I’ve made two longish reporting tours in Afghanistan over the last three months, and my feeling is growing that the Taliban have learnt the lesson of their previous five years in power, when they were the most extreme Islamist regime on earth. During those years I saw men and women beaten in the streets for wearing ‘unIslamic’ clothes; one was a man whose ankles were uncovered when the wind blew his shalwar kameez aside. I filmed in girls’ schools which had been attacked by the Taliban. At one there was blood on the walls up to head height. 

Nowadays there are no patrols checking on people’s clothes, and although there are noticeably fewer women in the streets than there used to be, they often wear quite loose headscarves. In the city of Bamian I filmed at a girls’ school which was half full of pupils.  Students and teachers told me the local Taliban had done nothing whatsoever to stop them going to school. Nor has there been any scope given to violent extremism. The Taliban have clamped down hard on the Islamic State Khorasan (ISK) group, and there have been occasional armed clashes between the Taliban and ISK.

These things – a relatively relaxed atmosphere in the streets, an increasing willingness to allow girls to go to school, and a determination to counter ISK – may well be the result of the West’s stranglehold on the Afghan economy. Yet the chances are that the Taliban would have been less extreme in power this time anyway, since they have understood and acknowledged the damage their ultra-conservatism did last time. 

What’s more, 20 years of Western influence have made Afghans much more difficult to control. Nowadays they’re outspoken and aware of the outside world. And of course they know very well what they’ve lost with the departure of the Western troops. On the walls of the citadel in Herat I met a 17-year-old who told me he felt he had been cut off from all his foreign friends on the internet. “I believed I was part of the same world as them,” he said. “Now I know I’m not.” Wasn’t he worried about talking to me in this way? “Why should I be worried? I can say what I want to say.”