Why the Taliban won in Afghanistan
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I was standing outside the university as this attack was going on. They were shooting inside, throwing hand grenades. Students were crawling out of the windows to try to get away from the attackers. And I just remember standing outside and realizing the absurdity of this. They said, he will start a war. I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars.

I recognise the challenges from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and beyond. War, hunger, terrorism. I just find bombs and I find dead people. But it's a really scary thing. I'm Venetia Roney and this is Battle Lines. It's Monday, December 16th, 2024.

Now, as we enter the festive season, we're going to be rolling out a series of specials in which we take a slightly left-field look at conflict around the world and throughout history. Why do the Napoleonic Wars continue to capture our imagination? What is the art of the war memoir? And looking ahead to the future, should we fear the ever-advancing drone technology? We'll have all of that and more in the coming weeks on Battlelines.

Today, we're going to start by bringing you a film and a book from two countries that have had to grapple with multiple crises in recent years, Afghanistan and Lebanon.

Later on, I'll be speaking to journalist Suneh Engel Rasmussen, who has lived and worked in Afghanistan for nearly a decade and has written a fascinating book about the generation born since America's invasion in 2001. To reflect on 20 years of war, he spent hundreds of hours interviewing everyone from Taliban fighters to female activists. But first, we head to Lebanon, a country that's been hit by the fallout of the Syrian civil war, a refugee crisis, the port explosion, and then Covid.

A charity called Scenario has made a film about five women's stories and their attempt to grapple with a country in collapse and chaos. It was recently screened in Parliament here in the UK. I spoke to Victoria Lupton, the CEO and founder of Scenario, about the situation in Lebanon post-Cisva ideal and why she made the film. Welcome to Battlelines, Victoria. Maybe you could start by telling us a little bit about your charity Scenario and the work that they've been doing on the ground in Lebanon, particularly over the last few months.

I founded Scenario back in 2015 in response to the Syrian revolution, war and refugee crisis when up to two million Syrians came into Lebanon. We focus on providing arts programs, so specifically participatory theater, where a group come together and decide a story that they want to tell and then perform that to an audience.

And then also on play, projects of play. So training teachers how to use play in their curriculum and transforming classrooms through play. And more recently, since the escalation in Lebanon, or in fact, in the last 14 months, we have been delivering projects across the region. So we now work in Lebanon, in Jordan, Palestine, and most recently in Syria. We've been delivering projects across the West Bank this year, and we're planning to be training teachers in Gaza early next year, just as soon as we can.

Throughout the 14 months of war in the southern borders of Lebanon, we've been delivering theatre projects with communities affected in order to try to give children the space to process what they've been through and the space to recover. And since the escalation, we have delivered a real ramping up of emergency response across Lebanon. So what you had was

a quarter of the population displaced, 1.2 million people, 4,000 people killed in Lebanon in the last few months. And what we've been doing is working inside shelters for displaced people across Lebanon in order to provide families with mental health support through theatre and then children with access to education because you've had 1.1 million children out of education. You were in Lebanon quite recently, right? What

kinds of things did you see there? Yeah, exactly. So I happened to be on a flight to Lebanon on the 17th of September when the Pager explosions happened. I lived in Lebanon for 10 years and I still spend a lot of time there. And I was there with my young daughter who's three and my husband and my

You know, we were in one of the safer areas of Beirut, but I really can't describe to you the feeling of powerlessness when you know that, you know, one of the best armed militaries in the world has complete control over the skies above you. And, you know, you might have a rocket fall on your head because your neighbor happens to be someone they're targeting or even because of a failure of military intelligence. You know, just last week,

Hours before the ceasefire came into effect in Lebanon, Beirut was being absolutely pummeled. You know, there really was nowhere safe. People were fleeing in all directions trying to find somewhere safe. And a friend of mine, the contemporary artist Ali Sherry, his two parents were targeted by

in an Israeli airstrike. Both of them killed an elderly couple and it turned out to be a failure of military intelligence that killed them right before the ceasefire. So I really can't describe enough this feeling of powerlessness and a feeling like nowhere's safe. That's awful news. I'm really sorry to hear about your friend's parents.

