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Last December, the Taliban banned women from travelling further than 45 miles from their home without a close male relative.

In March, mere hours after girls’ high schools were to have been reopened for the first time in seven months, the Taliban shut them all down, banning education for female students beyond Grade 6.

On May 7, the Taliban ordered that all women cover up in public, asserting a preference for the head-to-toe burqa, which leaves only a mesh swatch across the eyes, blurring vision.

On May 12, the Taliban instructed residents of Herat, a major city in western Afghanistan inhabited largely by Persian-speaking ethnic Tajiks, to segregate men and women (including married couples) in restaurants and public parks, with men and women, permitted to visit only on different days.

Last week the Taliban dissolved a number of critical institutions created over the past two decades, including the Afghan National Human Rights Commission, the High Council for National Reconciliation, the National Security Council and the commission overseeing implementation of the Afghan constitution — deeming them “not necessary.”

On Sunday the Taliban’s Vice and Virtue Ministry began enforcing an edict compelling all female TV news anchors to cover their faces while on air. The policy is “final and non-negotiable.” Medical masks will do.

Male relatives of females not properly swathed, across all segments of public life, will be held responsible and punished for the dress code violations.

“Some very brave people have opened ghost schools for girls again in their homes,” says Homairi Ayubi, who spent a decade as a member of Afghan’s parliament representing ultra-conservative Farrah province before fleeing — literally for her life — late last year, first to Athens and now to Canada, with eight members of her immediate family. Five of them live in this Scarborough apartment, where she serves tea and assorted nuts to a visiting reporter. Four others reside nearby.

Ayubi wears a head scarf when she goes out. More often it just falls around her shoulders.

“If I had stayed, I think the Taliban would have killed me.”

The Taliban, she says, has reneged on all the reformist vows it made during negotiations with the U.S. in Doha before the fall of Kabul and afterward. “It broke their promises, false promises to the West and to NATO. We warned Washington about this, but they didn’t listen.

“The Taliban hasn’t changed. Theirs is a backward ideology.”

She laughs without humour. “Maybe next they’ll have women journalists on TV turn their backs to the camera.”

None of this has come as a surprise. President Joe Biden knew exactly what would befall Afghanistan when he ordered the complete withdrawal of troops last summer, as he’d vowed to do during the election campaign, ending America’s longest war. Pentagon officials were surprised only by the stunning speed of the Taliban’s takeover, measured in days, and the fall of Kabul, measured in hours.

In 1996, when the Taliban seized power, it plunged Afghanistan back into the seventh century. Now they’re driving Afghanistan back to 2001, when the unspeakably repressive regime was ousted by the US-led coalition in the immediate wake of 9/11.

While the Taliban hasn’t changed its stripes, still dominated by its most hardcore element — tyrannical, virulently theocratic (heretical in its interpretation of Islam) and woman-hating — the world is a much different place. So is Afghanistan, for that matter, at least in its major cities, where modernization burgeoned apace. Ex-pats flocked home, a younger generation eager to apply and embrace 21st-century telecommunications, computer literacy and contemporary technology. Even in rural areas, mud-baked compounds are studded with satellite dishes. Shepherds have cellphones. The outside world has come inside.

But that outside world doesn’t much care about Afghanistan anymore. Where, in the ’90s, humanitarian advocates — from NGOs to Hollywood celebrities — fought hard to raise the profile of horrifically subjugated Afghans, particularly the plight of girls and women — today there is almost complete silence. Having watched the abrupt about-face of Afghanistan, all that international effort and the billions of dollars poured into the country’s rehabilitation, the thousands of lives lost during the military occupation — and the simultaneous civilian transformation — the West’s heart no longer wants to go there.

All is lost. We know the primary reasons for this, which wasn’t entirely about the Taliban sweeping unopposed across the country. The latest assessment by a U.S. watchdog, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, released earlier this month, emphasizes that Washington’s decision to withdraw military forces and contractors from Afghanistan “despite the inability of Afghan forces to support themselves, was the most significant factor in the county’s collapse.”

Corruption within the government was endemic, with President Ashraf Ghani — he bolted before Kabul fell — so fearful his own military would turn against him and suspecting the U.S. of plotting to remove him from power, that he dismissed many of his senior security officials and key commanders on the ground. That severely undermined the morale of Afghan security forces, which weren’t, in any event, capable of defending the country, despite two decades of training by the U.S. and NATO, including Canada.

“When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the Jenga pile and expected it to stay up,” former senior U.S. commander David Barno told the SIGAR researchers. “We built that army to run on contractor support. Without it, it can’t function. Game over.”

Most of the territory taken over by the Taliban as they encroached on the capital was captured not by military forces, the report continues, but was handed over in deals struck with local officials, tribal elders and Afghan military commanders, their troops beset by poor leadership and abandoned when U.S. forces withdrew aerial support for government operations.

Amidst the mess left behind, Afghan women and girls, as well as ethnic minorities, are suffering immeasurably. And there isn’t a damn thing the international community will do about it, not again, apart from no-teeth warnings to the Taliban to reform itself and withholding financial aid that Afghanistan desperately needs to lessen dire humanitarian conditions. (U.S. leverage on the Taliban includes $7 billion in Afghanistan Central Bank assets that remain frozen in U.S. accounts.)

Ayubi, 51, is among the thousands who tried to fix Afghanistan from within, through her tireless and outspoken campaigns to root out corruption, surviving several plots on her life.

“Corruption was everywhere. Not just inside the government but in the military, with tribal leaders, with the Afghan mafia,” said Ayubi.

During the previous Taliban era, Ayubi — who has a university degree in mathematics — operated underground schools for girls while her father ran a health clinic. Her husband, an internist and once the president of Kabul’s largest hospital, now stares out the window of their Scarborough apartment. Many of Afghanistan’s female politicians and civil rights leaders — though nowhere near enough — have been spirited out of the country because they are targets for retribution.

What’s becoming clearer by the day is that the Taliban can’t run the country, can’t ease the misery of its people, and can’t subdue the myriad terrorist groups that have scrambled back to Afghanistan, most especially the Islamic State group, which views the minority Shiite community as apostates and has resumed its merciless attacks against mosques, shrines, sports facilities, religious holiday events and schools.

Last month, two bomb blasts at a Kabul boys’ school and nearby private tutoring centre killed nine students and wounded more than 20. The school is located in the capital’s Dasht-e-Barchi district, a bustling working-class neighbourhood that is the heart of Kabul’s minority Shiite Hazara community. The Hazara are loathed by the Islamic State group and persecuted by everybody. The same neighbourhood where, a year ago, a girls’ school was struck by twin bomb explosions, killing 85 and wounding 147.

Yet while the Taliban has forbidden high school education for girls, several of its own ministers have sent their daughters to schools outside the country, as documented by the Afghanistan Analysis Network, an independent non-profit research organization largely funded by Scandinavian countries. As a member of the Taliban’s negotiating team from Doha told AAN, his children had begun their education in Qatar and have stayed there. “Since everybody in the neighbourhood was going to school, our children demanded that they go to school too.” Another minister’s daughter is studying medicine at a Qatari university.

Ignorance and the erasure of females are for the children of others. The Taliban enjoys its own hypocritical entitlements.

And Afghanistan is hell on Earth, the same as it ever was.

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