Nor did he mention Taliban fighters beating citizens at the Kabul airport or reports from provincial cities of backsliding into their old ways. In Kunduz, for example, Taliban officials, frustrated at civil servants’ refusal to return to work, set up checkpoints and sent fighters door-to-door looking for municipal workers. “They would have announced their cabinet.”Others said it is likely to be some time before these matters are settled. “There are people in there who think along more pragmatic lines, and some who don’t,” said a leading scholar of the Taliban, Antonio Giustozzi. But what little is known of the biographies of these leaders yields some clues.

Source: New York Times August 18, 2021 00:19 UTC