This isn't uncommon. I recall reading an article from the point of a woman in Afghanistan, where she said as much. The Taliban has issues, but the US army that

This isn't uncommon. I recall reading an article from the point of a woman in Afghanistan, where she said as much. The Taliban has issues, but the US army that empowered unjust warlords were much worse. > Nearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree. A villager recalled, “We went to cut them down, and they had been sliced open, their stomachs coming out.” In another village, Dado’s forces went from house to house, executing people suspected of being Taliban; an elderly scholar who’d never belonged to the movement was shot dead >When I asked Shakira and other women from the valley to reflect on Taliban rule, they were unwilling to judge the movement against some universal standard—only against what had come before. “They were softer,” Pazaro, the woman who lived in a neighboring village, said. “They were dealing with us respectfully.” The women described their lives under the Taliban as identical to their lives under Dado and the mujahideen—minus the strangers barging through the doors at night, the deadly checkpoints. >“My daughter wakes up screaming that the Americans are coming,” Pazaro said. “We have to keep talking to her softly, and tell her, ‘No, no, they won’t come back.’ So as a result you have people who don't agree with the Taliban ideologically, joining them just to keep American empowered war lords from killing civilians; >But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge; the movement was more thoroughly integrated into Sangin life than it had been in the nineties. Now, when Shakira and her friends discussed the Taliban, they were discussing their own friends, neighbors, and loved ones. Unfortunately these real stories aren't told. I consider myself a liberal, but the amount of liberals bemoaning America leaving Afghanistan was scary. People completely convinced they know the best thing for these people they never met, while American journalism made it clear that the death and rape of American rule in the Afghanistan countryside was not the feminist human rights- filled utopia some still think it was. When you see this, it makes sense why they so easily took over. https://www.newyorker.com./magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women https://www.newyorker.com./magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afg...