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Is Afghanistan destined to return to barbarism? Some hope that the hasty and haphazard U.S. withdrawal wont lead to Taliban rule or that the jihadist group will govern more gently than before. That optimism is misplaced, and the disaster likely to come will have global consequences.

Many observers fear that the Taliban will soon re-establish an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan. Scarcely a day passes without news of their advances. They now control about half of Afghanistans roughly 400 districts. Taliban fighters are at the gates of or inside at least three important provincial capitalsHerat, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah. They have captured border crossings with Iran, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and the strategic town of Spin Boldak on the Pakistan border. At times, Afghan government troops have fled in disarray or surrendered U.S.-provided equipment.

Atrocities have accompanied the Talibans battlefield gains. A video last month purportedly showed the Taliban executing 22 Afghan government special forces after they surrendered. On Monday the U.S. and the U.K. accused the Taliban of murdering civilians in Spin Boldak.

Last month the Taliban brutalized and murdered Danish Siddiqui, an Indian Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist with Reuters. They also murdered a folksy Afghan comedian known for poking fun at them. In some places, Taliban commanders have reportedly demanded lists of widows and unmarried women between 15 and 45 to be married off to their fighters. They have murdered civil society leaders, closed girls schools, and forced women out of public roles.

They havent yet reinstated the classical Islamic punishment of amputating limbs for theft, but a Taliban spokesman told this newspaper that this was only because they first need to establish the appropriate healthcare apparatus.

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Have No Illusions About the U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan - The Wall Street Journal

Afghan Taliban fighters and villagers attend a gathering in Laghman province, Alingar district, in March 2020 as they celebrate the peace deal signed between the U.S. and the Taliban. Wali Sabawoon/NurPhoto via Getty Images hide caption

Afghan Taliban fighters and villagers attend a gathering in Laghman province, Alingar district, in March 2020 as they celebrate the peace deal signed between the U.S. and the Taliban.

Nearly two decades after U.S. forces toppled a repressive Taliban regime, the militant religious movement is again winning territory on battlefields across Afghanistan, vying to fill a power vacuum left as America prepares to exit its longest war.

The prospect of a Taliban takeover reminiscent of the movement's 1996 blitz on the capital, Kabul, has people both inside and outside Afghanistan worried about the future.

While the Taliban have been making rapid gains particularly since U.S.-led forces began a withdrawal in May few experts see a complete takeover of the capital as imminent.

However, the question remains: After 20 years in the political wilderness, how would the Taliban govern if they regained power? The short answer might be, not much differently from the last time.

"I think everyone is trying to read some pretty sparse tea leaves here," says Laurel Miller, the Asia program director for the International Crisis Group.

When the Taliban last held power, in 2001, their treatment of women who were denied education and employment and forced to wear the all-encompassing burqa as well as minorities, such as Afghanistan's mostly Shiite Hazaras, earned the country pariah status in the international community. Only Afghanistan's neighbor Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would even recognize the Taliban government.

The Taliban are keen not to repeat the mistakes of the past. In recent weeks, they have reached out for allies and to reassure past adversaries, dispatching high-level delegations to Russia, China and Iran in hopes of gaining legitimacy, if not outright support, from powerful regional players, Miller says.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi meets with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, political chief of Afghanistan's Taliban, in Tianjin, China, on July 28. Li Ran/Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images hide caption

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi meets with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, political chief of Afghanistan's Taliban, in Tianjin, China, on July 28.

"They are currently pursuing a fairly savvy foreign policy," she says, pointing to last week's visit to Beijing by a delegation of Taliban led by the movement's second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, to meet Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

The Taliban "have been very eager for public displays of their acceptance by governments around the world," Miller says.

Baradar also sat across the table from then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last year to discuss a peace deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Despite viewing Washington as the enemy, Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban, got a world stage to bolster the movement's standing, she says.

For the Taliban, these high-profile photo ops give them the legitimacy they crave but it goes further than that. Beijing has reportedly promised big investments in energy and infrastructure projects, including the building of a road network in Afghanistan.

