Is the West preparing to sell out the Afghan people again?

While the Taliban continues to double down against women in Afghanistan, the UN appears to be wanting to normalise relations with them. Women in the country are already blocked from almost all jobs and all education. Yet a week after the extremist group barred females from working for the UN, the organisation’s deputy secretary general Amina Mohammed said it was now time to take ‘baby steps’ towards ‘recognition (of the Taliban)’.  

As UN spokespeople tried to limit the damage, protests poured in from Afghan opposition groups. One statement from a wide group of Afghan artists and human rights activists slammed nearly two years of ‘futile regional and global diplomacy’ since the Taliban took Kabul in 2021. At a conference in Vienna this week to form a united opposition movement to the Taliban, the leader of one of the main groups fighting against them, Ahmad Massoud, told me he was ‘outraged’ by Amina Mohammed’s comments.