Afghanistan has seen “five years of absolute madness” under Taliban rule

In August 2021, after two decades of military involvement, the people of Afghanistan were abandoned by the United States and its allies. The Taliban, the extremist Islamist movement supported by the Pakistani intelligence services that had once sheltered Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the run-up to and following the September 11th attacks on the United States, swept back into power as the Afghans who had believed in the West’s promise of nation building were mostly left to fend for themselves as U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken implemented an ignominious flight from their responsibility to the country’s people that had been carved out by Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before Biden and Blinken took office. The images of the month of August from five years ago are hard to shake. U.S. military leaving Bagram Airfield by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the middle of the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander. Desperate Afghans huddled around the international airport in Kabul where a suicide bombing killed 169 of them along with 13 members of the United States military. A young footballer and a dentist falling from the sky to their deaths after desperately clinging to a US air force C-17 Globemaster transport plane after it took off. Since then, things have only grown more grave for the country’s more than 42 million inhabitants. The Taliban have proven themselves to be as brutal, ignorant and violently misogynistic as they ever were, barring women from secondary or higher education and severely restricting their employment and even presence in public life. The Taliban’s new Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses, instituted early this year, legalizes child marriage, denies women the right to divorce even if husband is permanently absent, and denies women legal autonomy and allows a guardian and judge to determine their fate. As the Taliban engage in sporadic armed clashes with their former sponsors from Pakistan, more than 3.7 million children face acute malnutrition. Amidst all this, the European Union and India have hosted Taliban diplomatic delegations despite the fact that last year, the International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for Taliban so-called “Supreme Leader” Haibatullah Akhundzada and “Chief Justice” Abdul Hakim Haqqani finding “reasonable grounds” they have committed crime against humanity against women and girls. To discuss the situation in Afghanistan today, we are joined again by Fereshta Abbasi, the Afghanistan Researcher for Human Rights Watch, who first spoke to our programme last year.