Bitter anniversary: Old fears resurface as Taliban mark year in power in Afghanistan
Al Qaeda’s top leader was hiding out inside the country with no apparent fear of arrest. Women and religious minorities face systematic oppression, international aid groups say, as the government rolls back basic human rights and steadily imposes a media blackout to cover it up.
That description seems to fit Afghanistan today just as well as it did in the late 1990s when the Taliban’s first reign created one of the world’s most repressive societies and a sanctuary from which Islamic terrorists, led by Osama bin Laden, launched the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
A year after the final U.S. and foreign combat troops left Afghanistan after two decades of war, critics say it is jarring but not at all surprising that the country has fallen so far backward so quickly. Indeed, the Taliban’s second round of power looks eerily similar to the first in its brutality, discrimination and inability or unwillingness to keep the world’s most wanted terrorists out of the country. Now, as then, the leaders of one of the world’s most desperately poor countries are shut off from the West and struggling to jump-start the economy.
It’s an especially bitter pill for President Biden, whose political popularity has yet to recover from the chaotic and bloody events in Kabul in August 2021.
For the Biden administration, any hope that the Taliban would follow a different playbook this time has been dashed.
“There has not been any mystery or surprise about Taliban rule. They are unrepentantly brutal and ideological. They never changed, despite promises to the contrary,” said former Defense Department official Michael Rubin, now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Mr. Rubin studies Afghanistan extensively and has been highly critical of the U.S. withdrawal and the lack of accountability of high-level Biden administration officials involved in the operation.
“The only real surprise is just how uninterested Congress has been in holding to account those who botched the withdrawal,” Mr. Rubin said.
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Never Forget