The ceasefire, as you say, has come into effect, but it seems to be quite shaky. We're hearing news of airstrikes and violations on both sides. What are you hearing from your staff on the ground about how things are playing out? Yeah, I mean, what I know from my team is that a lot of people that we've been working with in the shelters have been returning to their homes in South Lebanon. And then because of the repeated Israeli violations of the ceasefire, a lot of them have been turning around and going back up north because

You know, they still don't feel safe to be in their villages with their families. And we're now in this situation where the ceasefire feels extremely fragile. I mean, if it can be even called a ceasefire at all. You know, we seem to have returned to where we were before the 23rd of September, which is when Israel escalated its campaign in Lebanon, where you have war.

you know, regular firing between South Lebanon and northern Israel. And we're not sure how much that's going to escalate and whether Beirut will start being targeted soon. And what does all of this mean for young people? I'm particularly interested in your view, given the scenarios work with children. I know you try to create the space for children to just be children and play and learn. What have these last few months done to children in Lebanon?

Well, maybe I can start by just giving you a story of a small girl. Lana's story particularly struck me because she's the same age as my daughter, three. She's from South Lebanon. She has been sheltering in an old school, in a former school that has been converted into a shelter in the Shouf Mountains.

for the past two months, she was participating in theater activities with us. And her mother told us that since her home was destroyed in South Lebanon in an airstrike, she hasn't been able to see doors open. She can't feel safe unless the door is closed. And so, you know, we did the first couple of theater sessions with her and our facilitators got used to closing the door every time in order for Lana to feel safe. On the third session with us,

Lana stopped the facilitator as she was closing the door and said, no, please keep the door open. I'm not going to cry anymore. So for us, that was a real sign that finally she felt safe.

And that's one of the things that I think theatre and arts and play are able to bring is this sense of safety and security. And also, with reference to that sense of powerlessness I was talking about earlier, to feel like people have a control over their own lives and their own stories. When people are creating theatre together, they have this space where they can express themselves, where they can decide what stories they want to tell and where they can be heard. I think the value of that is huge.

But in terms of the future for children in the country, the Lebanese Ministry of Education is desperately trying to reopen schools as we speak. 800,000 of the 1.2 million displaced people were returning to their homes. But I can't...

emphasize enough how fragile this feels, you know, and we've already had a very large number of children in Lebanon who have had two of the last four years off school between COVID and the economic collapse in the country. So, you know, the stakes couldn't be higher in terms of the future for Lebanese children.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier in the episode, this recent conflict with Israel is not the only thing that Lebanon has been going through. They had the port explosion, an economic crisis, COVID. Lebanon has been going through these multiple crises and conflicts without ever really finding any proper resolution. Scenaria recently helped produce a film that explores the impact of all of these crises on women, and you screened it in Parliament earlier this month. Can you tell us a bit more about that and what your aim was?

We did, exactly. So Tilka is our first documentary. It's a full-length feature. It was made on a tiny budget during COVID as a way to allow one of our plays to reach an audience because we couldn't have a live audience. And we've been absolutely amazed by the response. You know, it's received...

to awards. It's traveled in festivals around the world. And yes, we were lucky to have Helen Hayes MP kindly host a screening in parliament in partnership with CABU, the Council for Arab British Understanding. And the idea was really, I think, people, particularly in the UK, after 14 months of constant bombardment of the region being pushed into the abyss,

feel quite overwhelmed, I think, sometimes at the statistics and the numbers of people being killed. And our aim was to really try to humanize what's happening in the region with this film and really tell the story of five women handling the multiple crises facing Lebanon and understanding their lives in a much kind of deeper way. We also had

Dr. Maha Shoaib from the Center for Lebanese Studies. She's Lebanese. She was talking about the impact of the recent war on children and on education systems in Lebanon. We had Hiba Hussain, who's Scenarios country manager in Lebanon. She's also a third generation Palestinian refugee living in Lebanon, which means that she's stateless.

She doesn't have access to most of the public services that other people have. You know, she doesn't have access to public schools or public health or most jobs in Lebanon. So she was giving a personal testimony of what it's been like leading an organization in the last few months.

