As the Taliban return, Afghanistan's past threatens its future
In the blue haze of hookah smoke that filled Kandahars Cafe Delight on a recent weekend afternoon, it was easy to forget theres a war outside.
Young male professionals with well-groomed beards and mullet cuts, slumped in plush chairs, sipped espresso drinks beneath flat-screens that pulsed with racy Turkish and Indian music videos, the bare midriffs of women blurred by channel censors.
This was still Afghanistan, a conservative Islamic society. But the patrons belonged to a more permissive, urbane generation that came of age after the fall of the Taliban, with vague to no memory of the oppressive, fundamentalist regime, born in this southern city, that banned television, music, and cinema; forbade men from trimming their beards; and forced women to wear head-to-toe burkas.
Café owner Ahmadullah Akbari returned from two years in cosmopolitan Dubai in 2018 to start his business in Ayno Maina, a sprawling modern development on the outskirts of Kandahar. Behind the café counter a few months ago, Akbari monitored closed-circuit TV cameras he had recently installed to thwart sticky bombscrude explosives triggered by mobile phonesthat were targeting officials, activists, minorities, and journalists, as well as random civilians, part of the extremists strategy to eliminate dissent and project fear deep into urban centers. Emboldened by a February 2020 agreement with the United States that sidelined the Afghan government and paved the way for the withdrawal of American forces by the end of August this year, the Taliban had established their grip on rural areas and were closing in on cities at breathtaking speed.
Still, with its eucalyptus-lined streets, luxury villas, and shopping plazas lit by nearly round-the-clock electricity, the Ayno Maina gated community offered an atmosphere of suburban normalcy for middle- and upper-class Afghans, many on a government payroll. We have no worries here, said Suleiman Aryan, 28, an English teacher who works and lives in the complex with his wife and two children.
That was then. The calm has been shattered.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/as-the-taliban-rise-again-afghanistans-past-threatens-its-present