Protests test Taliban’s promise for peace

At least three people were killed in anti-Taliban protests in the Afghan city of Jalalabad yesterday, witnesses said, as the Islamist group moved to set up a government and Western countries ramped up evacuations from a chaotic Kabul airport. 

The Taliban have offered a pledge of reconciliation, vowing no revenge against opponents and to respect women's rights -- but there are huge concerns globally about the Taliban's brutal human rights record and tens of thousands of Afghans are still trying to flee.

A protest in Jalalabad, 150 km from Kabul on the main road to Pakistan, was an early test of that commitment.

Two witnesses and a former police official told Reuters that Taliban fighters had opened fire when local residents tried to install Afghanistan's national flag at a square in the city, killing three people and injuring more than a dozen.

Al Jazeera later reported that the protests had expanded beyond Jalalabad to several other provinces.

Meanwhile, the Taliban yesterday gave hints at how the future government in Afghanistan may look like.

The new government may take the form of a ruling council, with Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada in overall charge, a senior member of the group said.

But Afghanistan would not be a democracy, Waheedullah Hashimi told Reuters: "It is sharia law and that is it."

The power structure that Hashimi outlined would bear similarities to how Afghanistan was run the last time the Taliban were in power from 1996 to 2001. Then, supreme leader Mullah Omar remained in the shadows and left the day-to-day running of the country to a council.

Akhundzada would likely play a role above the head of the council, who would be akin to the country's president, Hashimi added.

"Maybe his (Akhundzada's) deputy will play the role of 'president'," Hashimi said, speaking in English.

The Taliban's supreme leader has three deputies: Mullah Yaqoob, son of Mullah Omar, Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the powerful militant Haqqani network, and Abdul Ghani Baradar, who heads the Taliban's political office in Doha and is one of the founding members of the group.

Many issues regarding how the Taliban would run Afghanistan have yet to be finalised, he added.

On Tuesday, Mullah Baradar returned to Afghanistan for the first time in more than 10 years. Reports said that he is expected to head any future government.

It also comes as a Taliban commander and senior leader of the Haqqani Network, Anas Haqqani, yesterday met former Afghan president Hamid Karzai for talks to form an "inclusive government", a Taliban official said.

Karzai was accompanied by the old government's main peace envoy, Abdullah Abdullah, in the meeting, said the Taliban official, who declined to be identified. He gave no more details.

The talks came as president Ashraf Ghani -- who fled Afghanistan as the insurgents closed in on Kabul at the weekend, sealing their return to power -- said from the United Arab Emirates that he supported those negotiations and was in talks to return home.

The Taliban took effective control of the country on Sunday when Ghani fled and the insurgents walked into Kabul with no opposition. It capped a staggeringly fast rout of all cities in just 10 days, achieved with relatively little bloodshed, following two decades of war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

The rout was paved by US President Joe Biden decision to troops withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yesterday, British lawmakers harshly criticized him calling Afghanistan's collapse into Taliban hands a failure of intelligence, leadership and moral duty.

Despite the dovish tone of Taliban, thousands of Afghans, many of whom helped US-led foreign forces in the two decades since an invasion ended the Taliban's 1996-2001 rule, are desperate to leave the country.

About 5,000 diplomats, security staff, aid workers and Afghans have been evacuated from Kabul in the last 24 hours and military flights will continue around the clock, a Western official told Reuters.

But chaos remained around the airport.

Taliban commanders and soldiers fired into the air to disperse crowds outside Kabul airport, a Taliban official said. "We have no intention to injure anyone," he told Reuters adding they were trying to bring order to chaos.

The United Nations said it had begun moving up to 100 international staff to Kazakhstan but said the measure was temporary and stressed it is "committed to staying and delivering in support of the Afghan people in their hour of need". The UN has about 300 international staff and 3,000 local staff in Afghanistan.

ACTIONS NOT WORDS

The Taliban have suggested they will impose their laws more softly than during their former harsh rule, and a senior official yesterday said that the group's leaders would be less reclusive than in the past.

In Taliban's first news briefing since their return to Kabul, the group's spokesperson said the new regime would be "positively different" from their 1996-2001 stint, which was infamous for deaths by stoning, girls being banned from school and women from working in contact with men.

Biden's administration gave a non-committal response to the Taliban's pledges of tolerance.

"If the Taliban says they are going to respect the rights of their citizens, we will be looking for them to uphold that statement and make good on that statement," State Department spokesman Ned Price said.

Russia and China have quickly signalled their willingness to work with the Taliban but remained skeptical of their promises.

"We'll see what they do, whether it will be according to the pronouncements that they made," Russia's UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told reporters.

Echoing that comment and those of other Western leaders, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Taliban would be judged on their actions.

"We will judge this regime based on the choices it makes, and by its actions rather than by its words, on its attitude to terrorism, to crime and narcotics, as well as humanitarian access and the rights of girls to receive an education," he told parliament, recalled from summer recess to debate the crisis.

The EU, US and 19 other countries issued a joint statement yesterday saying they were "deeply worried about Afghan women and girls", urging the Taliban to ensure their safety.

Many Afghans are sceptical of the Taliban promises. Some said they could only wait and see.

"My family lived under the Taliban and maybe they really want to change or have changed but only time will tell and it's going to become clear very soon," said Ferishta Karimi, who runs a tailoring shop for women.