Earlier, a Taliban delegation visited Russia, which invaded Afghanistan in 1979, setting in motion events that have led to 40 years of conflict there. The Kremlin's concern is security for the Central Asian states along its southern border, says Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. from 2008 to 2011.

Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (center) arrives with other members of the Taliban delegation for an international peace conference in Moscow in March. A delegation of the Taliban visited Moscow in July to offer assurances that their quick gains in Afghanistan don't threaten Russia or its allies in Central Asia. Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP hide caption

Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (center) arrives with other members of the Taliban delegation for an international peace conference in Moscow in March. A delegation of the Taliban visited Moscow in July to offer assurances that their quick gains in Afghanistan don't threaten Russia or its allies in Central Asia.

"Russia, China and Iran have for the last several years taken an interest in Afghanistan only to ensure that the Americans leave and leave in an embarrassment," says Haqqani, who is director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute.

Both Russia and China are concerned about "spillover," he says Russia doesn't want the Taliban to embolden unrest in Central Asia, and Beijing wants to make sure Afghanistan doesn't become a base for Uyghur separatists from China's Xinjiang region.

By casting their net wide in an effort to gain international recognition, the Taliban would not necessarily be as reliant on Pakistan, with which it has had relatively close, but nonetheless frequently strained, relations.

Having Pakistan as an ally "is less important to the Taliban now than it was in the 1990s, when it had very few governments recognizing it," says Madiha Afzal, the David M. Rubenstein fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

Pakistan is keen to avoid a civil war in Afghanistan that could trigger the type of outflow of refugees that has destabilized its western border region in the past, Afzal says. It also wants to keep the deadly Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, in check. Although the group's deadly attacks have waned in recent years, the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban could reinvigorate it.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged concerns over the rapid progress of Taliban fighters as the U.S. approaches an Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawal of its forces. "We've also seen these reports of atrocities committed by the Taliban in areas that it's taken over that are deeply, deeply troubling and certainly do not speak well to the Taliban's intentions for the country as a whole," he said during a news conference in India.

Little has changed from the time the Taliban methodically fought off or bought off warlords in the countryside in the lead-up to their 1996 victory over the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Haqqani says. Today, in areas where the Taliban have seized power, mainly in the country's more religiously conservative countryside, their conduct "is exactly what it was before."

"They have not changed at all ideologically," he says.

Much like they did in the runup to their 1996 takeover, the Taliban have implemented their own style of local government based on their interpretation of Islamic Sharia law wherever they have grabbed territory.

"They have conducted summary executions. They are beating up women. They are shutting down schools. They are blowing up clinics, and they are blowing up infrastructure," Haqqani says.

Women in regions controlled by the Taliban cannot study or even step out of the house unless they are wearing a burqa and are accompanied by a male relative. Voice of America reports that the Taliban have handed out leaflets in some areas they control ordering locals to follow many of the strict rules imposed under the previous Taliban regime.

Despite this, the Taliban leadership has made vague promises to the contrary, the Crisis Group's Miller says.

"They say women can have jobs and education, that it's consistent with Islamic principles and Afghan traditions," she says. "Well, who's going to be the judge of what Islamic principles and Afghan traditions mean and what kind of limitations that would impose?"

The extrajudicial killing of Afghan comedian Nazar Mohammad Khasha in July sparked widespread anger. "Taliban forces apparently executed [Khasha] ... because he poked fun at Taliban leaders," Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "His murder and other recent abuses demonstrate the willingness of Taliban commanders to violently crush even the tamest criticism or objection."

It's also not certain how much control the senior leadership has over rank-and-file militia members, Brookings' Afzal says.

"The political leadership presents one face," she says. "The soldiers on the ground look different."

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The Taliban Say They've Changed. Experts Aren't Buying It And Fear For Afghanistan - NPR

WASHINGTON The White House authorization of one more bombing campaign in Afghanistan, just weeks before the U.S. military mission is set to end, has a modest stated goal to buy time for Afghan security forces to marshal some kind of defense around the major cities that are under siege by a surging Taliban.

