Nearly a year on, that vision looks increasingly hollow. Talking about the seismic shift last August, Taliban refer to before and after \u201cthe victory\u201d. Ordinary Persian-speaking Afghans in the capital speak about life before and after \u201cthe fall\u201d, or \u201cthe collapse\u201d, suqut in Afghanistan\u2019s Dari dialect.<\/p>\n
The Taliban are an isolated pariah state, not recognised by a single country, even erstwhile allies. Their embrace of their old, violent allies was dramatically exposed last week when the US killed the leader of al Qaida in the heart of Kabul\u2019s elite Sherpur neighbourhood.<\/p>\n
Before that though, they had spent months out of the global spotlight. Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine was a gift to the Taliban, drawing the world\u2019s attention away as the group cranked up their extremist policies.<\/p>\n
Women face harsher restrictions here than anywhere else in the world, barred from secondary education and most work outside healthcare and education. They are forced to be accompanied by a male guardian for all but short journeys and required to cover their faces in public.<\/p>\n
Restrictions are enforced intermittently but, particularly for poorer and more vulnerable women including those without a guardian, the fear of enforcement alone can be crippling.<\/p>\n
\u201cThree times now I\u2019ve seen women being beaten in the market by Taliban. Some were wearing trousers they thought were too tight, you should have seen how broken they were afterwards,\u201d said Farkhunda*, 16, who had to stop school in September and has been battling depression.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnother time they beat girls just for smiling and talking too loud. It\u2019s a natural thing to chat about dresses you are buying and things,\u201d she said.\u201d<\/p>\n
She doesn\u2019t have Taliban-regulation long, black abaya and the family can\u2019t afford to buy one. \u201cSince then I\u2019ve even stopped going to study at the madrassa [religious school], it\u2019s better to be at home than run into these animals,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The economy has collapsed by at least a third, after international sanctions on the Taliban cut trade, the aid that had sustained the last regime dried up, and a militant group ill-prepared to shift from fighting an insurgency to running a government stumbled in their management. \u201cWe weren\u2019t politically linked to the last government, but the Taliban are just taking revenge that we were here doing business,\u201d said one major entrepreneur who has laid off almost 500 staff after equipment was confiscated and licenses suspended across several sectors.<\/p>\n He is frustrated but also baffled by the authorities\u2019 short-term approach. His businesses sit idle although the new regime knows from experience how lucrative they can be. \u201cI had paid them over $3m in forced \u2018taxes\u2019,\u201d before they took over, he said. \u201cSo many businesses have already collapsed, and if things continue, more will go.\u201d<\/p>\n For the previously rich, the downturn has brought an end to luxuries, but many of the former middle classes have been plunged virtually overnight into poverty and hunger. At least half the population now rely on food aid, if they can get it.<\/p>\n Sardar* and his wife had government jobs in the security forces, and earned enough to buy land and build a house. They were both fired when the Taliban came to power. Today, she sits at home while he touts for manual labour by the roadside and is lucky to get a day\u2019s work in a week, for 200 afghanis ($2).<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never done this in my life and it\u2019s tough for me because I am not used it, but I have a family to support,\u201d he says, as his four children play at his feet. \u201cI swear that currently I don\u2019t even have 1,000 afghanis in the house, my mother has diabetes and we don\u2019t have money for her medication.\u201d<\/p>\n At times the country\u2019s new leadership has been stunningly callous about this suffering, telling Afghans they should trust in God to feed them, not their government. But they are also aware the crisis is eroding any trust they may have.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are losing domestic support and very aware of it,\u201d said an Afghan analyst with connections to senior Taliban, who asked not to be named speaking about internal issues within the group.<\/p>\n The Taliban were always going to struggle with the transition from running a decentralised rural insurgency to taking over the administration in Kabul.<\/p>\n \u201cRunning a government is the biggest nightmare they should have. They were surprised with all the development,\u201d said an Afghan source with close Taliban links, who said the leadership were out of their depth after they arrived in a capital that had been transformed from the city they abandoned in 2001.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are traditional rural forces, they have come to cities, but instead of integrating themselves, they want the cities to be integrated to them, they want us to look like them, have beliefs and hobbies like them.