Afghanistan has changed. What if exiled Taliban have not?

The Taliban are set to reclaim some power in Afghanistan – if not orchestrate their own wholesale military takeover – as remaining U.S. forces prepare to withdraw and end America’s longest war by Sept. 11.

In the interim, a peace deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government in Kabul remains elusive, and the Taliban are gearing up for their annual spring offensive – even promising “every necessary countermeasure” against the United States for ignoring a May 1 pullout deadline that the militants agreed to in February 2020 with then-President Donald Trump.

It’s a vow that fits a pattern of uncompromising Taliban positions that appear to barely recognize – or to directly oppose – the dramatic social and political changes in Afghanistan since the U.S. ousted the Taliban’s self-proclaimed “Islamic Emirate” two decades ago.

And it raises questions about the danger to Afghanistan today posed by a Taliban leadership – returning after years in exile – equipped with thinking that analysts say is often still-calcified from a previous era.

Afghans have seen the results of out-of-touch outsiders returning from exile to rule, analysts say, in 1992 when faction chiefs long exiled in Peshawar, Pakistan, battled for control after the fall of President Mohammad Najibullah.

The result was a devastating civil war, further civilian exodus, and the fragmentation of the country by feuding warlords, a chaotic period that eventually gave rise to the Islamist Taliban, who seized control and ruled from 1996 to 2001.

To achieve their aims at the time, the Taliban used a heavy hand and imposed their strict interpretation of Islam – including unbending rules limiting the role of women and banning girls’ education, enforcing long beards, and even forbidding all music and photographic images of people.

There are some signs that the Taliban have evolved in their thinking, to accommodate changes in Afghanistan. But there are many other signs that echo a previous, violent era – from an assassination campaign that in recent months has killed scores of journalists, civil society activists, and government officials, to Taliban propaganda declaring continued jihad against the Western-backed Afghan government and “victory” over a superpower.

The Taliban’s Voice of Jihad website is among those that raise red flags for Afghan activists about the Taliban’s post-U.S.-withdrawal intentions. An article posted Wednesday, for example, titled “Feminism as colonial tool,” suggests that feminism for decades justified “invasion, subjugation and bullying of Muslims.”

“Western cries of ‘women’s rights’ appear a harmless demand,” the Taliban author states. “But when coupled with the incompatibility of much of these rights with the Islamic religion, their destructive effects on human society … and the dangerous agendas for Muslim societies curtained behind them, a more sinister perspective emerges.”

Also emblematic of the Taliban’s unwavering stance is their insistence on the term “Islamic Emirate,” the name of its regime in the late 1990s.

The Taliban “want everything, even this ‘Islamic Emirate,’ which could be changed to anything and doesn’t carry any value. But just to prove their point, they’re even sticking to that,” says Rahmatullah Amiri, a Kabul-based analyst who closely studies the Taliban.

“Imagine, if in these two years of this hardcore negotiation [with the U.S.], the Taliban didn’t even change that, which they can change in a minute,” says Mr. Amiri. “If I am not willing to change even the name, which is superficial, why would I be willing to change the content?”

American acquiescence is evident in the 2020 U.S.-Taliban deal, which refers 16 times to the Taliban with the unwieldy phrase “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban.”

Taliban insistence on “Emirate,” without clarifying its import, even prompted a rare joint rebuke by the U.S., Russia, China, and Pakistan, who stated in March they “did not support the restoration of the Islamic Emirate.”

“Bringing back people who have been outside of the country for a long time, and who are ideologues, is a recipe for disaster,” said Thomas Barfield, professor of anthropology at Boston University and president of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, in a recent webinar.

“It looks like we are going to make the same mistake as in 1992, and invite some of these Taliban who have not seen Afghanistan for 20 years,” said Professor Barfield. “The Afghanistan that they remember no longer exists. It doesn’t. If they fly into Kabul, that is not a recognizable city from the ruins they left, nor is the population, its education, its communications.”

“These are not exactly people who are prone to compromise, or who even understand what Afghanistan’s problems are going to be,” said Professor Barfield.

Already, those challenging characteristics have marked the Trump-Taliban deal. The February 2020 agreement required mandatory withdrawal dates for U.S. and NATO forces, but few concrete commitments by the Taliban, other than preventing Afghan soil from being used for terrorist attacks abroad, severing ties with Al Qaeda, and not attacking foreign forces.

The Taliban also committed to “start” intra-Afghan peace talks, with a cease-fire “on the agenda.” Yet since signing the deal – and despite an unwritten promise to reduce violence by 80%, according to the U.S. side – the Taliban have kept up attacks on Afghan forces.

This month the Taliban refused to attend a U.S.-initiated conference in Turkey meant to jump-start the intra-Afghan peace talks that have stalled for months in Doha, Qatar.

With President Joe Biden affirming that the U.S. withdrawal will proceed, administration officials publicly are shrugging off concerns for the Afghan government.

“I do not believe the government is going to collapse or the Taliban is going to take over,” U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday. The Pentagon reportedly plans to send a 650-strong force in coming days to “protect” the pullout of some 2,500 U.S. and 7,000 other NATO troops.

Yet the annual U.S. intelligence analysis of global threats, published earlier this month, takes a darker view.

Prospects for a peace deal “will remain low” for the next year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed. The Afghan government “will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support,” it noted. And while Kabul continues to face battlefield setbacks, “the Taliban is confident it can achieve military victory.”

That is not news to Afghanistan analysts, who point to high Taliban expectations of triumph, expressed in a steady barrage of statements. Responding on April 15 to President Biden’s declaration of the September withdrawal date, for example, the Taliban said U.S. “warmongering circles have failed,” and that the Taliban “will under no circumstance ever relent on … establishment of a pure Islamic system.”

Taliban fighters have been promised complete military victory. The Taliban’s supposed partner for peace – the Western-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani – is “corrupt and illegitimate” and “must be replaced with an Islamic government.”

Meanwhile, years of increasingly effective insurgency already have brought the Taliban to control or have influence over more than half of Afghanistan today. They say their emirate was “taken from them” in 2001, and that victory now means their emirate must be given back, completely, says Mr. Amiri, the Kabul-based analyst.

“The issue with the Taliban being so stubborn is that there’s no peak to Taliban success,” he adds, noting that most insurgencies reach a point where they recognize that “this is all we can do.” But for the Taliban, “every year they get more territory, they get more success … so that makes it quite challenging.”

Yet even if an unconditional U.S. departure removes the leverage of foreign troops, other pressure points remain, including the Taliban’s long-standing desire for international recognition and sanctions relief.

“The enemy gets a vote on the battlefield, but not in the Security Council,” says Barnett Rubin, a former senior adviser on Afghanistan to U.S. and United Nations envoys, in an analysis written last month for the United States Institute of Peace.

There are nevertheless limits, notes Mr. Rubin, now at New York University, to how much influence diplomatic pressure can have.

Being “accepted as partners in ruling Afghanistan” would require them to “make difficult decisions that they have thus far avoided,” he says. “Negotiations … over a future political road map for the country cannot succeed if the Taliban behave as they did in the 1990s.”