The Taliban announced a general amnesty for civil servants and called on them to go to work. In general, it is a reasonable measure. The job will not work out by itself. Taliban commissioners are already shuttling to agencies, answering questions, reassuring them, and giving guarantees. While not forgetting to put forward new conditions and restrictions.
There are two things to define.
First, a large portion of infrastructure jobs in Afghanistan is now filled with women. It is a whole list of professions where a man simply would not work. This circumstance has to be taken into account. Secondly, the current Taliban is not the same as those die-hard adherents of traditional values in the most conservative sense, those who founded the movement in 1994. Most of them either died or lost their place to people of a new generation. Twenty years is a pretty time to learn flexibility and the ability to find a compromise.
Afghanistan is a classic struggle between a city and a village, in which the village won, but at the same time, like any winner, it will simply be forced to absorb the cultural codes of the vanquished. The paradox of the first Taliban was that he defeated a similar village, the Alliance of Seven. Therefore, he had nothing to learn from the vanquished. Nothing that he himself did not have.
Now the situation is radically different. Its otherness creates a space for solutions in which the Taliban will seek (and in a very pragmatic way) a balance between adherence to values and the ability to adapt them to modern conditions.
This does not mean that the Taliban will change their principles, but tactically it is a
It absolutely doesn’t mean the Taliban will change its principles, yet, tactically, nowadays it is a much more flexible structure than one might imagine.
Getting back to the beginning: the amnesty will, of course, be selective. There is a whole list of names that are considered criminals by the Taliban, and they will have a different conversation. And this is a common story in such cases. The more important question now is not whether there will be reprisals, but whether the victorious is be able to limit reprisals to a closed list.
This did not work out in Iraq. “De-Baathization”, under which literally 2-3 thousand top leaders of the Saddam regime were supposed to fall, got out of control literally immediately, turning into a bloody orgy of massacres of the Sunnis (although the Shiites, of course, had considerable reasons – after the first war In the Gulf, Saddam Hussein suppressed the uprisings of the so-called “swamp Shiites” in the south with incredible brutality, and therefore the hatred of the regime among the survivors was understandable. But the weak and almost incompetent state failed to take control of the violence, which led to genocide, in which the idea of Sunni resistance in the form of ISIS or the lesser-known Naqshbandi Army grew up).
In this sense, the Taliban look more capable – and if they manage to take control and streamline the violence, then a similar situation in Afghanistan is unlikely to happen again.
But all this is still just a hypothesis. Only time will reveal how the situation will develop.
