NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

In the West, "Taliban" is a byword for all that is brutal, primitive, and fanatical, the ultimate antithesis of the tolerance and progressive attitudes of the civilized world. I wanted to see for myself how they were doing in power.

Their government--still "the Taliban" to outsiders, "the de facto authorities" to foreign governments, and "the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" in their own words--is, without a doubt, the most unusual regime on Earth. It is a near-perfect hermit kingdom: no country has recognized the Taliban government, with only a few countries operating embassies inside Kabul. The Islamic Emirate is denied representation in all global bodies, widely sanctioned, and shunned by multinational banks and corporations. The United States still offers a $10 million dollar bounty for its interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, whom it classifies as a "specially designated global terrorist." Even as the government of a large nation, the Taliban acts as a secretive armed brotherhood, opaque to outsiders. Many of its officials still operate under their noms de guerre from the insurgency, though they no longer tend to bring their AK-47s to the office. The government does not have a constitution, written or unwritten, and there are no plans to create one.

The final say on all government decisions lies with the emir, "prince of the believers"--the cleric Hibatullah Akhundzada, an alumnus of the Taliban's first government in the 1990s. Akhundzada is, much like the Taliban's founding emir Mullah Omar, nearly hermitic in his reclusiveness. Akhundzada refuses to have his photo taken, such that there is only one undated image of him available. He communicates policy decisions through written letters from Kandahar--having refused to relocate to Kabul--and makes only a few public appearances a year. More irreverent Afghans will speculate, probably wrongly, that he is dead.

Strangest of all, however, is the extraordinary degree of ideological sovereignty the Taliban seems to possess. It disdains the "blind imitation" of the West--taqlid is the Islamic term--that, in one way or another, characterizes other Islamic regimes. Unlike almost every other government in the world, it makes no reference to democracy, representation, or "the will of the people." Its mandate comes from more ancient things--conquest, negotiation, and the will of God.

Loosed from the restraints that seem to fetter other regimes, the Islamic Emirate is emboldened to do more or less as it wishes: of any Islamist government, it advances perhaps the most stringent version of Sharia law. Music has been banned in public; images of sentient beings, even store mannequins, have been veiled or defaced; corporal punishments, mainly public floggings, have been reinstated. Most controversial of all, however, are the Taliban's policies on women's education. In early 2022, by the decree of the emir, girls were banned from attending school from grades six through twelve. At the end of the year, after months in which Taliban officials promised the ban would be reversed, Akhundzada extended the policy to cover universities as well.

The backlash to the Emirate's education policies--from Westerners and bodies like the United Nations, but also from groups like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, many Afghans, and even some prominent Taliban supporters--has not dissuaded the Taliban leadership. In one of Akhundzada's rare public appearances as emir, he said that Afghanistan is "sovereign," and not in place to fulfill the wishes of others. "You are welcome to use even the atomic bomb against us," he continued, "because nothing can scare us into taking any step that is against Islam or Sharia." On walls throughout Afghan cities, the regime has emblazoned a slogan representing its remarkable confidence: "First Islam, then Afghanistan."

Yet these otherworldly aims stand in sharp contrast with the mundanity of everyday life in Afghanistan. I had been trained to view the Taliban as a sort of Islamist variant of the Khmer Rouge, intent on a total transformation of Afghan life, a movement that presided over a country whose situation the United Nations had described as "near apocalyptic." But I found few hints of the apocalypse in Afghanistan. Mostly, life was ordinary: families sat in restaurants; kids rode around on bicycles affixed with little flags of the Islamic Emirate; street vendors sold produce and clothing. It was obviously a desperately poor and undeveloped country, and it was hard to ignore the young children--almost toddlers--selling trinkets or begging for change on the streets. But this poverty, though made more severe by the country's economic isolation, was not new. Nor was it unique to Afghanistan.

On most issues, in fact, Taliban governance has had a much lighter touch than most imagined. In the bookstores of Kabul, at least, one can still find books by Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama; contraception and tobacco are available, and the Taliban has yet to regulate internet access like other Islamic governments. One can find gyms and restaurants that play Western music, sometimes with young Taliban guards as cautious patrons. Every woman wears a veil of some kind--as was the case before the Taliban took over--but the blue burqas so associated with Taliban rule in the West are worn by only a minority of women. Almost every man in Kabul has a beard, but the Taliban do not bat an eye at the clean-shaven.

Ordinary Taliban guards are prohibited from enforcing rules about Islamic personal conduct. For now, the Taliban has mostly confined itself to the path of "suggestion," like putting up signs in government offices praising men who choose to grow a beard. More blunt confrontations, usually over insufficiently modest clothing, are left to the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. But this morality police is severely understaffed: in the entirety of Kabul, a city with more people than Rome or Berlin, they have just two hundred agents. Thus they are often invisible--I did not see a single one during my time in Afghanistan. The poor logistical capacity of the state has proven the most important limit on the Taliban's ability to reshape Afghan life.

In truth, Taliban rule seems to have done surprisingly little to change the contours of everyday life. Once it took power in Kabul, the Emirate declared a general amnesty, promising protection not only for minorities like the Shia but also for employees of the previous government, including soldiers who had fought against it. This extended even to high-level figures like Hamid Karzai, the Republic's first president, who continues to reside in Kabul. Bureaucrats of the former regime have been retained in their posts, with Taliban mujahideen installed above or beside them. The animosities of the war years have simmered, at least for now. In a cafeteria in the Islamic Emirate's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I enjoyed a simple meal of rice and bread alongside both holdover bureaucrats and the Taliban officials who worked beside them--thinking, the whole time, that they had been trying to kill each other a few years ago.

In most areas of public administration, the new government is largely continuous with the old one. On signs for government offices, "Islamic Republic" has been hastily painted over and replaced with a handwritten "Islamic Emirate." For prosaic matters unlikely to excite the special interest of Taliban clerics, government policies have simply been carried over from the Republic. Even visa stamps still read "Islamic Republic of Afghanistan" and carry the Republic's official colors.

At these practical arts of governance, the Taliban has proven itself surprisingly adept. Dishonest officials, whose venality had defined the previous regime, have been disciplined or removed from office; even critics of the Islamic Emirate's policies will acknowledge its success in reducing corruption. With less corruption, tax collection has grown more efficient: increased revenue from taxation prevented a fiscal crisis after the withdrawal of foreign aid, which made up three-quarters of the previous regime's budget. This has allowed the Islamic Emirate to maintain most government services undisturbed and continue paying government employees, including some who have refused to return to work since the takeover. They have even commenced new infrastructure projects: Afghanistan's road system, which had degraded significantly due to the war, is being refurbished and expanded.

Taliban officials thus find themselves reborn as ordinary bureaucrats. The Taliban's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues statements on climate change summits, Malaysian elections, and International Women's Day. My own discussions with Taliban diplomats betrayed a clear eagerness for foreign acceptance, investment, and, if at all possible, official recognition. In their public communications, Taliban officials can seem comically similar to bureaucrats from any other government: they trumpet their success in increasing tax revenues and expanding fruit exports.

The longer I stayed in Afghanistan, the more the contradiction between the Islamic Emirate's otherworldly aspirations and the compromises demanded for stability and development became evident. 

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