HASfter the Taliban returned to power on August 15, 2021, no knowledgeable observer of Afghanistan believed they could have changed. All the skeptics were right. Despite initial promises aimed at reassuring, the new leaders were quick to close some timidly ajar doors.
A year later, this reinstallation in power is already burdened with a dismal record. Women are now banned from education and they can only move with a mentor, veiled from head to toe. All forms of freedom of expression have been muzzled, and many former employees of the overthrown regime are harassed, forced into hiding or into exile.
After hinting that teenage girls could study, contrary to their first experience of power (1996-2001), the Taliban abruptly reversed course on March 23 by closing secondary schools for girls just a few hours after their reopening.
If this change of foot undoubtedly reflects nuances, even possible tensions between the main factions of the new authorities, the decision has nonetheless had serious consequences for young Afghan women in the cities. They had become accustomed, after the fall of the first Taliban regime, to receiving an education and following their own path.
The empty promises of the new masters of Kabul were no doubt intended to facilitate the recognition of their regime. No country in the world, not even Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, however, has taken the plunge. These same promises, moreover remained vague, were also addressed to donors, while billions of dollars of reserves of the previous government have been blocked abroad since its defeat. Because to say that the country’s economic situation is otherwise disastrous is understatement: entire regions of Afghanistan are on the verge of famine.
The impasse is therefore total: the non-recognition of the regime does not encourage the latter to give signs of openness and its extreme ideological tension does not offer any prospect of diplomatic progress on the part of the international community…
In these times of global instability, as the war in Ukraine and Chinese aggression towards Taiwan garner attention, the sad fate of Afghanistan has been pushed into the background. As if, after the initial indignation aroused by the return to Kabul of the most obscurantist Islamist regime in the world, interest in this country had suddenly vaporized in the fog of other conflicts.
The only good news for Afghanistan: since the Soviet invasion of 1979, which gave the start to four decades of permanent wars, the country had never experienced such a lull. The only occasional skirmishes oppose the Taliban to supporters of the deposed regime, or the local franchise of the jihadist movement of the Islamic State, but, in the long term, even this calm may not be lasting.
In the meantime, and even if the recognition of such a regime is not an option for the overwhelming majority of countries, the urgency nevertheless calls for the expansion and reinforcement of humanitarian aid granted in dribs and drabs, in order to prevent a country exhausted from tipping over for good into the abyss. The Afghan people do not have to pay such an exorbitant price for the return of the Taliban.
Also listen In Afghanistan, nearly a year after the Taliban took power