I was a child when the Taliban first ruled Afghanistan. Yet some of what I witnessed on the streets of Kabul remains very clear to me.
I saw women being beaten by Taliban members with cables. I saw women punished because they were wearing white shoes. As a child, I could not understand how something as ordinary as the colour of a woman’s shoes could justify public humiliation and violence.
I did not understand the politics or ideology behind it then. But I understood the fear.
More than two decades later, watching a recent BBC interview with Taliban official Mullah Abdullah Sarhadi brought those memories back.
When asked about the destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, Sarhadi tells the BBC: “I destroyed it with my own hands.”
What disturbed me was not only the admission. It was the absence of remorse.
In the same BBC reporting, an 18-year-old Afghan woman, identified by the pseudonym Tuba, approaches Sarhadi seeking a divorce from a husband she says is abusive. She argues for her decision despite pressure to remain married. Afterwards, Sarhadi describes women as “mindless” and “deficient in intellect.”
Twenty-five years separate the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas from this interview.
Yet listening to him, I found myself asking a very simple question:
What exactly had changed?
What Bamiyan represents
The Buddhas of Bamiyan were not merely two statues.
Carved into the sandstone cliffs of central Afghanistan, the smaller Buddha stood approximately 38 metres high and has been dated to around 507 CE. The larger, approximately 55 metres high, dates to around 551 CE, according to dating carried out through UNESCO’s conservation work.
They were part of a much larger cultural landscape of caves, monasteries, sanctuaries and paintings. For centuries, Bamiyan was an important centre along the Silk Road, reflecting interactions among different civilizations and cultural traditions.
The Buddhas survived for approximately fifteen centuries.
In March 2001, the Taliban destroyed them.
Many Muslim religious scholars were among those who tried to stop it. UNESCO documented efforts involving prominent Islamic scholars, including representatives associated with Al-Azhar and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, who attempted to persuade the Taliban not to proceed.
Their appeals failed.
The Buddhas were destroyed.
The niches remained.
The Cultural Landscape and Archaeological Remains of the Bamiyan Valley was subsequently inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2003.
Twenty-five years later, Sarhadi now publicly claims that he personally participated in that destruction and sees no reason for regret.
That is not merely an uncomfortable historical detail. It raises a question about accountability in the present.
The “changed Taliban”
For years before the Taliban returned to power, Afghans heard discussions about a “new” or “changed” Taliban. Their representatives had become more sophisticated diplomats, appearing in international media and negotiating with Afghan and international political figures.
But Sarhadi’s interview raises a much more fundamental question about what had actually changed.
Here is a man who says he personally participated in destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001. Twenty-five years later, he expresses no remorse. He remains in a position of authority and, in the same BBC reporting, describes women as “mindless” and “deficient in intellect.”
If accountability for the Taliban’s past had been part of assessing their claimed reform, the destruction of Bamiyan should have mattered. Those negotiating Afghanistan’s future should have asked what the Taliban acknowledged about their previous actions, what they regretted, and what evidence demonstrated that the beliefs behind those actions had changed.
I have also seen political reactions to Sarhadi’s interview focusing on his appearance. But reducing this interview to personal ridicule risks distracting from what it actually reveals. His appearance is irrelevant. What deserves scrutiny is that a man who claims responsibility for destroying part of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage, expresses no remorse, and describes women as “mindless” and “deficient in intellect” continues to exercise authority today.
This is where the question of the “changed Taliban” becomes unavoidable. Rather than focusing on personalities or appearances, we should be asking what evidence of reform was demanded during the political process, and why accountability for acts such as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was not treated as part of determining whether genuine change had taken place.
Sarhadi’s interview does not show us a Taliban transformed by twenty years of engagement with the world. It shows why accountability for the past should have been part of determining whether the past would be repeated.
We now know what happened
Whether the Taliban had fundamentally changed no longer needs to be treated as a theoretical question.
We can examine what they have done since returning to power in August 2021.
Girls beyond sixth grade remain excluded from formal secondary education. Women have been barred from universities. Restrictions have severely reduced women’s ability to work, travel freely and participate in public life.
For women of my generation, the continuity is difficult to ignore.
I remember the Taliban’s first regime through the eyes of a child watching women being beaten on Kabul’s streets, including women punished for wearing white shoes.
Today’s generation experiences Taliban rule differently, but the underlying question remains painfully familiar: how much freedom will men in power permit Afghan women to have?
This is why Sarhadi’s comments about women’s intellect matter.
And it is why his admission about Bamiyan matters.
Not because one man’s statements alone prove what an entire movement believes, but because his continued position within the Taliban system forces us to examine what was meant when that movement was presented as having changed.
Perhaps the Taliban did change.
They learned diplomacy.
They learned international political language.
They became more sophisticated in dealing with governments and media.
But becoming better at negotiating with the world is not the same as changing how you govern women at home.
The empty spaces
Twenty-five years ago, the Taliban left two enormous empty niches in the cliffs of Bamiyan.
Today, another image of absence has come to represent Afghanistan under their rule: empty chairs in girls’ classrooms.
The two losses are not equivalent. One concerns cultural heritage; the other concerns the rights, opportunities and futures of millions of human beings.
But both tell us something about the exercise of ideological power.
The empty niches of Bamiyan remind us what happened when the Taliban decided which parts of Afghanistan’s past were acceptable.
The empty chairs in girls’ schools show what happens when they are allowed to decide who may participate in Afghanistan’s future.
Between those two images came twenty years in which millions of Afghan girls went to school, women entered universities and professions, and a generation grew up believing that the Afghanistan they were building would not return to the Afghanistan their mothers remembered.
I was a child when I saw women beaten on the streets of Kabul.
Today, another generation of Afghan girls is experiencing Taliban rule not as history, but as their present.
That is why Sarhadi’s interview deserves more than outrage at one man’s words. It should reopen a much larger conversation about accountability, political legitimacy and the assumptions on which Afghanistan’s future was negotiated.
When we were told that the Taliban had changed, what exactly had changed?
The niches in Bamiyan are empty because of what the Taliban destroyed in 2001.
The chairs in Afghanistan’s girls’ classrooms are empty because of what they are destroying now.
Dr. Amna Mehmood is an Afghan/German scientist, educator and science advocate based in Germany. She is a senior scientist at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany and works at the intersection of science, education, intercultural competence and women’s rights. Her writing focuses on Afghan women and girls, education, science and social inclusion.
