Photojournalist Lynsey Addario: Taliban Are on ‘Massive PR Campaign’ Trying to Convince the World that They’ll Afford Women Rights
Newly resurgent Taliban desperate for cash
The Taliban who have retaken control over Afghanistan want you to believe that they are not your father's Taliban.
The newly resurgent hardline Islamic fighters have undertaken a global public-relations campaign in an attempt to try to convince the international community that — this time — they intend to honor the rights of women and girls.
Don't believe them for a minute, warns photojournalist Lynsey Addario, who has made a career working in the Middle East.
This Taliban charm offensive comes as the faction who rolled back to rule Afghanistan over the last week or so after nearly 20 years out of power has come to realize that they are desperately short of the funding required to actually manage the country they've conquered.
“I mean they’re clearly on a massive PR campaign, trying to convince the world that they will afford women their rights,” Addario said. “But if you listen closely to what they say, everything [has been] within the parameters of sharia law and [when] they implemented it last time they were in power, they implemented the most extreme version of sharia law where when I was there women could basically not leave the house to work outside of the home, they could not be educated, all forms of entertainment were illegal. So I think we have to be very careful about trusting them.”
A large reason for the Taliban's desire to appear as more acceptable to the West this time is that they would like to receive Western foreign aid to help prop up their reportedly cash-strapped regime.
The United States froze Afghan reserves and Germany halted its aid following the collapse of the elected government after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and found asylum in the United Arab Emirates.
Although the Taliban made stunningly swift work of the larger and better-equipped Afghan military, they've reportedly come to find that Afghanistan's holdings of US dollars were “close to zero” as the country had not received a planned cash shipment during the last Taliban surge that swept the country, according to the governor of the country's central bank.
“The next shipment never arrived,” he wrote. “Seems like our partners had good intelligence as to what was going to happen.”
Although the Taliban have long supported themselves by way of the production of poppies needed for the global drug trade, apparently there's still a large gap between what was required as a paramilitary outfit and the ruling party of a sovereign nation.
“It appears that even the Taliban understand Afghanistan’s dire need for foreign assistance,” John Sopko, the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said earlier this year.
Meanwhile, foreign aid — now largely frozen and out of the hands of the Taliban — accounts for 42.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to The Guardian.
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