And as part of that screening, we had a couple of really clear calls to action for stakeholders in the UK, which I'd love to share with you. The first call that we had was for civil society to recover. So UK stakeholders to support civil society to recover. What's been happening in the last couple of months is Israel's bombing campaign has been deeply sectarian in nature.

Israeli ministers have been openly talking of targeting Shia villages, not just Hezbollah operatives, but Shia villages, and then chasing those Shia families from their villages and targeting them in the places where they're sheltering in Christian, Sunni or Druze villages. This is very dangerous. You know, it really risks

ripping apart Lebanon's very delicate social fabric and reigniting sectarian tensions in Lebanon. So we've been calling for funding from across government sources to prioritize social cohesion efforts, particularly grassroots social cohesion initiatives, and also to prioritize education in Lebanon.

And I think here Scenaria really has a key role to play in terms of bringing communities together, providing a platform for children to play and to learn and recover together, and also for adults to share stories and then try to stitch their communities back together. And then the second call was about...

was about the ceasefire. So it really feels particularly urgent today, given what I've just been talking about in terms of the violations of the ceasefire and its fragility. You know, we ask for UK stakeholders, in particular parliamentarians, to address the violations of the ceasefire

by its partner and ally Israel. And most importantly, we ask UK stakeholders to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, because that is the only way to ensure the safety of people across the region in Lebanon, in Palestine, and everywhere in the region. You know, these are very small countries, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, they're very small countries whose conflicts intrinsically linked, and they can't be bombed into peace.

So we would call for a just peace in Palestine that includes statehood for Palestinians as the only way to ensure a lasting peace across the region. Thank you so much for joining us. That's Victoria Lupton, CEO and founder of Scenario. If you would like to watch Tilka, the film she mentioned, there are screenings in London in January. Follow Scenario on social media or email them for more details. We'll link to the charity in the show notes. After the break, we look at the impact of 20 years of war on Afghanistan.

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Now, Afghanistan is a country often in the news for all the wrong reasons, particularly at the moment. The Taliban's takeover after the US withdrawal in 2021 has led to a sweeping rollback of basic rights, especially for women. How did things get so bad? To answer that question, you have to go back a bit and look at the 20 years of war that Afghans suffered through after the US-led international invasion in the wake of the 9-11 attacks.

Journalist Sune Engel Rasmussen has done exactly that in his new book, 20 Years, Hope, War and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation. Sune is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and has reported in Afghanistan since 2014, first for The Guardian and now for The Wall Street Journal.

He lived in Afghanistan for nearly a decade and has spent hundreds of hours interviewing the people at the centre of this book, from Taliban fighters to female activists. It tells the story of the war in Afghanistan since 2001 through the eyes of Afghans who grew up in the shadow of the conflict. Here's our chat.

So, Sunay, your book starts not with the fall of the Taliban when the U.S. first invaded in 2001 and not with the Taliban's return in 2021 when the U.S. left again, but with this attack on a university in Kabul in 2016. Why? That was the incident that actually inspired me to write the book originally. It was a time when I was living in Kabul and there was a lot of, I mean, obviously there was a lot of explosions and attacks all the time.

But for some reason, this was the one that really got to me. Despite the fact that I actually didn't see that much gore and blood, as you sometimes do in these attacks, the reason that it really got to me was because of the symbolism in the attack. This was an attack on the American university in Afghanistan, perpetrated by young Islamist fighters against

young people their own age who had chosen a different path in life by enrolling in this American-backed university. And that attack just really sort of hit home to me. I was standing outside the university as this attack was going on. There was shooting inside, there were foreign hand grenades, students were crawling out the windows, falling out of the windows to try and get away from the attackers. Basically sort of reminiscent of an American school shooting, I think, just in Kabul.

And I just remember standing outside and realizing the absurdity of this attack. The war in Afghanistan had been started by the U.S. to topple the Taliban and choke the threat from Islamist radicals like al-Qaeda. And now we had young Afghans who were children when the war started, fighting each other, killing each other over ideas, essentially.

And I just found that incredibly sad, but also there was a symbolism in it that I couldn't really let go. And that was like the early seed of the idea for this book, which is essentially tell the story of the war through the eyes of Afghans, because those were the people who were affected the most by the war. You call, and as you say, the story of the book is built around these chapters, each telling someone else's story. And you call these people Generation 9-11.

