From Kabul’s Chains to Damascus’ Smile
In January 2026, while European diplomats were negotiating deportation agreements in Kabul, the regime they were negotiating with published a law authorizing the ownership of human beings. Article 4(5) of the Taliban’s new Criminal Procedure Code permits masters to punish their slaves. Article 9 divides Afghan society into four hereditary castes, with the lowest—including the enslaved—subject to flogging for offenses that earn religious scholars only a warning. A woman who leaves her home without her husband’s permission is a criminal. A woman accused of apostasy receives life imprisonment with ten lashes every three days. A husband who beats his wife faces fifteen days in jail, provided the bruises are visible; less, if he is careful.
Fifteen hundred kilometers to the west, the United Nations had just lifted terrorism sanctions from a man who founded al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, citing his “pragmatic” disposition—while his forces were documented massacring Alawite civilians and abducting women and girls in numbers that triggered international alarm.
These are not separate failures. They are the same failure, recurring with such precision that coincidence is impossible. What connects the European missions to Kabul and the rehabilitation of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani is a particular pathology in how Western institutions engage with ideological movements whose premises are incompatible with liberal assumptions. Call it suicidal empathy: the compulsive extension of good faith to actors who have demonstrated, repeatedly and explicitly, that they do not operate in good faith. It is not naivety—naivety implies innocence. It is the systematic preference for comfortable fictions over uncomfortable truths, sustained by institutional incentives that reward optimism and punish accuracy. The cost is measured in slave codes and massacres. The beneficiaries are careers that continue undisturbed in Brussels and Washington. The victims are women flogged every three days in Kabul, families murdered in their homes in Latakia, minorities told that their oppressors have “changed.”
The Taliban’s Criminal Procedure Code deserves examination not as aberration but as destination—the logical terminus of an ideology that was never concealed and a Western interpretive failure that chose not to see it.
The code’s 119 articles accomplish what no modern state had previously formalized: the stratification of legal personhood according to hereditary classification, with explicit recognition of slavery as an operative juridical category. Article 9 calibrates punishment to birth: the ulema (religious scholars) receive admonitory warnings; the ashraf (descendants of the Prophet) face summons; the middle classes confront imprisonment; and the lowest orders—including those designated ghulam, the enslaved—receive corporal punishment and detention. Article 15 specifies applicability “whether the offender is free or enslaved.” The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security characterizes the code as extending “far beyond regulating courts or criminal procedure” to constitute “an ideological system in which punishment, surveillance, and coercion are core instruments of governance.” The provisions concerning women illuminate the regime’s understanding of female existence with particular clarity. Article 32 prescribes fifteen days’ imprisonment for husbands who beat their wives severely enough to cause “fracture, injury, or the appearance of bruising”—a sanction less severe than the five months mandated for organizing animal fights. Article 34 criminalizes wives who depart the marital residence without permission, mandating three months’ imprisonment for both the woman and those who “obstruct” her return. Article 58 sentences women convicted of apostasy to life imprisonment “accompanied by ten lashes every three days.” The theological genealogy of the four-tier hierarchy merits attention. The classification reflects classical jurisprudential interpretations that predate the modern state system, drawing upon medieval distinctions between categories of legal personhood that liberal modernity had consigned to historical obsolescence. The Taliban’s innovation lies not in conceptual creativity but in juridical resurrection—the formal translation of pre-modern social ontology into positive law. This is not governance by a state that happens to be harsh. This is the legal abandonment of human equality before the law, codified and published for the world to read.
The analytical significance of the January 2026 legislation resides not in its content—which represents the logical terminus of ideology the Taliban never disavowed—but in the interpretive failure that preceded it. This failure cannot be attributed to intelligence deficits. The Taliban governed Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. They destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, executed women in stadiums, prohibited girls from attending school. Their ideology was not secret. When they returned in August 2021, they held a press conference and said reassuring things. Western institutions chose to believe the press conference and ignore the previous government.