But the dozens of airstrikes, which began two weeks ago as the Taliban pushed their front lines deep into urban areas, also laid bare the big question now facing President Biden and the Pentagon as the United States seeks to wind down its longest war. Will the American air campaign continue after Aug. 31, the date the president has said would be the end of combat involvement in Afghanistan?

The White House and the Pentagon insist these are truly the final days of American combat support, after the withdrawal of most troops this summer after 20 years of war. Beginning next month, the president has said, the United States will engage militarily in Afghanistan only for counterterrorism reasons, to prevent the country from becoming a launchpad for attacks against the West. That would give Afghan security forces mere weeks to fix years of poor leadership and institutional failures, and rally their forces to defend what territory they still control.

Pentagon and White House officials say the current air campaign can blunt the Talibans momentum by destroying some of their artillery and other equipment, and lift the sagging morale of Afghan security forces.

But administration officials say the Pentagon will most likely request authorization from the president for another air campaign in the next months, should Kandahar or Kabul, the capital, appear on the verge of falling. Mr. Biden appeared to hold out that possibility last month when he said that the United States had worked out an over-the-horizon capacity that can be value added if Kabul came under serious threat, phrasing the military often uses to suggest possible airstrikes.

Such a move would foreshadow the inching toward a longer campaign that could give Mr. Biden space between his decision to withdraw American troops and an eventual fall of Kabul, and the possible specter of evacuations of the U.S. and other Western embassies, like the scene that preceded the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Americans were evacuated from a rooftop by helicopter.

Mr. Bidens aides say that he is aware of the risks, but that he remains skeptical of any effort by the Pentagon that looks as though it is prolonging the American military engagement. Still, officials say that they expect Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to approach Mr. Biden at the end of August about the possibility of continuing airstrikes into September if the Taliban look as if they are about to overrun key population centers.

Already, the Taliban have been making advances, sweeping through the Afghan countryside and closing in on the center of Kandahar. Taliban fighters launched rockets over the weekend at the airport in Kandahar, and fierce fighting near Herat shut down the airport there.

At the moment, the official line from the White House and the Pentagon is that these are truly the final days of American combat support.

My personal belief is that the closer the Taliban get to the urban areas, I think the fighting gets more intense, and they cant take advantage like they could in the rural areas, said Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the former commander of United States Central Command. As they get to the built-up areas, where theres leadership in place who will be fighting for their lives, I think those fights will become more difficult.

But that has not been the case in recent days and weeks, as Taliban fighters have entered several provincial capitals such as Kunduz in the north, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south and Herat in the west.

Even with American B-52 bombers and AC-130 gunships helping where they can, the Taliban have pushed into Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province.

One Afghan officer in the city described the situation last week as hell. Even now, with reinforcements and continued American airstrikes there were at least two on Monday morning fighting was still continuing in nearly every part of the city.

But helping Afghan partners fight for their lives is the point of the stepped-up bombing campaign, military officials said.

Mohammad Sadiq Essa, a spokesman for the Afghan Army corps fighting in Kandahar, said the U.S. strikes had been useful in busting the momentum of the Taliban. But continued strikes from both U.S. and Afghan aircraft, especially around urban areas, run the risk of causing a high number of civilian casualties.

Since the U.S. military began its official withdrawal in May, thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded the highest number recorded for the May-to-June period since the United Nations began monitoring these casualties in 2009.

Mr. Biden, in announcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops, initially gave Sept. 11 as the date when the American combat mission was to end. Then last month, he said it would wrap up by Aug. 31. That gave the Pentagon and Afghan forces just over a month to slow the Taliban surge.

Were prepared to continue this heightened level of support in the coming weeks if the Taliban continue their attacks, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the top American general overseeing operations in Afghanistan, said last week in explaining the intensified airstrikes.