How significant is the legacy of that attack back in 2001 for Afghans? The attack on 9/11 or the US is not something that, you know, people are aware of it, right? But it's not as momentous an event in Afghanistan as it is in the US and for the West.

What's meant is the response to 9-11 and the toppling of the Taliban and everything that came after. A 20-year war. It's almost like two generations, actually, right? But what I portray in this book is the generation of Afghans who were kind of formed by that war. And I think no matter where you were in the country as an Afghan, your life was shaped by the response to 9-11. It was shaped by...

the US invasion, but also by the government that the coalition propped up, by the Taliban that fought against that government and the foreign coalition. And this whole influx of new ideas, influx of a lot, a lot of money, an inconceivable amount of money, and just a complete revolution of society. And a lot of that was rolled back when the Taliban came back into power, of course, but I don't think we can really overestimate the extent to which

Afghan society turned upside down over these 20 years and the people who lived through there. I want to zoom in on two of the people who are at the core of your book and who tell that story, but in very different ways, Zahra and Omari. Can you tell us a bit about them and how you met them as well? So Zahra, I met while I was a correspondent for The Guardian. I did a short profile of her. She had a book coming out that was creating quite a stir in Kabul.

In that book, it was sort of like a fictionalized version of her own story. And I met her, was very inspired by her brief interview first, and then realized there was a lot more here and a big story to tell. What was the book about? What was the story that she was telling about her life already? The reason the book was creating a stir was that she was writing about female intimacies, I guess you could say, in a way that other Afghans don't.

that other Afghan female authors hadn't done. Like, she wrote about her period, for example. She wrote about marital rape. Like, sort of grim stuff, but also stuff that was less grim, but intimate stuff, right? That in a society like the Afghan society is quite...

unheard of and taboo, really. So a lot of young women and young men who had limited exposure to these kinds of topics found that very inspiring. She wrote under a pseudonym at the time for her own safety, I think, for her own privacy. So that's kind of why I created this story. But what I was captivated by was her own personal story. And I met her at a time in her life where she had, without revealing too much of the book, had turned a corner, right?

had managed to escape an incredibly violent marriage and build her own life for her and some children in Kabul. And during the years, the eight years that I've known her since then, her life has taken more turns, obviously, that also unfold in the book. Can you give us a brief outline of her journey? Yeah, sure. So you mentioned that the book opens with this attack at the university.

But the first chapter, that's like kind of the prologue and the introduction. The first chapter is Zahra returning to Afghanistan from Iran, where she had grown up. She was born in Afghanistan, but she was only a couple of weeks old when they left Afghanistan to go to Iran. This was during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 80s. And she returned a couple of years after the attacks of 9-11.

with her husband, her children, her parents, to basically create a new life in the new Afghanistan. She returned imbued with hope and with a sense of possibility. And a lot of Afghans felt that way immediately after 9-11. Like there was a whole... The Taliban were toppled. There was money coming in. There was opportunities for women. There was opportunities for young people. But also an increased awareness of rights, for example, was really fundamentally changing Afghan society. So...

Yes, she returned at that time with this feeling of hope and possibility. And then in the succeeding years, marriage took a turn for the worse. It was already quite dire, but it took a turn for the worse. And she had to basically escape and legally, in the legal definition, kidnap her own children because they are the quality Afghan law. They were the property of her husband if her husband was incapacitated.

then it would be the property of his parents. But she basically took her children and moved from the city where she had settled with her family out in the West to Kabul and disappeared from her family and then created a new life for her and her children. And then as she kind of got a growing awareness of women's rights and what women were entitled to in Afghan law, what they were able to do in a society like Kabul, she, yeah, then built a new life. And to me,

Her story is one of great personal courage, like really impressive personal courage. She's a very impressive person. But also the symbolism in her story was important to me because we always talk about, and I think rightly so, like all the mistakes and the failures of the Afghan intervention. But I think it's also important to remember that the intervention actually gave a lot of people, especially women, new opportunities. And Zahra,

sort of represents an Afghan for whom this, you know, increased awareness of rights, new opportunities, new money coming in. There were all these NGOs that sprung up in Kabul. She was someone for whom that like gave some benefits in life and she benefited from the intervention.