The Taliban’s inaugural Kabul press conference on 17 August 2021 was a masterwork of calibrated messaging. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, who had operated as a spectral figure for two decades, materialized before international journalists to deliver precisely the assurances Euro-American audiences wished to receive. “We are going to allow women to work and study,” he declared. “Women are going to be very active in the society but within the framework of Islam.” He extended amnesty to former government collaborators: “We assure you that nobody will go to their doors to ask why they helped.” When pressed on differentiation from the 1990s regime, Mujahid offered studied ambiguity: “There will be a difference when it comes to the actions we are going to take.” Contemporary analysts recognized the performance as explicitly designed for international consumption, an attempt “to rebrand them as the new Taliban…with whom the international community can engage.” The performance succeeded—not because Western observers lacked sophistication but because it confirmed what institutional incentives already demanded they believe. Two decades and trillions of dollars had been invested in Afghan state-building. Acknowledging ideological continuity would require acknowledging comprehensive enterprise failure. The European Union’s post-withdrawal assessment conceded that Afghanistan’s collapse “took the European Union by surprise”—a confession revealing not intelligence failure but interpretive failure, the subordination of analytical accuracy to institutional comfort.
The trajectory that followed constituted not unexpected reversals but progressive implementation of never-concealed intentions. September 2021 brought gender-segregated universities. March 2022 witnessed the abrupt reversal of secondary school reopening—girls who had dressed according to Taliban specifications and believed assurances were sent home in tears. Afghan journalist Mariam Naheebi captured the betrayal: “We did everything the Taliban asked in terms of Islamic dress, and they promised that girls could go to school and now they have broken their promise.” December 2022 produced complete university bans, rendering Afghanistan the sole nation on earth prohibiting female education by law. More than eighty subsequent edicts systematically excluded women from parks, employment, travel without male accompaniment, and eventually from United Nations employment itself.
Each breach of promise should have recalibrated Western assessments. None did. The engagement continued. The framework held. The fictions persisted.
The response from Western governments has been continued engagement. Belgium, which has coordinated European policy toward the Taliban since October 2025, exemplifies the collective approach. In January 2026—as the slavery provisions became public—Belgium’s Director General of Immigration completed a three-day mission to Kabul to negotiate deportation cooperation with the regime that had just legalized human ownership. He was not acting alone; he was executing European strategy.
The framework was established years earlier. Belgian Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmès declared in September 2021 that “operational consultation with the Taliban is unavoidable,” though “consultation should not be confused with formal recognition.” This distinction—engagement without recognition—became the architecture through which European actors convinced themselves that transactional cooperation could avoid moral implication. EU High Representative Josep Borrell articulated the underlying logic: “In order to have any chance to influence events, we have no other option but to engage.” The assumption embedded in this formulation—that engagement produces influence, that influence produces moderation—was never tested against the evidence accumulating in real time. Minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt invoked the framework again in 2026, acknowledging that Belgium “does not share the Taliban regime’s values” while arguing that “limited administrative co-operation with governments holding opposing worldviews was sometimes necessary.” The formulation is revealing. “Opposing worldviews” describes disagreement about tax policy or immigration levels. It does not describe a regime that has codified slavery, authorized masters to flog their property, and sentenced apostates to life imprisonment with corporal punishment every three days. The euphemism performs ideological work: it domesticates the Taliban into a negotiating partner with different but legitimate perspectives, rather than a movement whose foundational premises negate the possibility of good-faith engagement. BelRefugees spokesperson Mehdi Kassou articulated what ministerial language obscured: “One does not collaborate with an apartheid regime, just as one did not innocently collaborate yesterday with a regime accused of crimes against humanity, because such co-operation entails full political and moral responsibility.”
Germany has pursued similar deportation arrangements. The EU as an institution has maintained its engagement framework. The pattern is continental, not national. Belgium’s specificity provides concrete evidence of a collective European decision—the decision that cooperation with slave-owners remains administratively necessary and morally manageable.
Fifteen hundred kilometers west of Kabul, the identical script unfolds with different actors reading the same lines.
