NPR
KABUL, Afghanistan — At a dusty bus station on this city’s outskirts, ticket hawkers call out for passengers to the southern city of Kandahar. It’s a 300-mile route — and the Taliban control key parts of the highway.
There are gun battles along the route, and the Taliban undertake violent ambushes of Afghan forces.
But for bus driver Jan Mohammad, the highway seems to be the safest it has been in years because of the Taliban. “We are at ease now because the police don’t harass us for bribes,” says Jan Mohammad, 32, who like many Afghans, does not have a family name. Talibs even issue receipts for customs duties they collect so that drivers don’t have to pay again, he says. And there’s less highway robbery, he adds: “Robbers can’t even spend five minutes on the road, because the Talibs zip over on their motorbikes whenever they hear of a problem.”
Yet he acknowledges it’s not safe for everyone. “They check the IDs of passengers,” he says. “If you are with the Afghan military, they take you off the bus.” Rights groups say the Taliban have detained and sometimes killed those suspected of working with government security forces.
Another driver, Sharif Omeri, says the insurgents search passengers’ cellphones for music or material forbidden under the Taliban’s strict version of Islam forbid. “One time they found a guy who had some pornography on his phone,” he says. “They told him to delete it and not watch porn again.”
Across Afghanistan, there are echoes of what the Taliban did in the 1990s when they seized power after a brutal civil war. The Taliban wrested order out of chaos, imposing harsh rules on Afghan society until they were toppled in the U.S. invasion in 2001.
In the two decades since, the Taliban have fought the Afghan government and its international allies to regain land and power. Analysts say the insurgents have been growing stronger for years. Now, as American and NATO troops withdraw, the Taliban appear even more emboldened and are wresting more territory from the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
“Even the smallest mujahid feels like we defeated a superpower, and all the world combined,” says a Taliban commander, who is second in charge of military operations in a Kabul district. He requested anonymity to speak to NPR so he couldn’t be identified by Afghan or foreign forces.
The Taliban have been accelerating a years-old trend of seizing districts since the U.S. scaled back its airstrikes in support of Afghan forces following the deal the Trump administration struck with the Taliban in February last year, according to Jonathan Schroden, an expert at the Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington, Va.
The agreement included the departure of foreign forces from Afghanistan, largely in exchange for the insurgents refraining from attacks and from harboring terrorist groups like al-Qaida.
“Things have gotten notably worse over the last year,” Schroden says. “What you’re seeing the Taliban do now is not just taking rural areas, but taking rural areas that are increasingly closer to significant cities, provincial capitals, for example, and effectively surrounding them and also cutting the roads that connect to them.”
