A recent interview with Hamid Karzai, where he explained why he chose to stay in Afghanistan rather than flee, drew a predictable wave of comments online. “He was America’s puppet.” “Enabled the Taliban’s return.” “He should have left when he had the chance.” Confident, tidy verdicts, delivered in a sentence or two.
The statements are not necessarily wrong, but rather too simple for a country that has never been simple.
A Century, Not a Decade
Karzai was the right pawn for America at the time he came to power — but he wasn’t an evil man. Maybe an opportunist, navigating an impossible position with the tools available to him. And to anyone lining up to condemn him for that: who’s going to throw the first stone? Almost every Afghan leader of the last century has governed by making some version of the same trade-off, between survival and principle, between foreign backing and domestic legitimacy.
Dr. Najibullah is a sharper case of the same pattern. He spent years running KHAD, the communist intelligence service, an institution with a real record of brutality he was directly part of — that’s not in dispute, and it’s fair that it followed him. But his later years in power complicate any tidy verdict. After Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, he governed without their backing, or little if any, pushing what I believe was a genuine policy of national reconciliation and holding Kabul together for three more years on his own political skill rather than foreign muscle. Whatever the KHAD years earned him, and they earned him plenty of deserved distrust, the reconciliation effort that followed is usually the part that gets erased entirely, precisely because the earlier record made people unwilling to credit anything that came after it.
The deeper problem is how people talk about Afghanistan at all. Most treat it as a simple entity — a place whose politics can be sorted into heroes and villains, before-and-after, good decade and bad decade. It’s a deeply nuanced country, and you can see that nuance today in how the Taliban are treated by the West and its neighbours alike: distrusted, engaged with, sanctioned, and courted, sometimes all at once, by different capitals for different reasons. The relationship is far from ideal. But it hasn’t been ideal for a hundred years — not under the monarchy, not under the communists, not under the mujahideen, not under the Republic, and not now.
It’s not even a monolith today. Five years into their rule, the Taliban’s own leadership is openly split over the girls’ education ban. One senior official has fled the country after criticising the ban. That’s not the behaviour of a unified, monolithic force executing a single plan. It is a government fractured over its own most indefensible policy.
The Photographs That Lie by Omission
Scroll social media long enough and you’ll find them: black-and-white photos of 1960s Kabul, women in skirts walking near the university, men in Western suits. The implication is always the same — this is what Afghanistan really was, before it all went wrong.
It’s a real photo of a real place. It’s also almost never the whole country. Those images are Kabul, often a few streets of it, in a specific decade. They say very little about Kunduz, Nuristan, or Paktika or the rural majority of Afghans who lived under a very different, much more conservative code. Some people carry a romanticised view of the years Americans were present. They portray it as liberal baseline that Afghanistan simply fell out of. And across all three a similar pattern holds: what got counted as progress was often what could be seen rather than what had actually changed underneath. Freedom of what to wear photographed well and said little about freedom from violence at home. Literacy campaigns and social programs under the communists came layered with a quieter condition, that real access ran through party membership. And decades later, ask people what “progress” meant under Karzai or Ghani in a street interview, and the answer was rarely about legal protection or enforcement — it was “now we have television channels” or “the cinemas are open again.” Visible liberalisation stood in for the harder, less photogenic work that no one ever fully handled.
The reality is that Afghanistan endured roughly 40 years of cosmopolitan elitism and exclusive modernisation under Zahir Shah, then another 40 years of war and occupation — coups, Soviet invasion, civil war, Taliban rule, American occupation, and now Taliban rule again. To sum any of this up as “the Taliban did this” or “Karzai did that” isn’t just inaccurate. It’s dishonest, because it erases everything that made those outcomes possible in the first place.
More than a Hundred Years of Fighting Over Women’s Rights
Nowhere is this flattening more damaging than in how people talk about Afghan women. The assumption online is usually that Afghan women had rights, and then the Taliban took them away five years ago. That’s not what happened. Women’s status in Afghanistan has been a live political battleground for a century at least. It was not a settled achievement that one group disrupted, but a lever that nearly every government has pulled for its own purposes.
King Amanullah Khan tried to unveil women and expand girls’ education in the 1920s. It helped trigger a tribal revolt that ended his reign. The gains that followed under Zahir Shah and Daoud Khan such as women at Kabul University, in parliament, in professional life were real. However, they were concentrated almost entirely in the capital. Rural Afghanistan, where most Afghans lived, continued under a very different social order the entire time those famous photographs were being taken.