Abu Mohammed al-Jolani founded al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch in 2012. He led Jabhat al-Nusra through years of documented atrocities before rebranding as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and claiming independence from al-Qaeda in 2016. In December 2024, his forces toppled the Assad regime. Within eighteen months, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations had removed him from terrorism designations, lifted approximately fifteen billion dollars in sanctions, and welcomed him as a pragmatic statesman. His metamorphosis has been characterized as worthy of “Madison Avenue consultancy”—the jihadist turban exchanged for military fatigues, incendiary religious rhetoric modulated toward political pragmatism, CNN interviews wherein he discussed his extremist past as though recounting adolescent indiscretions rather than leadership of a designated terrorist organization.
The messaging calibration mirrors the Taliban template with instructive precision. In December 2024, al-Jolani informed the BBC that “Syria will not follow the same path as Afghanistan under the Taliban’s rule.” He pledged inclusivity, minority protection, constitutional governance. HTS’s political affairs department issued statements emphasizing commitment to protecting ethnic and religious communities as rebel forces advanced. The Soufan Center observed that HTS messaging was “carefully tailored not just to Syrians, at home and exiled, and other rebel fighters, but also to its adversaries, including Iran and Russia, and other members of the international community.” This represented not organic moderation but strategic communication designed to secure international rehabilitation.
The Western response followed an almost algorithmic sequence. July 2025 brought United States revocation of HTS’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designation, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring this “an important step in fulfilling President Trump’s vision of a stable, unified, and peaceful Syria.” The United Kingdom delisted HTS in October 2025. November 2025 witnessed the UN Security Council lifting terror-related sanctions on al-Jolani, the EU and US having already provided sanctions relief encompassing approximately fifteen billion dollars in restricted assets. UN sanctions monitors found “no active ties” between HTS and al-Qaeda during the first half of 2025, describing al-Jolani as a “pragmatic figure” without “ideologically rigid views.”
The velocity of rehabilitation was remarkable. The disregard for precedent was breathtaking. Yet contemporaneous with this diplomatic embrace, empirical reality manifested precisely the Afghan pattern.
March 2025 brought methodical massacres targeting Alawite communities across western Syria. The Syrian Network for Human Rights documented at least 1,084 deaths in clashes since 6 March, with forces aligned with the transitional government responsible for at least 639, including civilians and disarmed combatants. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported 1,614 civilians killed by armed militias between 6 and 12 March alone. The operational pattern was consistent: gunmen arrived at homes, asked residents about their religion, and executed based on the answer. Amnesty International documented at least 36 abductions of Alawite women and girls since February 2025. Reuters uncovered 33 cases involving ransom demands and trafficking. UN experts expressed grave concern over 38 documented abductions across multiple governorates, victims aged between 3 and 40 years, taken “in broad daylight while travelling to school, visiting relatives, or in their homes.” The documented pattern—”gender-based violence, threats, forced marriage of minors, and a glaring lack of effective response by Syrian interim Government”—suggested, according to UN experts, “a targeted campaign against Alawite women and girls.” Syrian activist Mohammed al-Jajeh characterized the situation as “catastrophic by all measures,” marked by “ethnic and sectarian purges” targeting Alawites, Christians, Ismailis, Shias, and moderate Sunnis. July 2025 brought the abduction of at least 105 Druze women and girls by government-affiliated armed groups.
On women’s status, Syrian women’s organizations voiced alarm that the nearly all-male caretaker government signaled systematic marginalization, with a government spokesperson asserting that women are “inherently not suited to certain government roles.” None of this interrupted the rehabilitation. The sanctions were lifted. The designations were revoked. The pragmatist was welcomed. The massacres were noted and filed. The speed of al-Jolani’s rehabilitation becomes truly remarkable only in comparison. Sanctions against Iran have persisted for over forty years. Sanctions against Russia have intensified since 2014, with expansion rather than contraction as the operative trajectory. Neither regime has been accused of massacring over a thousand civilians in a single week. Yet an organization that constituted al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch until 2016, designated terrorist by the United States in 2018, received comprehensive delisting within eighteen months of assuming power—while documented massacres were still being investigated.
