Voices: The West is still clinging to three damaging myths about the Taliban

It has been a dark year for Afghanistan. Since the fall of Kabul, life under the Taliban regime has become increasingly oppressive. The Taliban have executed former government employees, national defence security forces and some police officers; abused women’s rights activists and silenced journalists; and a week before the anniversary of their takeover they completely cut off internet access in Kabul.

The people of Afghanistan have not given up, continuing to risk their lives when fighting for an open, plural, and democratic society. But is the West ready to challenge the harmful myths the Taliban would have the world believe?

Before last summer’s offensive, Afghanistan’s civil society was active in condemning the Taliban – only 10 per cent of the population sympathised with the Islamist group. However, concerns raised by the people of Afghanistan were overlooked during US-Taliban talks in the years prior to the takeover, and these concerns continue to be downplayed amongst many in Western policy circles. In the meantime, the Taliban is systematically reversing all positive achievements of the past two decades, including the advancement of human rights, freedom of expression and tolerance.

There are three myths about the Taliban that the international community continues to perpetuate, to the detriment of the people of Afghanistan. The first – that the West’s engagement with the Taliban will lead to an advancement in human rights, particularly women’s – was held by many politicians and policymakers in the West. In the last year, women’s rights have been decimated in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have instead made every effort to eliminate women from public life. Only recently, the Taliban’s Chief of Justice published a book outlining the ideal Islamic political and administrative system. In it, to support his argument for confining women to the home, he cites a poem by 13th-century poet Saadi Shirazi: “If she gets out of her home, may it only be to her graveyard”.

The “inclusive government” promised by the Taliban would need to comprise all of Afghanistan’s ethnicities, religions and genders. Afghanistan is a country of minorities and civil society voices have been adamant that the government must reflect this. However, over 80 per cent of the Taliban’s cabinet is drawn from a single ethnic group in Afghanistan – the Pashtuns, who make up the core of Taliban forces. Representation of other ethnic communities and religious denominations, including Shia communities are merely tokenistic.

Since the Taliban are predominantly Pashtun and adhere to a strict interpretation of Deobandi Sunni Islam – hugely influenced by Salafism in Pakistani madrassas – they persecute many who fall outside of this demographic. In particular, the Shia Hazaras experience extreme persecution and fear genocide under the Taliban’s oppressively exclusive regime. As the Taliban is committed to establishing a religio-ethnocratic totalitarian regime, it is most unlikely that Western engagement with the Islamist regime would lead to an improvement in human rights.

The second myth – still widely held in Western policymaking circles – is that engagement with the Taliban is necessary to provide relief to the large numbers of the population currently facing a humanitarian crisis, and that engagement with the West may help reform the Taliban from within. The issue of refugee flow is particularly pertinent for the EU. Many in the West have adopted this position. Earlier this year the Norwegian government convened a forum for Taliban representatives in Oslo.

More recently, after a trip to Kabul, the Labour MP David Lammy, the opposition Labour Party’s chief foreign affairs spokesperson, also supported engagement with the Taliban. However, during the 1990s the Taliban were well known for establishing NGOs that controlled the delivery of international aid and diverted it to members of their own communities. When international organisations send relief, they have been lining the pockets of the Taliban. Instead of engaging with them, Western governments must use humanitarian corridors that do not involve the Taliban when providing relief to all people in need.

Across Afghanistan, people’s lives have been devastated by the Taliban’s oppressive regime. The illusion of a “Taliban 2.0”, coined during the US-Taliban Doha Agreement in 2020, has turned out to be a lie – one that deceived many. The idea was sold to the international community that the Taliban had rehabilitated since their rule during the 1990s, and that, hypothetically, they should be amenable to further reform through the deployment of carrot-and-stick policies. If anything, the Taliban have become even more ideological.

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The third myth perpetuated by the West is that there is no political alternative to the Taliban administration and that therefore, armed resistance against them should be discouraged. It is a lie to say that there is no credible alternative to the Taliban. Despite the Taliban’s claims that they have achieved total control of Afghanistan with no opposition able to challenge them, numerous resistance groups have been doing so.

The National Resistance Front (NRF) of Afghanistan has emerged as a significant challenge to Taliban rule. Importantly, these armed resistance groups, including the NRF, are all acting in self-defence – reclaiming land confiscated by the Taliban, protecting the human rights of all communities in Afghanistan, and standing up to the violently totalitarian regime.

It is also vital to acknowledge Afghanistan’s civil society, who risk their lives when protesting the Taliban’s brutal regime. Women, civil servants and human rights activists have led nonviolent resistance against the Taliban and their oppressive policies. Today’s Afghan civil society represents the achievements of the past two decades, where people have fought for a dignified, plural, diverse, democratic and free society. The Taliban have attempted to systematically destroy civil society through abduction, torture, intimidation and, ultimately, death; yet, despite all these pressures, it endures.

”The failure of Afghanistan” is a cliché regurgitated by many in the West. Yet we have seen women take to the streets and demand their rights; journalists challenge regime propaganda; and civil society risk lives to protect the country’s diverse culture. They have not failed. Inside and outside Afghanistan, civil society challenges Taliban rule, and Western governments and policymakers must re-engage with these groups. They have not given up, and neither should we.

Zalmai Nishat is Programme Lead for Central and South Asia at the Tony Blair Institute. Jemima Shelley is a researcher in the Extremism Policy Unit at the Tony Blair Institute