Mick Hartley

Christina Lamb talks to the sophisticated young people in Kabul who have no memory of the previous Taliban rule, and are a testament to the success of the West's Afghan project – and a bitter reminder of what we're sacrificing by deserting them so peremptorily. ‘We’re not about to give this all up for some Kalashnikov-wielding bumpkins in turbans’.

The first time I realised just how much Afghanistan had changed was a few years ago when a young transport student called Ahmadullah, who had tried to flee to Sweden and been sent back, asked me if I watched Peaky Blinders. “I prefer Love Island,” interjected his friend Najibullah, who worked in an IT office and told me he would meet up with friends in the iCafe to watch it together over espressos. The friends included a fashion influencer with more than 400,000 followers on TikTok for her daily posts set to western dance tracks and a coding whizzkid renting workspace for his start-up in The Hub, a space with bleached wooden desks and bonsai trees that would not have looked out of place in Manhattan.

Watching the Taliban gathering in the presidential palace in their robes and turbans last week, talking of sharia law, I thought of these young people and how on earth their very modern life could fit in with their new rulers’ austere vision of Islam.

About two thirds of Afghans are under 25, so they have little to no memory of the previous Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001. But they have all heard the stories of how they stopped women from working, locked them up for wearing lipstick or nail varnish and turned football stadiums into bloody arenas where they held public amputations, hangings and stonings.

Nowhere I have reported from has changed as much in the past 20 years as Afghanistan. In 2001, when the previous Taliban regime was toppled by US-led forces after 9/11, it was a country so cut off from the outside world that people I met couldn’t comprehend the attack on the World Trade Centre. They were unable to imagine a building with 110 floors — the tallest in Kabul had four.

There were almost no phone lines — when an interim government was installed under Hamid Karzai, ministers worked with satellite phones and suitcases of cash were flown in to pay wages.

British and American soldiers arriving were stunned by how backward the country was, with its unmade roads, people burning tyres for heat, almost no running water, schools with no walls and minimal health facilities.

Simple toys I took for children were placed with great reverence on shelves as precious items. The only entertainment in Kabul was the zoo, which had a few pigs and a scrawny, blind lion called Marjan, which died after the Daily Mail ran a campaign to save it.

Much of rural Afghanistan remains rooted in conservative ways and inclined to support the Taliban, but the Kabul of today is a city of shopping malls, burger and steak restaurants and espresso bars like the iCafe. Last time I was there I even discovered a yoga studio.

Much of this change is due to the spread of mobile phones, exposing people to an outside world many did not know existed. During the 2014 elections I visited a poor northern village, many hours from anywhere, and was sitting with a group of long-bearded elders when to my surprise a phone rang. To my even greater surprise it was a smartphone. How many of you have smartphones, I asked the gathering. All 12 of them pulled phones out of their pockets. “We’re on Facebook too,” said the first elder, asking if he could “friend” me.

Now 90 per cent of Afghans have access to mobile phones, with 12 million people using data services, including many who are illiterate but hooked up to social media.

Education has also changed things. Hundreds of thousands of young Afghans have graduated from private and state universities that have sprung up across the country. Many are female, and these women are in particular danger and among those with most to lose. There are girls’ cycling clubs, football teams and robotics teams. Women have become police chiefs, prosecutors, judges and film directors.

“We are not about to give this up because of some Kalashnikov-wielding bumpkins in turbans,” said one of the country’s first female rappers.

They may, alas, have no choice in the matter after Biden's betrayal. 

Dr Zaman Stanizai, professor of Islamic traditions at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, believes it will be hard to impose rule over a society where people have got used to their freedoms.

“Last time they came to an Afghanistan of chaos, a country in ruins, an Afghanistan of fiefdoms, and people welcomed them,” he said. “But now people are used to free press and television programmes making fun of the president. I’m sure there will be resistance, particularly from the young.”

Well, we shall see. There's more to Afghanistan than Kabul. The young may rebel – but the Taliban may be that much more brutal.