We'll come back to talk more about women's rights shortly. But I also want to hear about Omari, this other central character, because he represents a very different Afghanistan, doesn't he? Very much so. And I met him right around the same time as I met Zahra. And he's younger. He at the time was 20 or 21. And he was a young Taliban fighter who grew up in a village west of Kabul in a province called Wadak, which is one of the most sort of embattled provinces in the country.

And I met him through a friend, as we often do in Afghanistan, who was a journalist, but who came from the same area as Omari. And we just met initially because I was curious. Like I thought like it was a very sort of undercover part of the conflict was the Taliban. Western journalists had always sort of had access to certain states or like Taliban officials, especially abroad or former Taliban officials who would give like

you know, the official account of the movement, or a historical perspective. But what I wanted to know was, why did tens of thousands of young men continue to join this movement? A radical, backward-looking, sort of archaic, fundamentalist, religious movement. Why did they not just join it, but choose to risk their lives for it at a time when, you know, by all measures, it appeared to be losing the war, right? Yeah.

Henry Murray was game. He was skeptical when we first met. I was the first foreigner he met who wasn't wearing a uniform. He hadn't met them in uniform either, but when he was a child, the Americans came to his village and gave out candy and gave out sweets and pencils in school and stuff like that. And then he had attacked American soldiers, but he had never sort of spoken with or had a sit-down conversation with a foreigner before.

So I think he was, he was like skeptical and wanted to make sure that I wasn't selling him out to Afghan intelligence.

But then he also had questions for me. And I knew him and I've been in touch with him for eight years since we first met. And he's always had questions for me. He's a smart guy, right? He's sort of a thinking Taliban fighter, if you can be. He's critical also of the Taliban movement. He's curious about Christianity and he's curious about

what were the Americans actually doing in Afghanistan? He was like, he was certain they were there to wage war on Islam. Just, he could not be persuaded otherwise. And the Americans committed a lot of acts to kind of reinforce that idea. So yeah, he was willing to repeatedly meet with me, but also was able to, was willing to tell his own life story and reflect on some of these things.

Well, I think we need to know the answer to how was the Taliban able to keep recruiting people even while they were on the sidelines for 20 years? Why did they maintain such enduring appeal? There's several reasons for this. But one reason is there was no lack of credible alternative for a lot of these young men in the countryside. The Afghan government that was propped up by the West was...

deeply corrupt. It was abusive. It used violence as retribution and fundamentalist, honestly, as the Taliban were or as they had been when they were in power. There were police commanders in Kandahar that ran private torture chambers. So that kind of undermined the credibility of the government for many years in the eyes of many Afghans.

There's one fundamental sort of mistake, I think, that the Americans had the West, but mostly the Americans did in Afghanistan. And I think you can have all these great intentions, like bring in this agenda, a new political agenda with human rights, women's rights, economic prosperity, democracy, all these things that you and I can agree are sort of good values and are worth striving for. But if you bring them into a country on the back of an armed invasion,

Then you turn the people who believe in your ideals, you turn them into soldiers, whether they know it or not, whether they believe it or not. You don't have to be a police officer or a soldier in the Afghan government army. You can also be a teacher. You can also be a regular government official. But if you

If you bought into that political agenda, you were seen by many in the Taliban as a quote-unquote soldier for the Americans. That became very clear, obviously, when the Americans pulled out and all these people, activists, civil society activists, politicians, people who used to work for foreign media, they were all just left alone and on the front lines alone. So I think there was...

That was a big mistake by the Americans. Another thing also is one way that I've sort of come to see the Taliban is also less, it's obviously a religious fundamentalist movement, but I compare them less to, say, Al-Qaeda than to a resistance movement like FARC in Colombia. Like, I think the Taliban were nationalists, are nationalists in their ambition.

They didn't really care that much about what happened outside of Afghanistan. Just remember, it was not the Taliban who committed 9-11. They sheltered Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda who were behind it. But the Taliban were not international terrorists. And I think it's better understood as a resistance movement like FARC, but cloaked in religious fundamentalism.

