and Tajali.<\/span><\/p>\n

      In international meetings and on social media, Taliban leaders suggest only that women have rights \u201caccording to Islam.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

      A schoolteacher in northern Afghanistan told the researchers, \u201cIn the beginning, when we saw the Taliban interviews on TV, we hoped for peace, as if the Taliban had changed. But when I saw the Taliban up close, they have not changed at all.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

        \n
      1. A \u2018moral tragedy\u2019<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        The United States cannot shirk moral responsibility for the human rights abuses and violence that Afghans will likely face under Taliban rule, according to University of Washington philosopher Michael Blake.<\/span><\/p>\n

        \u00a0\u201cThis ought to trouble the politicians who defend the withdrawal, and those voters who gave power to those politicians,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

        Calling the collapse of Afghanistan \u201cmorally tragic,\u201d Blake says the U.S. may have an obligation to provide refuge to Afghans who bear particular risks because they were part of the United States war effort. That includes Afghan translators, who have been targeted by the Taliban for their work with the U.S. military.<\/span><\/p>\n

        The Biden administration in July 2021 authorized a US$100 million \u201curgent\u201d expansion of the special visa program that could get up to 20,000 Afghans affiliated with the U.S. war effort out of Afghanistan and resettled abroad.<\/span><\/p>\n

        But it is difficult if not impossible now for those people to flee a country under Taliban rule. And translators are far from the only Afghans at risk of retaliation by the Taliban.<\/span><\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Global terror threat<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          The Taliban\u2019s victory in Afghanistan is also a victory for the terrorist organization al-Qaida, according to Greg Barton, chair in global Islamic politics at Deakin University in Australia.<\/span><\/p>\n

          \u201cAfghanistan was the birthplace of al-Qaida in 1988. The group gave rise to terrorist networks around the world, including\u2026al-Qaida in Iraq, which morphed into the Islamic State,\u201d writes Barton.<\/span><\/p>\n

          The U.S. originally invaded Afghanistan to hunt down and destroy al-Qaida after the group attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Afghanistan had become a haven for terrorists under Taliban rule.<\/span><\/p>\n

          With the Taliban\u2019s return to power, international terrorist organizations could \u2013 sooner than anticipated \u2013 begin openly operating out of the country again, said Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley on Aug. 15, 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n

            \n
          1. Could US forces return to Afghanistan?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            When former President Donald Trump made a deal with the Taliban to end the U.S. war in Aghanistan, acceding to a longstanding Taliban demand, public opinion polls indicated widespread support for the decision.<\/span><\/p>\n

            That gave President Joe Biden license to follow through on Trump\u2019s decision, says Thomas Alan Schwartz, a history professor at Vanderbilt University.<\/span><\/p>\n

            But a \u201crapid takeover of the country by the Taliban, with the subsequent persecution of women and domestic opponents of the regime, may well produce a backlash among millions of Americans,\u201d Schwartz wrote on Aug. 13, 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n

            Schwarz notes that \u201cthe brutality of Islamic State executions led U.S. forces back into Iraq\u201d after President George W. Bush had declared victory there. Similarly, the \u201crepression and carnage involved in a Taliban triumph\u201d could make Biden rethink a full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that would \u201ccast a profound and damaging shadow over the entire Biden presidency.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

            \n

            * Published in print edition on 17 August 2021<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

            The Taliban \u2018expect a complete handover of power.\u2019 Experts explain who the Taliban are, what life is like under their rule and how the U.S. may bear responsibility for Afghanistan\u2019s collapse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":32303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8348],"tags":[29538,4484,29539,29536,29537,21560,29534,18475,1343,17521,29535],"class_list":["post-32302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-conversation","tag-afghan-women","tag-afghanistan","tag-afghanistan-conflict","tag-afghanistan-war","tag-al-qaida","tag-religious-extremism","tag-sharia","tag-taliban","tag-terrorism","tag-the-conversation","tag-womens-rights"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Taliban-sweep-into-Afghan-capital-after-government-collapses.-Pic-WBNG.jpg?fit=1200%2C726&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-8p0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}