What is happening now echoes the past. After the end of the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan in 2014, the Obama administration had to backtrack and permit more airstrikes for the Afghan security forces as they lost the bases and outposts that international forces had transferred to them.

In the past, air power has not been enough unless it was accompanied by a competent force on the ground. Right now, those forces are still lacking, with the Afghan military relying on an exhausted commando corps to fill in for many police officers who have fled or surrendered and army troops who refuse to fight or even venture outside their bases.

Administration and military officials have voiced conflicting views on whether the United States will continue airstrikes after Aug. 31 to prevent Afghan cities and the Afghan government, led by President Ashraf Ghani, from falling. General McKenzie declined last week to say that U.S. airstrikes would end at the end of the month.

Mr. Biden has been clear in meetings with his senior aides and advisers that continued American bombing runs from the skies over Afghanistan after the pullout are not what he wants, administration officials said. But his hand might be forced if Taliban forces are on the verge of overrunning Kandahar or even Kabul, where the United States maintains an embassy, with some 4,000 people.

The Afghan military is trying to hold key cities and roads, a strategy that American military officers have pushed for years while the Afghan security forces, backed by U.S. air power, clung to far-flung, isolated and indefensible districts after the U.S. combat mission ended in 2014. Afghan officials largely ignored the suggestions until now, unwilling to cede any territory despite its strategic insignificance to the insurgents.

So for the time being, the United States is trying to make the fight as difficult as it can for the Taliban. This is about buying time, General Votel said in an interview. Its about blunting and slowing down the Taliban and helping the Afghans to get a little more organized.

Defense Department officials said they expected the strikes, up to five a day, to continue at least through August. The attacks, carried out by armed Reaper drones and AC-130 aerial gunships, are targeting specific Taliban equipment, including heavy artillery, that could be used to threaten population centers, foreign embassies, Afghan government buildings or compounds, or airports, officials said.

A Taliban official shrugged off the presence of hulking B-52 bombers that have appeared in Afghanistans skies, though officially the group has decried the bombings as a breach of the 2020 peace agreement with the United States and promised consequences.

The American airstrikes have underscored the shortcomings of the Afghan Air Force, which U.S. officials say is overstretched and breaking down.

All of the Afghan Air Forces aircraft platforms are overtaxed due to increased requests for close air support, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance missions and aerial resupply now that the ANDSF largely lacks U.S. air support, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction said in a report released last week, referring to Afghan security forces.

The departure of all but a couple of hundred U.S. aircraft maintenance contractors has led to sharp decreases in readiness rates for five of the seven aircraft in the Afghan air fleet, the report found. But even with the litany of issues, including the loss of aircraft to Taliban fire at an increasing rate, Afghan pilots have been trying to support the forces.

Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Kabul, Afghanistan. Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

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U.S. Airstrikes in Afghanistan Could Be a Sign of What Comes Next - The New York Times

Last week more than 200 Afghan interpreters who worked with the U.S. military landed in Virginia, recipients of a special visa for those who served alongside U.S. forces. Interpreters who risked their lives serving as the eyes and voice of U.S. troops are receiving at last the administrative okay to come to America with their families to escape the Taliban.

What is not yet clear is how the story ends for the hundreds of Afghan women who supported the U.S. and NATO diplomatic effort these past two decades. And the thousands of community activists across the nation advocating for women. What happens to the women who served U.S. State Department officials, who worked in the U.S. embassy, and who implemented aid programs? Women who stood up alongside the internationals in their country to push for progress for women and girls?

Right now, Afghan women activists who came of age in the two decades following Americas 2001 toppling of the Taliban face an urgent question: do they stay in Afghanistan and continue their work on the ground or seek safety in a neighboring country or an overseas haven such as the U.S., Canada or the U.K.? A generation of Afghan women leaders who pushed for the progress of Afghan women and girls and changed their country in the process must now decide their own fate, with little chance of help from their former allies. I have had the privilege of writing about many of them since 2005 and we have stayed in touch this past decade and a half. Their journey now faces a question mark that has no right answer, only deep responsibility and real consequences.

