This Is How Taliban's New Police Force Functions

With power comes a daunting challenge: convincing Afghans — many of them with bitter memories of the last time the group was in charge — that it can govern as well as it can fight

- Nabih Bulos

KABUL

It was almost 4 o’clock on a recent afternoon when Mawlawi Shaker, the new chief of this city’s Police District 10, leaned back in his leather chair and plopped a foot on the ornate wooden desk before him.

A 35-year-old built like a lanky basketball player, Shaker is from Wardak, a province just east of Kabul, the Afghan capital. He was one week into his job, a position that opened after the Taliban blitzed into the capital last month as the American-backed government collapsed. He had passed through Kabul before but had never lived here. So far, he didn’t like it.

“In the provinces, things were normal. We had religious services, no criminality, the adhan,” he said, referring to the Muslim call to prayer. “But here, we see a lot of injustice. There was cruelty. Brutality. Corruption. Sexual harassment. But now that we have come to Kabul, people are satisfied. They always tell us, ‘We love you and appreciate you.’”

Though there’s no lack of Afghans who would disagree with that statement — and despite Shaker’s thoughts about policing Kabul — he was now part of a high-stakes litmus test playing out across this war-battered nation the Taliban rules.

In its almost two-decade fight with the US, the Taliban worked at every turn to undermine the former Afghan government, deriding its leaders as corrupt stooges whose forces could never protect Afghans from the group’s ferocious attacks. But with power comes a daunting challenge: convincing Afghans — many of them with bitter memories of the last time the fundamentalist group was in charge — that it can govern as well as it can fight.