Top US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, in an interview with the BBC, has stated that the US will go back into Afghanistan in the future. He said: "We will have to because the [terror] threat will be so large". After almost two decades, the US had pulled out all of its troops from Afghanistan. Barely days later, the entire nation fell to the Taliban.
The final days of America's 20-year war in Afghanistan were marked by a harrowing airlift at Kabul's airport to evacuate tens of thousands of people Americans and their allies who feared what the future would hold, given the Taliban's history of repression, particularly of women. When the last US troops pulled out on August. 30, though, many were left behind.
Searing images of that chaotic evacuation including people clinging to an airplane as it took off came to define the final days of America's longest war, just weeks after Taliban fighters retook the country in a lightning offensive.
Since their takeover, the Taliban have sought to recast themselves as different from their 1990s incarnation, when they last ruled the country and imposed repressive restrictions across society. Women and girls were denied work and education, men were forced to grow beards, and television and music were banned.
Now, the world is waiting to see the face of the new government, and many Afghans remain skeptical. In the weeks since they took power, signals have been mixed: Government employees including women have been asked to return to work, but some women were later ordered home by lower-ranking Taliban. Universities and schools have been ordered open, but fear has kept both students and teachers away.
Women have demonstrated peacefully, some even having conversations about their rights with Taliban leaders. But some have been dispersed by Taliban special forces firing in the air.
Some signs of normalcy have also begun to return. Kabul's streets are again clogged with traffic, as Taliban fighters patrol in pickup trucks and police vehicles brandishing their automatic weapons and flying the Taliban's white flag. Schools have opened, and moneychangers work the street corners.