For some, the answer is to stayat least as long as they can. That is the answer Kamila Sidiqi gave to her own question of what is next. During the Russian invasion, the Afghan civil war and Taliban rule, she never left her country. Indeed, she braved rockets falling from the sky to attend high school while her hometown of Kabul was gutted. Her father taught his nine daughters from girlhood to be patriots who served their nation and loved their land. During the 1990s, when the Taliban ruled Kabul, Sidiqi remained in the city and started a dressmaking business that gave jobs to women and girls around her neighborhood, including the daughters of Taliban. We have spent a lot of time together since 2005, discussing the future, and I have never seen her more determined, or more concerned for the next generation.

She has the ability to leave Afghanistan, but is fighting to remain. She is pushing forward with her consultancy, employing dozens and training hundreds of women on the basics of business. The political uncertainty means business of all kinds is now a question mark and securing investment an extreme challenge, and still she does not feel she can leave, despite the fear she feelsfor the first time everin her own home city. Things feel more dangerous in Afghanistan, she said, even more than in previous years, because now no place is safe from attack. Still, she says, her job is to stay and to be there for the majority of people in her country who want to support their children, earn a decent wage and fight for a better future.

The people living in Afghanistan need jobs, they need work, they need to survive, Sidiqi says. I always gave a commitment to my country to be there for it. This is the time that I have to be here for my people.

Others find themselves working overseas in order to stay safe while their hearts and heads remain in Afghanistan, focused on helping those in danger.

Wazhma Frogh, whom I first met in 2008, worked on the peace process for the past several years. She served as part of the High Peace Council and has worked since the early 2000s as a peace activist and advocate for women and girls. She cofounded the Women and Peace Studies Organization a decade ago and has played an active role in the Afghan Womens Network. The U.S. State Department gave her its Women of Courage Award in 2009. In her family are women who have broken all kinds of taboos, in public service, the private sector and academia.

She now has left nearly every one of her loved ones at home to seek safety in North America. Each night her day starts. Beginning at 11.30 pm she gets to work speaking with women who are facing danger across the provinces and seeking her help. Saturday night into Sunday morning she stayed up working to help women from Herat, Kandahar and Helmand. Airports are closed and phone lines are largely down due to the fighting. This means getting women activists to safety is not only very dangerous, but extremely difficult. Even moving a family from one district to another is not easy now, let alone from one province to another, especially with cell phone connections intermittent.

It is very complicated; you feel guilty because of the fact that I have had the opportunity to save my life that ten or a hundred or a thousand other women didnt have, Frogh said. But at the same time the chance that I am able to raise their voices makes it mean something.

Frogh wrestled with her decision, and with the reality that the people she loves most in the world remain in Afghanistan. But in the end she felt she had to continue speaking up for others and, for the sake of those who counted on her, she had to take care of herself.

There is this expectation that activists need to sacrifice their lives and know that if they are killed there will be a vigil in their names, Frogh said. But I dont want to be a vigil, I want to be a help to all those people who stood by me.

Nargis Nehan knows firsthand the weight of this personal deliberation between the need to keep herself alive and the duty to protect others. The breast cancer survivor leads an NGO focused on women and peace building. She does all she can to avoid risk, but in the end has told her mother, with whom she is close, that she is reconciled to whatever comes.

I have dedicated my life to this work, and I love what I do trying to raise the voice of those that are voiceless, Nehan said. If I have helped someone, that means more to me than having a comfortable day, so that is why I am staying here. This is the hardest timeif anyone is committed to trying to make a difference for women and girls, then this is the time.

Like Frogh, Nehan spent most of this past weekend talking to women and men in Kandahar, Helmand and Herat forced to flee their homes and their possessions as a result of the fighting. She is battling now to get more emergency support from the U.S., Europe and other NATO allies to women who spoke up for other women who now have absolutely no place to go and no place safe to which to escape. And she says there is no time for the luxury of looking away.