So when you ask, how were they able to recruit people? Well, resistance movements could do that because they are the only outlet for frustrated, angry young men, especially. So let's talk about the return of the Taliban. Were you there at that time? I was there around the time. I'd left a few weeks, a couple of weeks before, and then I came back pretty much straight after. So what did you notice in the months leading up to August 2021? It all went quite well.

Quickly, in the months leading up to, like from beginning in May, especially in 2021, the Taliban started seizing territory in the provinces and people started getting nervous. The Americans had put a date on their withdrawal. Joe Biden, President Biden had said by 9-11, 2021, on the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, the last soldier would leave Afghanistan. I think in the eyes of Afghans I spoke to, choosing that date,

said more about the American need for, to, to like tie a bow around the mission in a little bit of a sentimental way, like in a Hollywood way, almost rather than their sort of genuine concern for the Afghan people. I think a lot of Afghans saw that way. Why 9-11? I was like, Alex, couldn't you have just like, why, why telegraph that date? They ended up leaving before that as it were. But the Taliban knew that the Americans were leaving and they knew with the Americans that

The rest of the Western coalition would also leave and the Afghan government would be left on its own. So they got a lot of momentum from that. But once they started seizing territory in the provinces, it just went really, really fast. Because in most places, the Afghan government security forces, the army, the police, they just laid down their weapons and walked away. Why was that? Because I think half-cultivated.

half guessing here but also I mean the people that I spoke to at the time who were on the front lines told me that look like what are we fighting for here like we're on the losing side and this government can't even pay our salaries like for months and months people on the front lines hadn't been paid their salaries they could barely they got

Terrible food. They were barely fed enough. They were actually fighting the Taliban outside of the cities, you know, deep into Helmand province or Kandahar, wherever.

And I think they just felt like the government didn't have their back and they didn't know what they were fighting for. So they didn't, most people didn't feel like the gap between the current Afghani government and the Taliban was that big. It didn't feel like the Taliban was definitely the worst thing that could happen. It was, well, we're not being paid, so why bother fighting for this government? I think a lot of people were terrified of the Taliban returning to power. But if you're going to risk your life on the front line, you want to know what you're risking your life for.

And people who put down their weapons and went home were spared, at least most of them. There was definitely some retaliation after the takeover. But, you know, you could go home and be with your family. So let's fast forward to that day on August 15th in 2021 when the Taliban sweep into Kabul. What were you hearing from your friends, sources on the ground? What was the first that you heard of it?

I think the first I heard was the Taliban had entered the city from the west, actually on the side of Wardak, where Omari is from.

And I later found out that he was among the first to enter the city. He was coming from the north at the time, but one of the first units to enter the city from there. I then heard from foreign friends and Afghan friends inside the city that there were rumors that the Taliban were there. A lot of speculation about where they were, which neighborhoods people had seen them in. And then all of a sudden we just had Taliban cars driving through Kabul.

And people started fleeing towards the airport. There was a crush of people in Towing International Airport, people trying to get out on those flights that were evacuating both Afghans and foreigners. We evacuated. We as The Wall Street Journal, with The New York Times and The Washington Post, we evacuated all our staff and their family members. I would also later find out that Zahra was among the people who were trying to escape through the airport.

And yeah, I think it was parts of the city were complete chaos and other parts of the city were very quiet because there was no fighting really in the Taliban just sort of walking. Umar told me a story actually on the day when they entered Kabul. He was walking in the eastern part of the city, came up to a roundabout and saw two soldiers sitting with their weapons and he was dressed so you could easily recognize that he was a Taliban. And they just handed over their weapons to him and he walked away and said, here you go, here are the weapons.

So very little fighting. Were you surprised or did it feel inevitable by that point? I think we have to be honest here. Like many other foreigners, I was surprised. When the day came when the Taliban entered Kabul, I think we weren't surprised anymore. But up to two weeks before, maybe even a week before, we were surprised by the pace. We were surprised that the government fell and it fell so quickly. And I think a lot of us, maybe because of hope, maybe we were buoyed by hope,

had underestimated the ability of the Taliban to, I don't want to say win over the Afghan population, but at least make sure that not a majority of the population fought back, like barely anyone fought back. And I think we had kind of underestimated how much influence they had in the countryside and were able to sort of win power that easily. Let's talk about some of the resistance to the Taliban since then. One of the people whose stories you tell is Perasto. Tell us about her secret schools.

