RASC News Agency: In a scathing analysis published by The National Interest, Natalie Gonnella-Platts, Director of Global Policy at the George W. Bush Institute, and Jessica Ludwig, a Senior Fellow at the same institution, have issued a stark warning: the Taliban’s stranglehold over Afghanistan is not merely a domestic crisis it is a global threat, rooted in decades of institutionalized violence, corruption, and religious extremism. According to the authors, the Taliban have not reformed; they have simply refined their ability to deceive. Over thirty years, they have become masters of manipulation weaponizing religious rhetoric to conceal the brutality of their rule and exploiting international diplomacy to secure legitimacy while continuing their reign of terror.
Gonnella-Platts and Ludwig highlight the harrowing plight of thousands of Afghanistanis who were forced to flee their country after the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. Many of these individuals particularly those who cooperated with the United States and its allies in building a more democratic Afghanistan now face the terrifying prospect of deportation. Repatriating them, the authors argue, would be tantamount to sending them into the hands of a regime intent on revenge. It is not only their freedom, but their very lives, that hang in the balance. The article sharply criticizes the growing political apathy among some U.S. officials, who treat Temporary Protected Status (TPS) as sufficient protection for these refugees while conveniently ignoring the Taliban’s documented campaign of intimidation, detention, and assassination of former government workers, civil society activists, and journalists. Such negligence, the authors warn, contributes to the broader normalization of the Taliban, portraying them as stabilizers rather than the violent extremists they remain.
The authors are particularly scathing in their assessment of those in the West who attempt to rebrand the Taliban as pragmatic rulers. These narratives, they argue, deliberately whitewash the group’s enduring ties to terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda and the Haqqani Network entities responsible for the deaths of over 2,000 American service members and countless Afghanistani civilians. The Taliban, they remind us, remain on the U.S. government’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entities. Any diplomatic or financial engagement with the group not only undermines American values but also emboldens authoritarianism worldwide. The Bush Institute’s data reveals that Taliban claims of reducing corruption are patently false. In reality, the group has entrenched a mafia-style system of governance, characterized by systemic bribery, theft of aid, and violent enforcement of power through coercion. Their so-called “Islamic Emirate” has delivered not moral order, but a humanitarian catastrophe: soaring hunger, collapsed healthcare, a resurgence of child labor, and the near-eradication of public services.
The article is especially critical of the Taliban’s gender apartheid, describing it as one of the most severe in modern history. Women and girls have been completely erased from public life barred from schools, stripped of their jobs, confined to their homes, and subjected to sexual violence as a tool of control and humiliation. The authors denounce Western figures who claim to support women’s rights while tolerating or legitimizing Taliban rule. Such posturing, they argue, is not feminism it is political hypocrisy that enables the very systems of oppression it claims to oppose. “From bloggers and influencers to policymakers and diplomats,” they write, “those who sanitize the Taliban’s image are complicit in their crimes. Their silence in the face of this regime’s brutality normalizes tyranny and validates extremism.”
Despite severe repression, Afghanistan’s independent journalists and civil society activists continue to expose the Taliban’s abuses often at immense personal risk. Their courage ensures that the international community cannot pretend ignorance. The article concludes with an urgent call to moral clarity: any regime that systematically dehumanizes women and terrorizes its citizens must not be engaged, endorsed, or appeased. Repression of women and girls whether in Afghanistan or anywhere else is not just a human rights violation. It is a direct assault on democracy, justice, and global stability. And nowhere, the authors stress, is this more deeply entrenched or more dangerous than in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
