Nearly three years after the Taliban retook Kabul, they plan to resume the brutal practice of stoning women for adultery. “You say it’s a violation of women’s rights when we stone them to death,” Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada said in a March audio message aired on state television, apparently directed at Western critics. “But we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. . . . We both say we defend human rights—we do it as God’s representative and you as the devil’s.”
The return of barbarism to Afghanistan shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Shariah. Since returning to power, the Taliban have brought back public executions, banned girls from attending school beyond sixth grade, and carried out hundreds of public floggings. Nonetheless, the Taliban 2.0—like the Taliban 1.0, which ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001—offer lessons to the West.
First, their actions expose the naiveté of Western analysts who argued that the Taliban would be more moderate the second time around. Except for reluctantly accepting television and the internet as unavoidable aspects of 21st-century life, they appear as committed as ever to instituting its archaic and bleak vision of Allah’s law on earth.
In a phone interview from London, Tamim Asey, a former Afghan deputy defense minister who now heads the Afghanistan-focused Institute of War and Peace Studies, says the Taliban are “involved in a state-building exercise, the likes of which you have never seen in the Islamic world. They say they are going to establish the purest Islamic system. They view all other Islamic countries as under the influence of infidels.”
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Author: Ruth King
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