Yeah, Parastu is another really remarkable young woman who I was fortunate enough to get to know in Afghanistan from a Pashtun family. And that's relevant because most of the Taliban are Pashtuns. Obviously not every Pashtun Afghan is a sympathizer of the Taliban, but it's relevant in the sense that they are sort of traditionally known as more conservative, the more conservative side of Afghan society. And in Parastu's family, there was a lot of

to girls' education in her own family. But she always, she was raised by her own parents, her immediate family, to believe that she could do whatever she wanted to do, even though her mother never got an education. Her mother can't read or write. Paras too, and her sisters, were raised to believe that they could do anything they wanted and that education was the path to success.

fulfilling your dreams. And she, so she got that, she got a degree, she started working for the Afghan government, and then she, I'm not responding too much in the book by saying that she was forced eventually to leave the country, and then from abroad has been running this network of secret girl schools, as you probably remember the Taliban have banned women from most types of vegetation in Afghanistan. And

She stayed in Afghanistan for as long as possible, for a long time after the Taliban takeover. But then at the end, because of these schools she was running, she had to leave for her own safety.

You mentioned earlier that one of the few positives of the US Western presence in Afghanistan over those 20 years was the improvement in women's rights and issues around education for girls and women. Why did it roll back so quickly then? I think a lot of people have been surprised by how quickly two decades worth of work has completely unraveled. I mean, the Taliban's most recent edict is that women can't speak to anyone, any man,

outside of their immediate family, outside of their house and in the streets. They have to cover every part of their body, including their eyes now. How did that happen so quickly? Does it suggest that the changes were quite superficial, perhaps? Glad you asked that question, because I think there's also an issue where we need to be honest as Westerners. I think we also underestimated, I think we overestimated

the extent to which the Taliban had changed. There was a lot of people inside the Taliban, Umar included, who believed that women should be able to go to school. But the people who called the shots clearly don't. And during the peace negotiations, which went on for a few years, the Taliban implied that they had changed and a lot of the things that were kind of part and parcel of their regime in the late 1990s

But they had softened on some of those areas, including girls' education. And if they didn't say it explicitly, they certainly left negotiators, Western negotiators and representatives of the Afghan government and Afghan society with the impression that they had changed. And this is what they told the Afghan people. This is what they told people like Parasto when she was working for the president's office. I was scared that the Taliban was going to come back. People said, well, the Taliban have changed. They're still very conservative, but they're also a product

of our time, the product of the 21st century. And it's true, a lot of Taliban are there and they have changed, but clearly the people who have to file all these things

as conservative and as oppressive as they were in the 90s. And I think that's why it was rolled back so quickly. The reason that Thailand gave in the beginning was that there were some technical issues that needed to be resolved before girls could go back to school because they wanted to segregate all education. They never specified what those technical issues were that needed to be resolved. And some women have been able, some girls, as you said, have been able to get educated

Education is mostly our primary school education and it's mostly religious topics. But in general, it's been rolled back and speaks to the true nature of the Taliban regime in the 21st century. It's been three years, right? So I'm not expecting any media change. And if there's been any change, it's been for the worse for Afghanistan. What do you think is the prospect for Afghanistan in the sort of near to medium term? Is there anything that gives you hope?

I don't know if hope is the right thing to go for. I know that we like to seek refuge in hope. And I can find things that make me hopeful out of Afghanistan, sure. But I don't know if that's the most important thing. I think, well, let me start with your question. I think if I do find hope, it's in the people of Afghanistan that will not bow to pressure eternally and who will come up with new ways of being

being resilient and creative and trying to carve out lives in their own lives in Afghanistan. The Afghans hate it often when you call them resilient because it's so... But I did it anyway because it's true, but also, you know, they hate it because...

it kind of implies that things won't change and they should just sit back and be resilient and they can't do anything or they don't need help. And sometimes picture stones are going to be seen as victims of an oppressive regime. All that said, I think there is a very important fundamental difference between Afghanistan in 2001 and Afghanistan in 2024. And that comes down to this generation that I portray in the book.