When the communist government took power in 1978, it pushed rapid, top-down reforms on women’s status as part of a broader modernisation campaign. That, combined with land reform and secularisation, ignited the rural and religious insurgency — the same insurgency the United States armed. By the time the mujahideen factions were fighting each other for control of Kabul in the early 1990s, rights were already diminishing before the Taliban took the capital in 1996.
The Taliban’s first period in power was the sharpest and most systematic reversal Afghan women have faced. But it was an escalation of a trend already in motion, not a bolt from a clear sky. The twenty years of the republic that followed saw some gains. But a lot of what got called progress during the Karzai and Ghani years wasn’t just concentrated by geography. It was concentrated by access. Scholarships, government posts, NGO jobs, protection from powerful patrons went disproportionately to those with a connection to someone in power. Some went to those willing to work the same networks of corruption that defined that government broadly. A woman in Kabul with no such connections often had less real opportunity than the official statistics. The progress was genuine for some, but it was distributed the way most things were distributed in that system: unevenly, and often along lines of proximity to power rather than merit or need.
So when people talk as though Afghan women simply lost their rights five years ago, as if everything before that was fine, they’re not describing history. They’re erasing a century of the actual fight. The fight that Afghan women have waged, gained ground in, lost ground in, and waged again. The same fight under monarchists, communists, mujahideen, Jamhooriyat (republic), and now the Taliban.
The Rights Nobody Enforced
There’s a documentary scene that complicates this further, and it’s worth sitting with rather than smoothing over. A rural Taliban court hears a case that a widow and her father brought against her in-laws. Her in-laws were pressuring her to marry her dead husband’s brother. It’s an old, common tactic: keep the widow in the family so nobody has to pay out her Mahr, her share of her late husband’s estate, or the blood money owed to her from his death. Force the marriage, and the money never leaves the household. The court ruled in her favour. The brother-in-law who’d expected to inherit her along with the money reportedly said something to the effect of, “we thought the Taliban would be on our side.”
That single line does more work than a paragraph of argument. It reveals that these are Islamic entitlements a widow’s right to her Mahr, her inheritance, her blood money, her say in remarriage that Afghan governments spent a century claiming to honour in principle while never actually forcing rural families and tribal custom to hand them over in practice. Not the monarchy, not the socialists, not the American-backed republic. Custom quietly overrode law, generation after generation, in exactly the cases where money and family control were at stake, and nobody in Kabul built the institutions to stop it.
This is not an argument that the Taliban are good for women. That would be its own kind of oversimplification; the same move this post keeps warning against. The regime enforcing a widow’s inheritance rights in one rural courtroom is the same regime barring her daughter from a classroom. Both are true at once. What the documentary actually exposes isn’t Taliban virtue (whether it was the intention or not), but the scale of prior failures. The decades of governments that photographed well on women’s issues and never built the machinery to protect the women furthest from the camera.
There’s a specific image from 1996 that became shorthand for Taliban’s treatment of women: a Taliban soldier striking a woman with a stick in the middle of a street. It’s real, and it fits. The Taliban were, in that same period, building an entire codified system of control over women. But the photo alone, stripped of context, doesn’t distinguish between two different things: the specific machinery of gendered subjugation, and the generic instrument of Afghan state control that every government of the last fifty years has used on men and women alike for ordinary public disorder. I saw the second kind as a child near a government store during Najibullah’s government where a soldier was attacking two women with a stick for pushing ahead in the queue. It had nothing to do with their being women. The 1996 photo is true evidence of a true crime. It just isn’t proof, on its own, of which of the two things it’s actually showing.
What Nuance Actually Requires
None of this is an argument for excusing the Taliban’s current record. Nuance doesn’t mean spreading blame evenly or refusing to judge. It means being honest about the difference between a leader whose trade-offs under a foreign occupation were self-serving, and a government making free policy choices today; those aren’t the same kind of decision, and they don’t deserve the same kind of judgement.
What nuance does require is giving up the comfort of a simple story — including the simple story of who benefited when things somewhat did go well, and the simple story a single photo tells once you strip away the system that actually produced it. “Progress” in Afghanistan was rarely distributed evenly, whether the divide was rural versus urban or connected versus ordinary. Afghanistan’s last hundred years won’t fit into a single photograph, a single ruler, or a single sentence on LinkedIn. Anyone offering you one should receive the same scepticism as the photo itself.
