This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 19th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

This is the second time the Taliban has taken power in Afghanistan.

Cato's Mustafa Aquille, author of the forthcoming book,

Why, as a Muslim, I Defend Liberty, discusses the Taliban's background and offers some ideas

about what's to come next for the people of Afghanistan.

Before we get into the new Taliban, the new kinder gentler Taliban that we're hearing about

in Afghanistan, who was the Taliban, oh about 2001, you know, from the 90s to about 2001?

Taliban is a word which means the students.

They were basically a militant Islamist group that

emerged in the mid-90s in the chaos of the Civil War, which began after the Soviet pull out.

Actually it's fair to say that the old evil, I mean at least most of it began with the Soviet invasion of 1979, which was a very brutal invasion with

landmines and destruction of the civilian population in the countryside.

So the people who fought that were freedom fighters, you know, as they were perceived at the time in the West, they were not the Taliban.

The Taliban are the children of some of those people who grew up in Pakistan in some of the madrasas, religious schools,

from a very hard line Islamic point of view, and they came to the scene in the mid-90s, the Soviets were gone, but there was civil war and

some of the warlords were pretty brutal. So they actually first gained some recognition

by bringing low on order, punishing thieves or rapists.

But they themselves became the biggest gang in the town and occupied Afghanistan and established their first rule until the US invasion of 2001.

So what is the Taliban promising now? They've returned to power in Afghanistan. I will say that their

messaging is fairly impressive in that everything that I've seen from Western media

characterizing how the Taliban is presenting itself to the world is

...