The asymmetry cannot be explained by behavior. HTS engaged in precisely the conduct that justifies sanctions maintenance elsewhere: sectarian violence, persecution of minorities, gender-based repression. The explanation resides instead in utility. Syria under al-Jolani serves Western strategic interests: counterbalancing Iranian regional influence, complicating Russian Mediterranean presence, stabilizing a refugee-generating conflict. The human rights concerns that animate official discourse are subordinate to these calculations. They always were. This is not pragmatic realism. Realism would acknowledge the tradeoff explicitly: we are accepting a brutal regime because we need its cooperation against Iran. Instead, Western governments maintain the fiction that al-Jolani has transformed, that HTS has moderated, that engagement will produce the change that accommodation cannot demand. The moral vocabulary of human rights provides cover for decisions made on entirely different grounds.
European negotiations with the Taliban follow the same logic. The goal is deportation cooperation—the ability to return Afghan asylum seekers to their country of origin. This requires a functioning relationship with whoever controls Kabul. That the controllers have just legalized slavery is, from this perspective, an inconvenience to be managed rather than a fact that should determine policy.
The Long War Journal warned that despite claims of moderation, HTS “remains a jihadist organization that began life as Al Qaeda’s local branch.” Christian Solidarity International observed that “the rehabilitation of a Syrian al-Qaeda-linked terrorist is in high gear” and that HTS had “long benefited from the covert support of the U.S. and its allies,” functioning as an asset against Assad and Iran. This instrumentalization created institutional investment in al-Jolani’s success independent of his actual governance—precisely mirroring the dynamics that prolonged Afghan engagement despite accumulating evidence of Taliban intransigence. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies had warned in December 2024 that “HTS’s membership rolls and track record do not inspire confidence that the group will lead to a free, inclusive, and prosperous Syria.” The Atlantic Council had cautioned against treating HTS as “a viable negotiating partner,” noting Syrian researchers’ arguments that “al-Jolani is not showing openness out of goodwill” but rather seeking “external recognition” while HTS’s “ideological framework as a jihadi organization has not changed.”
These warnings were documented, filed, and systematically disregarded. Why does this keep happening? The answer is not intelligence failure. Western governments knew who the Taliban were. They know who al-Jolani is. The intelligence is adequate. The interpretation is the problem. Four mechanisms drive the interpretive failure.
First: the engagement fallacy. Liberal foreign policy doctrine holds that engagement produces moderation—that exposure to international norms combined with economic incentives shifts actors toward acceptable behavior. This assumes actors want international acceptance more than they want ideological fidelity. For movements whose legitimacy derives from religious authenticity, this assumption is backwards. The Taliban can survive international isolation; they cannot survive appearing to compromise their interpretation of Islamic law. Engagement gives them resources without giving the West leverage. The hypothesis was tested and falsified in Afghanistan; yet it continues to structure policy in Syria.
Second: temporal mismatch. Islamist movements think in generations. Western democracies think in election cycles. The Taliban waited twenty years to return to power, demonstrating capacity to modulate rhetoric during negotiations while maintaining ideological continuity. They can easily wait another five for Western attention to shift before implementing their full program, as the progression from August 2021 assurances to January 2026 slavery codification demonstrates. Al-Jolani showed similar patience, governing portions of Idlib since 2017 while cultivating an image of pragmatic administration suitable for eventual international rehabilitation. Western policymakers who need results before the next election cannot compete with adversaries who measure success in decades. The Trump administration’s Doha Agreement “gave the Taliban everything they wanted—a date for America to leave Afghanistan—while asking for very little in return besides counterterror promises.” Biden’s decision to proceed “displayed extraordinary fidelity to a Doha deal negotiated by a previous administration” while ignoring worst-case scenarios, prioritizing exit over outcome. Both administrations operated within short-term political horizons; the Taliban operated within decades-long strategic patience.
Third: tactical modulation without ideological transformation. Both the Taliban and HTS understand what Western audiences want to hear. They speak of women’s rights, minority protection, inclusive governance. These are not lies in the simple sense—they are performances calibrated for specific audiences. The Taliban’s August 2021 press conference was not meant to predict their governance. It was meant to buy time and reduce international resistance during the transition. Al-Jolani’s CNN interviews serve the same function. HTS praised the Taliban in 2021 as “a source of inspiration for effectively balancing jihadist ambitions with political goals, including making tactical compromises.” This constitutes not ideological transformation but strategic communication. Analyst Thomas Pierret characterized al-Jolani as “a pragmatic radical” who “has moderated his rhetoric” without abandoning fundamental positions. The distinction is crucial: a pragmatic actor adjusts means to achieve ends; a pragmatic radical adjusts presentation to achieve ideological ends. Western policymakers consistently mistake the latter for the former because liberal theory struggles to conceptualize actors for whom ideological purity supersedes material gain.