We have no choice but to get back to our struggle; we need to talk about peace in Afghanistan, Nehan says. We cannot get out of this responsibility, no matter how bad the situation gets. The world should not see us as victims begging for their support; women have been a consistent and loyal partner for the international community for the last 20 years. We have never changed our position no matter how hard the situation has gotten, and we will continue our struggle.

All the discussion with activists made me ask a question I had not wanted to, but now could not think how to avoid. Wasnt Nehan worried about the danger that might lie ahead if the Taliban returned to power?

There might be some of us that might be sacrificed; that is the very harsh reality of the struggle, Nehan says. But how many will they be killing? They might terrorize people, they might kill some of us to shut others up but that will not continue endlessly because women will organize and will raise their voice.

Having spent years interviewing young women like Sidiqi who served as their familys sole breadwinner under the Taliban in the 1990s, I know she is right. In the 1990s, during life under the Taliban, Afghan women started home businesses, taught school, served as doctors, worked with health-related NGOs, and taught Microsoft Office. Women made the difference between survival and starvation for their families and made the most of the narrow space they had for their communities. Unacknowledged outside their borders and underground within them, they worked for a brighter path for the next generation. This time will be no different.

Afghan women will push forward no matter what. The only question is how bad it will get for them: will the Taliban once more beat with sticks and television antennas women who challenge the status quo? Will they imprison women who break their rules and ban women from going to work or university? Will they force fathers at the threat of death to hand their daughterssometimes girls only in their teensover to marry Taliban fighters? Is there a chance the world will be there to support them diplomatically, politically and economically as they live on the front lines of extremism and fight for their futures and their countrys?

Right now the answer looks to be no. And that is a loss for all of us.

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These Women Fought For Afghanistans Future. Now They Don't Want to Leave It Behind - TIME

Passivity and withdrawal in Afghanistan is beginning to look like a short-sighted sell-out. A long-running civil war in Afghanistan will do no one any good in the long-run not even the Taliban, their henchmen in Pakistan or their ISIS and al Qaeda terrorist cronies. They will all get bogged down.

British commanders think the fight is far from over and would like to see a more dynamic approach from Britains political leadership, No10 and the Foreign Office especially.

The Biden approach, now tested on several fronts, is causing bewilderment and confusion among allies. We were assured that his foreign engagement team were thoroughly experienced and safe hands. The world would be a calmer place on their watch, as opposed to what came before under team Trump. Yet so far we seem to be getting posture without strategy or practical engagement.

Iran, under its new president Ebrahim Raisi, seems bent on testing the resolve of the US and its allies. The attack on the Mercer Street tanker last week was an escalation. The drone strike killed two crew and clearly was aimed at sinking it. The hijack on Tuesday of the Dubai-registered Asphalt Princess appears a stunt gone wrong. It is a clear sign that Tehran means to up the ante.

Biden appears to be banking on restarting the nuclear JCPOA talks a bid to re-engage Iran diplomatically, which Britain supports. But the Iranians didnt turn up to the seventh round of talks in Vienna. Meanwhile the Iranian centrifuges keep spinning.

Time for realistic strategic thinking of the kind so completely ignored in the pull-back from Afghanistan and Iraq. Four accomplished generals, Petraeus and Milley in the US, and Richards and defence chief Carter in UK, have warned about the strategy vacuum. Leaving Afghanistan to the Afghans, as Biden so inelegantly put it, is no option.

Its not even an option for the US, because whatever boils up from the international franchise extremists in Afghanistans newly ungoverned plains and mountains will surely hit us here in Europe. And it will come to America.

The generals are right to warn our political leaders about getting a grip on strategic reality.

As General Carter warns, in Afghanistan we need deterrence to avoid escalation which too often leads to miscalculation.

Strategy is no airy-fairy concept of military science from the Clausewitz laboratory. It means policy and planning for our international and national security.

Robert Fox is the Evening Standards Defence Editor

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We urgently need a strategy in Afghanistan - Evening Standard