Taliban rule bears little resemblance to what top terrorists told the NYT a year ago

One year after President Joe Biden disaster Two weeks after the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. liquidated It is useful to look back at a decision taken in February 2020, the airstrikes carried out by the US while living with the Taliban in Kabul. to give the top terrorist leader Sirajuddin Hakkani the opportunity to explain “What do we want the Taliban to do”.

(NYT) faced harsh criticism at the time for giving Haqqani space to broadcast Taliban propaganda. Hakkani was and remains a terrorist leader The FBI wants. He is the operations commander Hakkani networkThe most dangerous militant organization in Afghanistan and a criminal group with extensive experience in kidnapping foreigners, including Americans, for profit.

equity network, appointed Founded in the 1980s by Sirajuddin Haqqani’s father, Jalaluddin, the foreign terrorist organization has close ties to al-Qaeda and is almost entirely affiliated with the Taliban. The Biden administration has made one of many unfortunate mistakes since the fall of Kabul in 2021. he said strangely The Haqqanis have nothing to do with the Taliban, a desperate media advertisement to cover up the fact that Biden handed over Afghanistan to al-Qaeda’s best friend. Within weeks, half of the top officials in the Taliban’s “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” adopted the surname Haqqani.

including Sirajuddin it happened “Minister of the Interior” and Deputy Leader of the Islamic Emirate. After Zawahiri was found in a safe house in Kabul and destroyed by a drone strike, the White House said: aforementioned “A few top leaders of the Haqqani network” were aware of its existence. The Hakkanis worked feverishly to conceal their knowledge of Zawahiri’s whereabouts and to disinfect the place of his death.

The White House added that Zawahiri was “actively involved in the planning and preparation of threats to our homeland,” so his retreat in Kabul was not a retirement villa.

Sirajeddin Hakkani February 2020 for The Taliban is described as a peace-loving, ambitious group of statesmen who only want to stop “killing and maiming”.

“We did not choose our war with a foreign coalition led by the US. We had to defend ourselves. The withdrawal of foreign troops is our first and foremost demand,” wrote Haqqani, pointing to the Taliban’s cooperation with Al-Qaeda as the reason for the invasion of Afghanistan.

In a key passage In the article, Haqqani dismissed concerns that the Taliban harbored al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, describing them as “politically motivated exaggerations by militant players from all sides of the war”.

“No Afghan is interested in allowing such groups to take over our country and turn it into a battlefield. We’ve suffered enough from outside interference. “We will take all measures, in cooperation with other Afghans, to ensure that the new Afghanistan is a bastion of stability and that no one on our land feels threatened,” he said.

Haqqani said the Taliban would create “an Islamic system where all Afghans have equal rights, women’s rights are protected from the right to education to the right to work, and where merit is the basis for equal opportunity”. . ”

Actually, it seems The Haqqani gangster regime was darkly described in an article published on Friday entitled “The Taliban rewinds time: woman is a helpless and powerless creature.” created This is the kind of medieval tyranny that human rights activists fear:

Girls are not allowed to travel long distances to secondary schools, and women are not allowed to travel long distances without male relatives. Men in government offices are told to grow beards, wear traditional Afghan clothing and caps, and stop working to pray.

Music was officially banned, and foreign news, TV shows, and movies were removed from public broadcasts. At checkpoints on the streets, the police aide scolded the women for not wearing veils from head to toe in public and not wearing a headscarf.

A year of Taliban rule makes Afghanistan look like a flashback. Successful after two decades of insurgency, the country’s new rulers re-established an emirate governed by a strict interpretation of Islamic law and issued a series of decrees that restricted women’s rights, included patriarchal practices, restricted journalists, and effectively eliminated most women. American-led power. work and efforts in nation building.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, in his 2020 article, stated that the Taliban wanted “interest and active involvement of the international community in the peace transition process”, but in practice this meant ignoring all human rights demands from the United Nations and, in fact, the flow of humanitarian aid into the country. the threat of letting poor Afghans die en masse if it stops.

“Unless the international community does more to get the Taliban to change their stance, the future of Afghans will be very bleak. and fulfilling human rights obligations,” said the panel of UN experts. aforementioned Without explaining what anyone can do to force the violent Islamic Emirate to change its lifestyle.

However, the group complained of “cutting international aid and freezing Afghan assets abroad”. The Taliban strategy of taking its own population hostage seems to be working.

“Although the Taliban made many promises to protect human rights, it not only failed to deliver on its promises, but reversed much of the progress made over the past two decades,” the commission said.

“Nowhere in the world has there been such a massive, systematic and widespread attack on women’s and girls’ rights – every aspect of their lives is limited under the guise of morality and the instrumentalization of religion.” talked about it.

A Taliban fighter stands guard at a checkpoint in Herat on August 15, 2022. Taliban fighters shout victory slogans outside the US embassy in Kabul on August 15, marking the first anniversary of their return to power in Afghanistan after a turbulent year of violations of women’s rights. rights and a deepening humanitarian crisis. (Photo: Mohsin Karimi/AFP) (Photo: Mohsin Karimi/AFP via Getty Images)

“In fact, daily reports of violence, including extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture, increased risk of exploitation of women and girls, including children and forced marriages, and violations of the rule of law, give us confidence. The Taliban do not honor their commitment to respect human rights. intend,” he said.

The UN report also pointed out that the apparent hypocrisy of the Taliban was seen as a potential violation of international law, but the only remedy it could offer was to refuse “recognition” of the Taliban regime as the legitimate government.

Ramiz Alekperov, Senior UN Assistance Coordinator aforementioned “Since the Taliban’s advance into Kabul last summer, the scale of suffering in Afghanistan has continued to increase in many regions,” he said on Monday.

“Today, more than half of the country’s population lives below the poverty line. “Almost 23 million people, many of them severely food insecure, and more than two million children suffer from malnutrition.”

Comparing the bitter realities of Afghanistan in 2022 with the promises made by Sirajuddin Haqqani in his 2020 article probably did not embarrass Haqqani and raises the question of why. Willing to broadcast enemy propaganda.

The notion that rumors from an entity like the Haqqani could provide valuable insight into the Taliban mentality seems definitively refuted. Haqqani wrote nothing in this controversial opinion that bears the slightest resemblance to what the Taliban actually did when Joe Biden gave them the keys to Afghanistan and a huge arsenal of abandoned American equipment.