There is a young woman sheltering under a tree between two busy roads clutching a pile of documents to her chest.
These pieces of paper are more important to Bibi Nazdana than anything in the world: they are the divorce granted to her after a two-year court battle to free herself from life as a child bride.
They are the same papers a Taliban court has invalidated - a victim of the group’s hardline interpretation on Sharia (religious law) which has seen women effectively silenced in Afghanistan’s legal system.
Nazdana’s divorce is one of tens of thousands of court rulings revoked since the Taliban took control of the country three years ago this month.
I don’t think the two are related. I’m pretty sure that the root of the current Islamic rule is from the US funding the mujahideen against the Soviet Union back in the 70s.
Afghanistan isn’t really a cohesive country in the first place. There have been a lot of warring factions in the past few hundred years, both foreign and domestic, and none of them have brought all the people under one flag.
It’s not that they’d rather have the Taliban, it’s that they want to be left alone and they don’t care who’s in Kabul.