EDITORIAL: The Taliban regime continues to tighten the screws on the Afghan public; now pledging to implement a law banning news media from publishing images of all living things because, in their opinion, such things are “really contrary to sharia and must be avoided”.
A similar law was in force during their last time in power (1996-2001) but had been avoided so far since their return to Kabul.
Yet just like the case of female education, which they first said they’d allow but later banned, they seem committed to cutting back most personal, and now professional, freedoms and forms of expression.
It’s not just journalists that will not be allowed to take pictures or provide coverage of living things, this law is eventually going to apply across society. Even restaurants have been asked to remove pictures of living things, for example fish, from their menus.
The Taliban government says that this law will be applied gradually. Yet such is their widespread public fear of their morality police that it will not take much more than a statement from Kandahar to get citizens and journalists alike to focus their cameras strictly on non-living things. And so the country fast forwards its backward march to medieval times.
It’s a shame that the regime that has finally won freedom and put an end to more than four decades of senseless wars in Afghanistan is bent upon keeping the country as far away from the 21st century as possible. These are times when technology has enabled progress not dreamed of just a few years ago. The internet can connect people and facilitate businesses and transactions across continents.
The world is full of Muslim countries, practicing Muslims, and Muslim scholars, very few, if any, of whom agree even remotely with the Taliban’s interpretation and implementation of religious edicts.
Yet they are willing to keep half the country (girls and women) from getting an education and/or jobs and all of it away from modern technologies that are part and parcel of everyday life in the present era; just because they feel they are following divine instruction.
Surely, they realise that Afghanistan is one of the world’s least developed and most struggling countries. But they don’t seem to understand at all that their own policies are making things much, much worse for their own people.
This time – as opposed to their last stint – it’s not just that they are going back to their old ways, rather it’s that they promised the international community that things would be different after they re-took Kabul. Yet slow but surely their word is turning out to be hollow.
So it was with women’s rights, so, too, with controlling insurgents holed up on their side of the border (like TTP), and so it is with personal and professional freedoms, for example what kind of pictures people and professionals can take with their cameras.
It’s also been reported that the Taliban cabinet of a year or two ago, which featured somewhat moderate voices – which favoured female education, for example – has been properly cleansed and now there’s nobody left to disagree with the leadership that is keeping the country from progressing.
Now, the Taliban have only themselves to blame as the world tires of trying to get them to see reason and ultimately turns away from Afghanistan; at least while they run the show.
Yet sooner or later they will have to turn to the international community for help, since they have neither the resources nor the know-how to deal with the many, many humanitarian crises that they are allowing to fester.
It is, therefore, a matter of time before the Taliban are forced to come to their senses. It’s best if they do it themselves, before it is too late for their country and their people.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024