There Was No “Liberation” Of Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan – On the morning of Nov. 13, 2001, Abdul Maruf Ahmadi was a teenager standing on a street in Kabul, watching men shave off their beards. The Taliban had slipped out of the capital overnight after they were overthrown by the invading Americans and their Afghan allies. By dawn, the fighters of the so-called Northern Alliance were rolling in on pickup trucks, and music, banned for five years, was playing again from shopfronts. People cheered. Women who had been confined to their homes stepped outside and threw away their burqas. “For many people, it was a relief. They have had enough of the repressions,” Ahmadi told me when I met him in Kabul this autumn. He is in his early 40s now, and he does not romanticize the Taliban, then or now. But he remembers how quickly the joy curdled. Within days, Kabul and the rest of the country became a hunting ground.

This excerpt comes from the named source. Read the original for the full reporting.