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Taliban fighters take control of the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul on Aug. 15 after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. (AP/Yonhap News)

The Taliban took Kabul by force on Sept. 27, 1996. The Afghan capital was in ruins at the time, most of its buildings and infrastructure having been destroyed by shelling amid the civil war that followed Soviet occupation.

It was a bizarre spectacle seemingly out of medieval times: the crumbling city and Taliban members wearing black turbans with their eyes blackened with kohl.

The Taliban’s first stop was the UN compound, where they found and assassinated Mohammad Najibullah, leader of the socialist regime that had collapsed five years earlier. The bodies of Najibullah and his brother — beaten to death with stones and clubs — were hung from a scaffold at a roundabout in the center of the city.

The Taliban immediately established a religious police center, where a placard read: “Throw reason to the dogs.” The broadcasting of music was banned according to Islamic law; even the use of toothpaste was forbidden, the reason being that the prophet Mohammed had brushed his teeth with roots.

At the time, women represented 40 percent of Afghanistan’s physicians, 50 percent of its government employees, and 70 percent of its schoolteachers. In an instant, they were left not only unemployed, but impoverished.

After 25 years, on Aug. 15, the Taliban returned to Kabul — this time without bloodshed. Kabul was now a modernized city of 4.5 million people — 10 times more than before. Some of the Taliban members did not wear traditional garments this time.

The first person Taliban leadership sought out was former President Hamid Karzai. Meeting face to face with Karzai, who had led US forces in the armed struggle against the Taliban’s rule 20 years prior, they came to an agreement on the transfer of power and the formation of a new administration.

The Taliban have also used social media for propaganda, declaring their plans for amnesty and reconciliation. On Sept. 1, the international press group Reporters without Borders called for all women journalists to be allowed to return to work, saying that fewer than 100 of the 700 or so women journalists in Kabul were currently working.

Have the Taliban actually changed, or is this just skin-deep? One thing is clear: the situation they face today is not the same they saw 25 years ago.

Back then, they were an object of hate, drawing mere curiosity from the international community. Their rise to power did not fundamentally alter the global disinterest in Afghanistan.

Today, the Taliban are a focus of major international attention, particularly from the US, China and Russia.

The US needs the Taliban’s cooperation to stop Afghanistan from once again becoming a base for terrorism. The Taliban-led Afghanistan is also essential for the US’s confrontation with China — one of the reasons it pulled troops out of Afghanistan in the first place.

For China, the power vacuum in Central Asia — that in an Afghanistan free from the US in particular — is something it must shift toward a balance of power that works in its own favor. If it can use this approach to expand its power to the Indian Ocean, it opens up a path for neutralizing Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

It’s also clear that, unlike before, the Taliban want the international community’s recognition. Because without such global recognition, they will be unable to sustain their rule.

To begin with, they need the US$9 billion in state funds that the US has frozen. Islamic law alone will not be enough to regulate an Afghan public that has relied on Western aid for 20 years and tasted Western products.

As of Sept. 2, the US Treasury Department moved to allow the resumption of personal remittances to Afghanistan, which had been banned since the Taliban entered Kabul. For ordinary people in Afghanistan, remittances from overseas are a life-or-death matter, accounting for some four percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

It’s meaningless to ask whether the Taliban have truly “changed.” These are not the times they were 25 years ago, and such discrepancies will undoubtedly alter the responses both of the Taliban and the international community.

By Jung E-gil, senior staff writer

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