A year into Taliban 2.0's rule, what has changed for Afghanistan?

A year ago, when Taliban fighters entered Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, former president Ashraf Ghani fled the nation to avoid ‘bloodshed’. Hours after his departure, the Taliban took control of the presidential palace in Kabul, marking the end of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The Taliban swept the entire nation in August 2021 and reinstated the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

A year into the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan, the nation’s economy, which was already suffering over the past few decades due to permanent war, has only worsened. Since the Taliban’s takeover of the war-torn nation, many development agencies have pulled out of Afghanistan, while international sanctions to cut off the Taliban government’s finances have led to a potential collapse of the economy.

According to the World Bank, the cessation of foreign aid, which previously amounted to 45 per cent of the nation’s GDP, resulted in a sharp fiscal decline, leading to the collapse of demand, as total public spending is expected to have declined by almost 60 per cent.

Millions of Afghans have plunged into poverty as by the end of 2021, half of the nation’s population of nearly 38 million were living under the poverty line, according to a report by the United Nations.

After they invaded Kabul for the second time in three decades, the Taliban promised to form a lenient form of government and uphold certain rights, including for women, that were not in their first rule (from 1996 until October 2001).

However, the Taliban government, complying with their vision of Islam, has imposed restrictions on women. While teenage girls have been shut out from secondary schools, women have been forced out of some government jobs and barred from travelling alone, without any guardian.

How is the Taliban 2.0 government any different from the Taliban 1.0 government?

The Taliban, which means "students" in the Pashto language, emerged in northern Pakistan in the early 1990s after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan. The Taliban in the 1990s promised to restore peace and security and enforce their own austere version of Sharia, or Islamic law, once in power. They ruled most parts of Afghanistan from 1996 until October 2001, when the US military overthrew them.

During their rule in the 1990s, the Taliban held out public executions of convicted murderers and adulterers and amputated those who were found guilty of theft. While men were required to grow beards and women had to wear a burka. They had also banned television, music and cinema and did not allow girls aged ten and over to go to school.

Also read: Taliban to bring new curriculum in Afghanistan for girls' education

Rakesh Sood, who served as Indian Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2008, said, "Taliban 1.0 of the 1990s was a politically unknown, militarily untested and internally united movement under Mullah Omar. The Taliban 2.0 that took power in 2021 was a politically known entity." However, he added that the group was "no different in terms of ideology; that myth was mere self-delusion on the part of the West as part of justifying its exit."

While the Taliban 2.0 government has not repeated such excesses as it did during its rule in the 1990s, multiple reports said that their fighters have killed opponents and beaten and detained journalists and citizens who protested for their rights.

Dr Shanthie Mariet D'Souza, Visiting Fellow at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin and founder, president of Mantraya, an independent research forum, said that in the last year, "Taliban 2.0 has not demonstrated any inclination to change its behaviour from its earlier past though it did try to portray a different image of itself to accrue international recognition and funding. Their harsh and regressive policies towards girls, women and minorities have remained the same. Their recent reiteration that they will continue to implement shariah underlines this.”

She added that only on a surface level, the Taliban “seem to be amenable to few ideas such as not objecting to sports such as cricket.”

“However, the hardline core remains essentially the same interspersed with few moderates who do not hold much clout,” said D'Souza.

Has the Doha peace agreement collapsed?

The Doha peace agreement was inked in February 2022 between the Taliban and the US for the smooth withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. However, with the recent killing of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, the US accused the Taliban of violating the peace agreement, which stated that Afghanistan's soil would not be used for terror activities.

“The peace treaty is a vague document and open to interpretations. If the Taliban deny knowledge of Zawahiri’s presence in Afghanistan, which they have already done, it absolves them of any violation. The peace treaty served only one prominent purpose, i.e., to facilitate the US exit from Afghanistan. The rest of the conditions were hardly met,” D’Souza said.

Rudra Chaudhuri, the director of Carnegie India, said, "The Taliban bluff the west... The US, the UK and other countries were looking for an exit, so they just dealt with (it)."

Al-Zawahiri was killed on July 31 in a drone strike carried out by the CIA in Kabul, where the Al-Qaeda leader was staying in the house of a senior Taliban leader.

On the other hand, Russia also said last month that the number of Islamic State terrorist organisation members in Afghanistan had increased three times to 6,000 since the Taliban came to power last year.

"Today there is this view that essentially the Taliban has double dealt, they promised us something (else) on the negotiating table and they have delivered something that’s totally different. That’s hypocritical, but the Taliban have not double dealt (with) anybody, they were as extremist then as they are now,” Chaudhuri, the author of Forged in Crisis: India and the United States Since 1947, added.

Can the Taliban pull Afghanistan out of a deepening economic crisis?

According to a report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) last December, Afghanistan’s GDP was likely to contract by 20 per cent within a year, from $20 billion in 2020 to $16 billion.

The report warned that this decline might reach 30 per cent in the following years, or $14 billion if urgent corrective action was not taken.

The “Taliban will not be able to pull Afghanistan out of its economic mess because it is both unwilling and unable to make the necessary policy shifts,” said Sood, distinguished fellow at ORF.

“Without western aid and assistance, it will be impossible to put the Afghan economy to be put back on track. The improbable event of (the) Taliban conceding to the western conditions for unfreezing the Afghan funds might help the country only temporarily. Sheer mismanagement of finances will result in that fund being siphoned off in no time,” said D'Souza.

Afghanistan, a nation of 40 million, is among the poorest countries in Asia. The UNDP report stated that its annual per capita income has declined from $650 in 2012 to $500 in 2020 and is expected to drop precipitously to $350 next year.

She added, “It is almost certain that Afghanistan’s dependence on countries like China and later Russia (after the war is over) could grow. There will always be a limit to how much Beijing will come to its aid, as long as (the) Taliban do not put a working governance structure and economic planning in place.”

After the fall of Kabul in August last year, the US administration led by President Joe Biden froze Afghanistan's funds in New York, saying it was unclear who had the legal authority to access the account.

In February this year, Biden said that he intended to split $3.5 billion from the account to a trust fund to support humanitarian aid in Afghanistan, while the US will keep half of the reserves for the families of the victims of the September 11 attacks.

Chaudhuri said that the US will only unfreeze the nation’s assets when “there’s a confidence that Afghan’s soil will not be used for international terrorism.”

How does Afghanistan’s future look under the shadow of the Taliban?

A prominent Taliban cleric, Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani, was killed in Kabul on August 11 in a suicide attack which ISIS claimed. Haqqani was killed a few days after publicly speaking in favour of girls being allowed to attend school.

Sood said, “It (Taliban) is still not a unified entity. Differences among themselves and with the international terrorist groups operating there will eventually surface. In (the) coming months, it may regress into warlordism that will then spawn pockets of opposition.”

As attacks by ISIS in Afghanistan have increased over the past few months, many anti-Taliban groups are also emerging in parts of Afghanistan.

D’Souza said, “The narrative that (the) Taliban control the entire country is questionable. A large number of anti-Taliban groups have been organising their activities across the country… However, wherever the Taliban control is firm, it will continue to implement its own hardline rule.”

She added, “The fragile progress that Afghanistan witnessed over the past two decades could slowly dissipate over time making it a black hole from where terrorist groups can carry out attacks globally once again.”