Who in their right mind would go to Afghanistan today? It is hard to think of a country with a more negative reputation. For years, Afghanistan was one vast abattoir, jostling with Somalia and Syria for the title of Most Dangerous Nation on Earth. The State Department still advises U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to the country at all costs, due to “armed conflict, civil unrest, crime, terrorism, and kidnapping.” The name alone invites a string of unsettling associations—suicide bombings, backward customs, wretched poverty—that drive away anyone sensible. Afghans recognize and detest this reputation, but it is hard to escape. Even I, curious enough to make the journey there, spent a few anxious days before my trip researching the current market rates for foreign hostages.
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The longer I stayed in Afghanistan, the more the contradiction between the Islamic Emirate’s otherworldly aspirations and the compromises demanded for stability and development became evident. The telos of the Taliban governance project remained indeterminate. Was their project a religiously-inspired developmentalist nationalism, conservative but conciliatory, a tempered “Taliban 2.0”? Or was it, as [Hibatullah] Akhundzada and the hardliners around him seemed to want, a vision of total purity, a complete rejection of Western influence—an outpost of medieval Islam, permanently segregated from the outside world?
For now, the emir’s vision is winning. But his program is hegemonic neither in Afghanistan, where even many Taliban supporters have criticized his most hardline edicts, nor within the Taliban itself. Most Taliban officials will do little to hide their unhappiness with Akhundzada’s policies on girls’ education.
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Seeing these disagreements, many Afghans, prone to rumor in a country whose politics are often mysterious and conspiratorial, will speculate about a factional conflict within the upper ranks of the Emirate. There is talk of palace intrigue, coups, even a return to civil war. But the divide within the Taliban is unlikely to get so far. Outsiders have long predicted factional splits within the Taliban that have not come to pass. The Taliban has thrived precisely because of its culture of loyalty.
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Apart from the widely-hated ISKP, the Taliban faces virtually no organized opposition. The entire elite of the Republic era has fled abroad. Unlike the 1990s, when the northeast was always controlled by the Northern Alliance led by Massoud and Dostum, the government has unchallenged control of the entire country. Nor does any foreign power have the desire to involve itself in Afghan politics after the American experience. Even Pakistan, which has long meddled in Afghan affairs, has sought to extricate itself. There is no force inside Afghanistan strong enough to displace it, and no force outside Afghanistan that cares enough to interfere. It is hard to imagine a more complete resolution to the struggle over Afghanistan’s future.
And yet I could not help but detect a surprising fragility to Taliban rule. The Taliban had intrigued me because they, alone among the regimes of the global periphery, seemed capable of articulating an alternative civilizational vision, one that was not merely an antithesis or restatement of Western modernity. I had come to Afghanistan because I wanted to see something truly different from the West. But even in the Islamic Emirate, I could sense a creeping Westernization.
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The Taliban won the war; but in the long run, the social modernity they so bitterly resisted is on its way. Even as my Afghan friends professed their conservatism and religiosity, they were yet to get married or have children—at ages long past when their parents were doing so. The direction of things to come seemed obvious. For decades, the age of first marriage has been inching upward, particularly in the cities; since the late 1990s the fertility rate has fallen drastically. The literacy rate among young women, just 11 percent in 1979, had grown to 42 percent by 2021.
The more time I spent in Afghanistan, the more I doubted that the Taliban had an affirmative social vision to counteract this Westernization. The jagged conservatism of Akhundzada, spiritually situated in the Pashtun hinterlands of the twentieth century, was a purely negative answer. Beyond that, the Islamic Emirate seemed to offer nothing that could match Western culture for charisma. When they tried to emphasize normalcy and functionality, it was by showing that they, too, could meet Western norms.
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