But the 10-year-old, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, has a strategy to stay at school for another year and her eyes dance with satisfaction as she explains her plan. “I’ll make sure I don’t get too many questions wrong. I decided to fail so I could study again in the sixth grade.” This is Afghanistan nearly a year after the Taliban seized control of the country in a lightning advance, moving so quickly to capture Kabul that they surprised even their own leadership. The country’s brightest young citizens take advantage of their intelligence to self-sabotage, because in a twisted system the group has created, that gives them more hope than success. In their campaign in Afghanistan, and in international talks with the US, the Taliban offered a tacit promise that in exchange for a slightly toned down version of their puritanical extremism, they would at least bring peace and stability to a country reeling from decades of war. Women had an Islamic right to education and work, their envoys told international conferences, and without constant war the Afghan economy would have more room to grow. As hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled, many others welcomed the silencing of the weapons with hope. A girl joins a class at a hidden school in Afghanistan. Photo: Nanna Muus Steffensen/The Guardian Almost a year later, that vision is looking increasingly hollow. Speaking of the seismic shift last August, the Taliban refer to before and after the “victory”. Ordinary Persian-speaking Afghans in the capital talk about life before and after the “fall”, or “collapse”, sukut in Afghanistan’s Dari dialect. The Taliban is an isolated pariah state, not recognized by any country, even former allies. Their embrace of their old, violent allies was dramatically exposed last week when the US killed al Qaeda’s leader in the heart of Kabul’s elite Sherpur neighborhood. But before that, they had spent months away from the global spotlight. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a gift to the Taliban, distracting the world as the group stepped up its extremist policies. Women face harsher restrictions here than anywhere else in the world, are excluded from secondary education and most work outside of health care and education. They are forced to be accompanied by a male guardian for all but short trips and are required to cover their faces in public. Restrictions are occasionally imposed, but, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable women, including those without guardians, the fear of enforcement alone can be crippling. “Three times now I have seen women beaten in the market by the Taliban. Some people were wearing pants that they thought were too tight, you should have seen how much they ripped afterwards,” said Farkhunda*, 16, who had to drop out of school in September and was struggling with depression. “Another time they beat up girls just for smiling and talking too loudly. It’s natural to talk about dresses you buy and things,’ she said.’ She does not have the long, black abaya prescribed by the Taliban, and the family cannot afford to buy one. “Since then I stopped going to study at the madrasah [religious school]it is better to be at home than to meet these animals,” he said. Members of the Taliban greet each other outside the district commander’s compound in Jalrez. Photo: Nanna Muus Steffensen/The Guardian

Financial collapse

The economy has collapsed by at least a third as international sanctions on the Taliban cut off trade, the aid that had kept the last regime afloat dried up and a militant group unwilling to shift from fighting an insurgency to running a government stumbled. management. “We were not politically connected to the last government, but the Taliban are just taking revenge that we were here to do business,” said a major businessman who has laid off nearly 500 people after equipment was seized and licenses suspended in several sectors. He is disappointed but also confused by the short-term approach of the authorities. His businesses remain dormant, although the new regime knows from experience how lucrative they can be. “I had paid them over $3 million in forced ‘taxes’” before they took over, he said. “So many businesses have already collapsed and if things continue, more will go.” For the formerly wealthy, the recession ended luxuries, but many of the former middle classes have been plunged almost overnight into poverty and hunger. At least half the population now relies on food aid, if they can get it. Sardar* and his wife held government posts in the security forces and were earning enough to buy land and build a house. Both were fired when the Taliban came to power. Today, she sits at home while he begs for manual labor on the side of the road and is lucky to have one day’s work a week, for 200 Afghanis ($2). “I’ve never done it in my life and it’s hard for me because I don’t use it, but I have a family to support,” he says, as his four children play at his feet. “I swear right now I don’t even have 1,000 Afghanis at home, my mother has diabetes and we don’t have money for her medicine.” At times, the country’s new leadership has been surprisingly adamant about these ills, telling Afghans they must trust God to feed them, not their government. But they also know that the crisis is eroding any confidence they might have. “They are losing domestic support and they know it very well,” said an Afghan analyst with ties to senior Taliban, who asked not to be identified speaking about internal issues within the group. The Taliban have always struggled with the transition from running a decentralized rural insurgency to taking control in Kabul. Rahmanullah, 12, applies for help at the district governor’s house in Jalrez in Wardak province. Rahmanullah’s father was killed soon after his birth and as an only child he takes care of his widowed mother. On the wall, the Taliban have written the name of their unit. Photo: Nanna Muus Steffensen/The Guardian “Running a government is the biggest nightmare they have to have. They were surprised by the whole development,” said an Afghan source with close ties to the Taliban, who said the leadership was out of their depth after arriving in a capital that had been transformed from the city they left in 2001. “They are traditional rural forces, they have come to cities, but instead of integrating, they want the cities to integrate into them, they want us to be like them, to have beliefs and hobbies like them.” An entire generation of educated Afghans has fled or is looking for a way out. The desperation to leave was not surprising given that the Taliban had targeted media, civil society and government professionals for assassination for years. While the widely publicized killing spree some feared the Taliban would unleash on Kabul never took place, dozens of people have been killed because of their ties to the previous government and its security forces. A former member of the intelligence service told the Observer how he had surrendered the day the Taliban arrived in his town, but had been arrested three times afterwards while trying to work. Now he is just coming out of his house. The brain drain has made it even more difficult to run the country. The central bank, struggling with frozen reserves and sanctions, has retained only mid- and low-level staff, with the most experienced senior executives going abroad, a banker involved in months-long crisis talks told the Observer. One area where the Taliban has had some success has been in combating the obscene levels of graft that have marked the administrations of the past 20 years, but their progress there is slowing. “Corruption is not as bad as before [former president Ashraf] Ghani, when you walked into an office to sort something out and everyone from A to Z wanted something. Now there are only two specific people, but it is expanding,” said the businessman. A flag painted with a rose, a tulip and a bomb-dropping drone flies over a small cluster of graves in the village of Ismail Khel. Photo: Nanna Muus Steffensen/The Guardian

The violence was renewed

Among the olive groves of the village of Ismail Khel, just an hour’s drive southwest of Kabul, a flag painted with a rose, a tulip and a bomb-dropping drone flies over a small cluster of graves. On the right are the abandoned ruins of a house where, 14 years ago, at least eight women and children died in an airstrike. They were buried next to their house. Left, Haji Yahyah, 66, still lives with his wife and a niece in the rubble of their home, hit by a second bomb that killed his daughter-in-law and nephew. They never got compensation from the US forces to rebuild and stayed because they had nowhere else to go. Villagers say these were the only airstrikes in this rural community, but for more than a decade the area has been mired in death and violence as foreign and government troops have landed in helicopters and raided homes. “We have four cemeteries in this village. Twenty years ago we only had one,” said Ainullah, 53. “A charity recently came to the village, looking for children who had lost a parent, to help them with food. They could hardly find a home in the village without at least one.” Every man stopped by visiting journalists (women rarely speak to strangers in a conservative rural area) had a terrifying story of losing civilian brothers, cousins, uncles, killed during these raids, sometimes in front of their children, always close to ear. These night raids and civilian deaths were powerful recruiting sergeants and a reason why the West and its allies lost the war. “Many, many people participated…