THE last time I was in the Afghan capital Kabul, I had a brief telephone chat with Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. During our conversation, the Islamist group’s ever available PR man was at pains to stress how his fellow Taliban would never give up their fight until all foreign troops had left Afghan soil.

That moment is now rapidly approaching but already the redoubtable Taliban messenger Mr Zabihullah has other points he feels must be rammed home.

Just these past days in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, he was at pains to stress how even with foreign troops gone the insurgents will continue to fight to establish what he calls an “Islamic government”.

Women will be forced to wear the hijab or burqa, Zabihullah insisted, and the sexes will be clearly segregated, while freedom of expression and speech will simply become memories. In other words, it will be back to business as usual should the Taliban once again be in control and with every day that passes that looks ever more likely.

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What the Taliban say and what they do of course don’t always match up. Only yesterday they were strongly denying that they carried out the killing of 10 Afghans working for the Scotland-based demining agency the Halo Trust. Their denial of involvement in the killings would appear to be borne out by Halo Trust CEO James Cowan who told the BBC that “the local Taliban... came to our rescue and scared the assailants off”.

Others are less convinced that the masked men who gunned down the aid workers were not in some way connected to the Taliban. Whatever the truth behind the attack, few Afghans doubt the Taliban will be so accommodating should they sweep once gain to power in the wake of the US and Nato troop withdrawal that is currently underway.

Those Afghans who worked with foreign forces will be safe the Taliban insist, provided they “show remorse” for their past actions. But try telling that to the countless interpreters, cooks, and drivers among others currently looking to flee the country while western embassies the UK among them – albeit reluctantly – process thousands of visa applications.

Try telling it also to all those Afghan women who have seen their rights improved since the Taliban were ousted. The progress made on women’s rights is one of the biggest successes of the last 20 years in Afghanistan but many now fear a return of darker times.

Some years ago, in the wake of the Taliban’s ouster, I paid a visit to Kabul’s Ghazi football stadium where the Islamist extremists who banned all sport found another use for the ground. In what had been the stadium’s team dressing rooms, I was shown how they had been adapted to hold prisoners ready for punishment or execution before the crowd of citizens who were forcibly herded into the stands and terraces and made to watch.

I was led down the tunnel leading on to the pitch where sometimes cowering women in their pale blue, all-enveloping burqas, were brought into the stadium to be either stoned or shot dead at point blank range. Their crimes were usually spurious accusations of adultery under a regime where 80% of marriages were forced.

Even today few ordinary Afghans like to be near the stadium after dark, believing that the souls of the victims still roam the sprawling grounds.

TODAY the Taliban are content to offer up conflicting messages over how women will be treated should they return to power. While Zabihullah Mujahid talks of segregating the sexes and forcing women to wear the hijab or burqa, others within their ranks say that women’s rights will be “protected”.

But ask most young Afghan women in Kabul about such things and they will tell you of their sisters being targeted or still being gunned down in the streets while going to work or school. And as if it were not enough to be targeted as a woman then try being female and from one of the country’s ethnic minorities like the Hazara community, long persecuted by the Taliban who themselves belong to Afghanistan’s majority ethnic Pashtun group.

Just last month a bombing in one of Kabul’s Hazara neighbourhoods killed 85 people with most of the victims being schoolgirls between 13 and 18 years old.

Distrustful of the Afghan government and the Taliban, many of Afghanistan’s minority groups, particularly the Hazaras, view the presence of foreign forces as their last line of defence. In the coming weeks and months that defence will dwindle leaving many Hazaras fearing what lies in store for them.

This September will mark exactly 20 years since al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on America, planned and directed from Afghanistan, that brought in the US-led Coalition that removed the Taliban from power and temporarily drove out al-Qaeda.

This week it was revealed that Britain’s war in Afghanistan cost the taxpayer £22.2 billion and this only accounts for the cash from a specific Whitehall pot for the conflict.

In America’s case it has cost the taxpayer there close to a staggering US$1 trillion. All this money too before that other cost in terms of the thousands of lives of the service personnel from the US, UK, and other countries.

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“Do you think it was worth it?” I’m often asked. The answer must be a resounding no not least given that it remains ordinary Afghans above all who have sacrificed and continue to do so.

Whatever one thinks of the rights or wrongs of having foreign troops in Afghanistan in the first place, once they are gone the Taliban will continue moving into the ascendancy adding more towns and cities to those that fall under their control almost daily now.

Some people reading this might perhaps say glibly well so be it, at least Afghans will be sorting it out for themselves.

I understand that argument and on a certain level it’s difficult to refute. But it doesn’t take into account what comes next for those Afghans, mainly women and ethnic minorities who will bear the brunt of the Taliban’s return to power.

Those ordinary decent Afghans that I’ve met over the years deserve better after all they have been through. Afghan women especially hope that the world will not abandon and forget them again.

It’s up to all of us in whatever way we can to make sure that their fate is not left yet again in the hands of the Taliban.