\u201d<\/p>\n An entire generation of educated Afghans has fled, or is looking for a way out. The desperation to leave was not surprising, given that the Taliban had targeted professionals across media, civil society and government for assassination for years. While the widespread orgy of killing some feared the Taliban would unleash on Kabul never took place, dozens of people have been assassinated because of their links with the previous government and its security forces.<\/p>\n One former member of the intelligence service told the Observer how he had surrendered the day the Taliban reached his town, but had been arrested three times subsequently while trying to work. Now he barely leaves his home.<\/p>\n The brain drain has made running the country even harder. The central bank, struggling with frozen reserves and sanctions, has kept on only mid and low-level staff, with the most experienced senior managers fleeing abroad, one banker who has been involved in months of crisis talks told the Observer.<\/p>\n One area where the Taliban registered some success was battling the obscene levels of graft that have scarred the administrations of the past 20 years, but their progress there is slowing.<\/p>\n \u201cCorruption is not as bad as under [former president Ashraf] Ghani, when you entered an office to sort something out and everyone from A to Z wanted something. Now there are just a couple of specific people, but it is expanding,\u201d the businessman said.<\/p>\n Between the apple groves of Ismail Khel village, barely an hour\u2019s drive southwest of Kabul, a flag painted with a rose, a tulip and a drone releasing bombs flutters over a small cluster of graves.<\/p>\n To the right are the abandoned ruins of a house, where 14 years ago, at least eight women and children died in an airstrike. They were buried beside their home.<\/p>\n To the left, Haji Yahyah, 66, still lives with his wife and a niece in the patched-up wreckage of their home, hit by a second bomb that killed his daughter-in-law and his nephew. They never got compensation from American forces to rebuild, and stayed because they had nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n Villagers say those were the only aerial attacks on this farming community, but for over a decade the area was racked by death and violence, as foreign and government troops would land in helicopters and storm through the houses.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have four graveyards in this village. Twenty years ago we had just one,\u201d said Ainullah, 53. \u201cA charity came to the village recently, looking for kids who had lost a parent, to help them with food. They could hardly find a house in the village without at least one.\u201d<\/p>\n Every man stopped by visiting journalists (women rarely speak to strangers in a conservative rural area) had a harrowing story of losing civilian brothers, cousins, uncles, executed during these raids, sometimes in front of their children, always within earshot.<\/p>\n These night raids and the deaths of civilians were powerful recruiting sergeants, and one reason the west and its allies lost their war.<\/p>\n \u201cMany, many people joined the Taliban because of the pain of these cases. If your father or son is killed in front of you, wouldn\u2019t you want to take revenge? And the way to do that was to join the Taliban,\u201d said Mohammad Habib, 26.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen people heard the choppers at night they would do their ablutions, so at least they would die clean, and get dressed so their corpses would be decent.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Members](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/2ac5ea52ae08a48d2ef1f0e8cfd2c806fd3651dc\/253_97_2747_1841\/master\/2747.jpg?width=880&quality=85&fit=max&s=79e00a93862f1299c9b3a54dddc34c52\")
<\/span>Members of the Taliban greet each other outside the district governor\u2019s compound in Jalrez.<\/span> Photograph: Nanna Muus Steffensen\/The Guardian<\/p>\nEconomic collapse<\/h2>\n
![\"Rahmanullah,](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/e06c25ff46551960d89043005da178cb9eea9b4f\/0_0_3000_1996\/master\/3000.jpg?width=620&quality=85&fit=max&s=439dba89cef0af4a80876d512f0bf8f9\")
<\/span>Rahmanullah, 12, applies for aid at the district governor\u2019s house in Jalrez in the province of Wardak. Rahmanullah\u2019s father was killed just after he was born and as the only child he provides for his widowed mother. On the wall, the Taliban has written the name of their unit.<\/span> Photograph: Nanna Muus Steffensen\/The Guardian<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/5d9212ccbfcb28c59976049b30c677dafbf02dba\/0_0_3000_1996\/master\/3000.jpg?width=880&quality=85&fit=max&s=7b61a179a7c035bc29e5190853e6424a\")
<\/span>A flag painted with a rose, a tulip and a drone releasing bombs flutters flutters over a small cluster of graves in the village of Ismail Khel.<\/span> Photograph: Nanna Muus Steffensen\/The Guardian<\/p>\nViolence renewed<\/h2>\n
![\"Mawli](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/ffc1a841a7be73dbe498f0c62322371b473b641e\/0_0_3000_1996\/master\/3000.jpg?width=620&quality=85&fit=max&s=8cd7bc358bf562573ed12e17f5cd21c5\")