2024-09-06
14 分钟Afghanistan’s Taliban leadership may have smashed TVs in the 1990s, but these days their embracing slickly-produced videos and social media influencers to try to rehab their image abroad. Afghan anthropologist Omar Sharifi unpacks whether its working.
I'm Dina Templest, and this is click.
Here's micro when Omar Sharifi first came to the US to study, it was 2006, just five years after the US and its allies drove the Taliban regime from power in Afghanistan.
I ended up at Columbia University.
I went there.
I was the first half one, I think, in a quarter of a century, who again came back to the United States to study.
He was on a Fulbright scholarship, which funds foreign students to study in the US.
And ironically, when he was studying in New York City, where I was living at the time I was traveling in Afghanistan.
I was working on a book about radicalization.
And following in the footsteps of six upstate New Yorkers who were among the first Americans to travel to Afghanistan to join al Qaeda.
Omar didn't expect to, but he ended up loving New York.
I left Afghanistan and I felt initially that I would be very overwhelmed.
Afghan guy in New York, you could imagine why he was worried.
But he said it was very easy.
To get used to.
One of my friends told me that freedom is easy to get used to.
Freedom is easy to get used to.
So easy, apparently, that Omar stayed in the US, earned a PhD, and then went back home to teach at the American University of Afghanistan.
Penisla, I think, is the only, literally the only venue for modern education in the country right now.
And we wanted to talk to him because he has a unique perspective, because he experienced both the first Taliban regime, which ran roughly from 1996 to 2001, as well as the Afghanistan that emerged after that, the modern Afghanistan that, until recently, Omar said was not just defined by hope, but by technology, too.
And now that the Taliban is back in power, Omar says, it feels uncomfortably familiar.