“To be honest, I feel like I’m living a nightmare. It’s hard to understand what we’ve been through in the last two years,” 29-year-old Afghan Mariam Marof Arvin told DW by phone. Mariam has founded a welfare organization for women and children and lives in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, which was captured by the Taliban two years ago – on August 15, 2021.

With the withdrawal of international troops, the Taliban managed to conquer the entire country within a few weeks with a lightning advance. Over the past two years, they have imposed a series of bans that severely curtail women’s rights, excluding them from public life, educational institutions and the labor market, and severely restricting their freedom of movement.

Warning before the capital falls

“I can’t understand where the hope came from that the Taliban had changed or even improved,” says Arvin, adding: “We always knew that with the Taliban in power we would lose everything we had achieved. Twenty days before the assumption of power, activists and civil society representatives in Kabul organized a press conference where we again warned the world community. We said: Look at the areas controlled by the Taliban and see how much women’s rights are despised. But no one wanted to listen to us.”

The Taliban had been able to gradually take control of larger and larger parts of the rural areas. In the areas they controlled, women were forced to conform to the traditional female pattern that was also imposed during the first Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001: women were forbidden to study or work and were only allowed to leave the house accompanied by male relatives. If a woman walked around alone, she risked a whipping.

The Taliban of 2021 would hardly be any different from the Taliban of the 1990s, says former Afghanistan Undersecretary for Peace Dr. Let’s go to DW. The Ministry of Peace was responsible for intra-Afghan peace negotiations and was disbanded after the Taliban took power. Today the Taliban have simply become more experienced and cautious. “Since they came back to power, they have issued 51 bans on women. But they did not announce them all together, so as not to scare the world community on the one hand, and not to turn Afghan society against them on the other. Their power was not yet established,” Alema explains.

The US gave hope to the Taliban

In 2018, the US had started direct talks with the Taliban. Had the Afghan government and local experts been involved, the story would have been different, believes Alema, who now lives in Germany. The US and its partners wanted to end the conflict in Afghanistan. Because even after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, the Taliban continued to put up strong armed resistance against the Afghan government and foreign troops. It was a multi-year conflict that claimed the lives of many soldiers and civilians.

Talks with the Taliban resulted in an agreement on February 29, 2020, setting a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops and NATO units. “The agreement provided for, among other things, peace talks in which the Taliban would negotiate directly with the Afghan government,” explains former deputy minister Alema. “But the Taliban showed no interest in talking to us. They knew the US would leave Afghanistan and were not willing to make concessions. And the US, by claiming that the Taliban had changed, allowed them to hope.”

The deal boosted the country’s morale

Direct negotiations with the US gave the Taliban recognition. At the Taliban’s office in Doha, Qatar, the deal that was supposed to bring peace to Afghanistan was signed: a deal that demoralized the Afghan army and greatly reduced its resistance to a subsequent Taliban advance. “What happened in Afghanistan in August 2021 was not a military triumph of the Taliban, but the result of a political decision,” analyzes journalist Kushal Asefi. “No one had any insight into the background of the negotiations with the Taliban. It seemed that Western countries had withdrawn their support for the government.”

After the Taliban took power, Asefi was forced to flee the country. As a critical journalist he could not stay in Afghanistan. “The developments of the last two years reinforce the feeling that the country has been abandoned to the Taliban. It doesn’t seem to matter what they do. At best a critical statement is published condemning their policies. Afghan society is demoralized and exhausted. The economy is in recession and over 20 million people live below the poverty line.”

“Many are only thinking about how to leave the country,” agrees activist Arvin. “I am disappointed that the world community and Afghan society capitulated so quickly. Things are worse than I feared. But Afghan civil society has a strong core that will not give up. This core should not be underestimated. I firmly believe in us.”