Ahmed-Waleed Kakar reports:

Muhammad Sadiq Akif was not in Kabul as the city fell to the Taliban last August. An insurgent propagandist who had been chronicling the frantic last days of the war on Twitter, he was over 60 miles to the southeast, in Loya Paktia. Taliban control there was tenuous and the surrender of a regional CIA-created militia, the notorious Khost Protection Force, was still being negotiated. Akif arrived in Kabul days later. Across the city, fluttering in the summer wind, was the Taliban’s white flag. His prayers had been answered.

“I cannot explain how I felt,” Akif told me recently. “The first thing we did was step out of the car, walk through the city and perform ‘sajdat ash-shukr’ [the Islamic prostration of thankfulness] at every turn.”

For rural Afghans who make up the majority of the population and from whom the Taliban draw their strongest support, the Afghan capital has historically been a remote entity. Not for Akif. Disguised as a student, he had often infiltrated Kabul during the war. This time, however, with the promise of peace on the horizon, he was openly entering the capital as a Talib. Used to a life of secrecy, waging jihad over a smartphone and via the occasional foray into combat, he would soon find himself devoid of cover and with a highly public profile as the spokesperson for the government’s most controversial department: the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — Amr-bil-Ma’roof.

Rifts at the top of the Taliban’s emirate have emerged in recent weeks as the new government struggles to reconcile the parameters of classical Islamic governance with the twin challenges posed by modernity and running a country that has undergone immense social, cultural and political change in the past 20 years. Men and women, courtesy of Akif’s ministry, are now forbidden from mixing in Kabul’s parks. Meanwhile, girls’ schools are still closed despite a promise they would open on March 23, causing disquiet even among some senior Taliban figures. This has come as the assets of the Afghan Central Bank remain frozen by the U.S. and the country remains in the throes of international isolation, undoubtedly exacerbated by the erratic turn recently taken by its government.

The stakes are high. We owe it to ourselves, therefore, to listen to men like Akif, and that is what I set out to do via a series of WhatsApp interviews earlier this year. One need not agree with the Taliban in order to understand them. I wanted to find out if the background and opinions of a skilled propagandist within the movement could help us explain what has been happening in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s victory. [Continue reading…]