One year after the Taliban takeover it is hard to absorb the fact that 20 years of international efforts to reinvent Afghanistan, at a cost of a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of western and Afghan lives lost, led only to the Taliban returning to power.⁠ ⁠ At the airport visitors are greeted by a placard proclaiming: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan seeks peaceful and positive relations with the world.” But early hopes that this is a more enlightened Taliban 2.0, changed from the brutal backwardness of the 1990s, have been exposed as wishful thinking. Afghanistan remains the only place on Earth where girls are banned from high school.⁠ ⁠ The Ministry of Women’s Affairs has been replaced by the Ministry for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Women must wear a hijab and need a male escort to travel beyond 72km (45 miles — one day’s journey by camel). Civil society activists live in fear. “It’s as if we are in a box that is shrinking,” said one. Yesterday a small protest by a few brave women in Kabul was broken up by shots fired overhead after just a few minutes. Last weekend the first public flogging was held — 30 lashes each for two women and a man accused of adultery and two male thieves.⁠ ⁠ The Taliban will celebrate the anniversary of the biggest humiliation in Nato’s history tomorrow with military parades and a big gathering in their heartland of Kandahar. For the West, it has become the war everyone wants to forget.⁠ ⁠ 🔗 Click the link in our bio for the full story