“Victory and Freedom!” 

This chant rang out from central Kabul this week as hundreds of Taliban fighters and commanders gathered to mark a year since the group swept into Kabul ending a long, brutal war and upending the lives of millions. 

As expected, the return of this oppressive regime has in fact resulted in loss of freedoms for Afghan people, especially women.  Over the last year the Taliban have implemented the following policies:

• Blocked Afghan girls from getting an education
• Fired 125,000 women from government jobs
• Revoked women’s right to drive
• Fired 80 per cent of female journalists
• Controlled what women wear and where they can travel
• Changed the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to the Ministry of Vice and Virtue

You can find out more in this thoughtful article in Women’s Agenda. 

I have just finished reading August in Kabul by Australian photo journalist Andrew Quilty. One of the last foreign journalists left in Kabul as Afghanistan fell, Quilty shows through personal stories how naïve the Allied Forces, led by the Americans, were in believing they could negotiate towards a peaceful power-sharing.

“It must be said that the Taliban’s military victory would never have come without the ineptitude and malfeasance of successive administrations in Kabul and their armed forces, and the hubris of the American-led international military coalition,” writes Quilty.

Another foreign affairs expert, David Kilcullen, has co-authored a book with Greg Mills The Ledger: Accounting for failure in Afghanistan which delves into 20 years of mistakes and missteps by the West in Afghanistan. “After confidently assuring everybody that the Taliban were not likely to come anywhere near Kabul within a year, we saw the collapse of 16 out of the 34 provinces in about two days, and all of the rest bar one in another week.” You can listen to a terrific interview with Kilcullen here. 

Neither of these books are easy reads and they made me angry on so many levels: what a waste of twenty years of peacebuilding in the country; fear for women under Taliban rule again; and how incompetent the evacuation was for Afghan people who had collaborated with the allies. I am grateful that family of my friends Farid and Fauzia were able to get out and start a new life here in Western Australia.