They've grown up in a country with an awareness of democracy and human rights and the value of education. A lot of Afghan families who 10, 20 years ago would have been skeptical of education, especially for girls and women, have seen that, well, their female family members, their sisters, their cousins were actually able to go to school and they were fine. It wasn't necessarily an un-Islamic thing to do. They weren't necessarily taught.

on Islamic things, even at places like the American University. So that has dramatically changed, I think, the mentality in the country. And eventually the Taliban will have to deal with that. The population that the Taliban is ruling over now is a different population that they ruled over in the late '90s. So

At some point, there will be resistance, I think. What form that will take, how successful it will be, I can't predict that. But it is a fundamentally different country today. It's also a country where people have enjoyed a certain level of economic prosperity, of government services, however flawed they were. They were at a different level than they were in the 90s. And that's also something that people have come to expect more of the state.

When we talk about the Taliban, I think most people think of sort of, you know, someone with like a big bushy beard and a turban carrying an AK-47. Can you break that down for us a bit? Who actually are the Taliban? You've mentioned Omar. Can you tell us about some of the other people you've met? Yeah, well, they look pretty much like the way you describe them. The Taliban, like, it's the way Talibs look. But that's not like, it's not a uniform. It's also the way that most men in the Pashtun countryside look.

Not necessarily always with the turban, but, you know, the kind of traditional tunics they wear. There's a special sort of specific cut to your tunic, depending on where Shabba Kameez is called, or put on tomon in the Pashtun areas.

There's a specific cut to your clothes, like depending on where you come from. So you can kind of see if a person is from the south or the east or if he's from the north and then you can kind of gauge his ethnicity based on that. So yes, the Taliban dress in a certain way. That's recognizable. But that could also be like a random guy from Kandahar. And that also includes the beard that is often dyed black and things like that. Then they are, you know, I should be careful about generalizing too much, but they are sort of

conservative Muslims that are deeply skeptical of foreign influence, particularly Western influence, because that's what history has mostly exposed them to. I mean, a lot of the Taliban's quote-unquote culture that they are imposing on Afghan people is not Islamic. It's sort of really old-fashioned tribal culture that has been infused with Islam over the years. Yeah.

I want to end on a slightly more positive note, if we can. A lot of people will only know Afghanistan to do with war and oppression and the Taliban. I'd love to hear some of your stories, either from the book or from your time there, that show the other side of Afghanistan, the sort of joy in life there and things aside from conflict. Yeah. So one person at a profile in the book, Alex, the young man who in his late teens realized that he was homosexual and

Instead of retreating into himself in fear, he became a bit of an inspiration to men around him. He actually met an American contractor while he was working at a base and met this American man who was gay and basically sort of took him by the hand and let him out of the closet, by the way. And that was a revelation to Alex and he wanted to

pass that on to other men in Kabul, which can be very treacherous terrain, obviously, because it's deeply illegal, but it's also culturally deep, deep taboo in Afghan society. But he created like a whole little sort of mini community around himself, like a subculture around himself with guys who would go out together. They would party on the rooftops.

They would dance. Some of these guys would dance for money on weekdays, but then they would get together and have sort of a lot more sort of unrestrained, joyous time together. And he had dreams of opening the first gay bar or disco in Kabul. Non-alcoholic, obviously, these guys didn't drink.

but just a safe space for men. And the reason he dared to dream about that was that you can actually hang out. Like it's actually in many ways safer to be 20 gay men that hang out together and dance than it is to be 10 guys and 10 women, because then everyone sort of, everyone knows that something unsavory is taking place. But if you're just 20 men, you're just like with your, you know, with your male friends, you're just with the lads, right? Yeah.

But in the end, the people are meant to support him financially and help him out by providing a space for it, kind of a cool feat. But he was super inspiring and always managed to find and create a space for joy for himself and his friends around him. Sune Engel-Rasmussen, thank you very much for joining us on Battlelines.

His book, 20 Years, Hope, War and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation, is published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux and is out now. That's it for this episode of Battlelines. We'll be back again on Friday. See you then. Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. The producer is Yolaine Goffin. To stay on top of all of our news, analysis and dispatches from the ground in Israel and Gaza, subscribe to The Telegraph or sign up to Dispatches, which brings stories from our award-winning foreign correspondents straight to your inbox.

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