Fourth: sunk-cost reasoning. Twenty years of investment in Afghanistan created powerful incentives to believe transformation had occurred. Admitting the Taliban remained unchanged meant admitting comprehensive failure. Philip Quinlan, an Irish army veteran of peace missions, articulated the underlying problem: “To think that we can land into a country, rotate through in six- or 12-month intervals and fundamentally change how a culture has evolved always seemed to me to be an unbelievably bad mix of hubris and naivety.” The CIDOB analysis concluded that “the fall of Kabul confirms a failure of Euroamerican strategic thinking in Afghanistan due to flaws in its ideological and conceptual foundations”—not operational errors but foundational assumptions about how societies transform and what role external actors can legitimately play.
The same dynamic now operates in Syria: having invested in Assad’s overthrow, having designated al-Jolani’s forces as the alternative, Western governments have institutional stakes in his success that exist independently of his actual behavior. There is a particular cruelty in how this pattern operates. Afghan women believed the Taliban’s promises in August 2021. They showed up to schools in March 2022 dressed according to Taliban requirements, trusting assurances that education would resume. They were sent home in tears. Syrian minorities believed that the new government would protect them. They stayed in their homes. Armed men came to their doors and asked about their religion. The victims trusted because Western governments signaled that trust was reasonable. When Europe negotiates with the Taliban, it communicates that the regime is a legitimate interlocutor. When the UN lifts sanctions on al-Jolani, it communicates that his government deserves international standing. These signals reach the people living under these regimes. They shape calculations about whether to flee or stay, resist or accommodate, hope or despair.
The West’s suicidal empathy is not merely self-destructive. It is lethal for others. The optimistic assessments that serve institutional convenience translate into survival decisions for women in Kabul and Alawites in Latakia. When those assessments prove false, the cost is not measured in embarrassed diplomats but in enslaved women and massacred families. Ibrahim Essa, writing on the relationship between Islamist movements and civil governance, identified what he termed a “Western fantasy”—the belief that “there can exist an Islamist current that believes in democracy, respects civil life, yet still applies its religious ideology.” The Western left, he argued, “bought this illusion wholesale. It never spoke to those who truly understand these movements from within Islamic culture itself.” Driven by desires to disprove domestic political opponents or to romanticize “forces of change,” Western institutions persist in legitimizing political Islam—”a mistake that reveals a deep ignorance of the doctrinal roots of the conflict.”
Imagine a Western foreign policy that took ideology seriously. It would start from a simple recognition: some movements mean what they say. When the Taliban promised in 2021 that women would be active “within the framework of Islam,” accurate analysis would have asked what that framework entailed according to Taliban interpretation—and the answer was available in their 1996-2001 governance. When al-Jolani promises minority protection while his forces are documented massacring minorities, accurate analysis would weight the actions over the words. This would require abandoning the engagement-moderation hypothesis, or at least subjecting it to empirical testing. After decades of evidence that engagement with ideologically-driven movements does not moderate them, continued reliance on this framework represents faith rather than analysis. It would require accepting that some actors cannot be influenced by incentives the West controls. The Taliban’s legitimacy depends on religious authenticity, not international recognition. Offering recognition in exchange for moderation misunderstands what they value. The offer has no purchase. It would require acknowledging that rebranding is not reformation. A movement that changes its name, its spokesman’s wardrobe, and its talking points for CNN has not necessarily changed its goals. The test is governance, not performance. Al-Jolani governed Idlib for years with well-documented repression. That record should weigh more heavily than his interviews.It would require, finally, accepting that some problems have no good solutions. Afghanistan after Western withdrawal was going to be governed badly regardless of Western engagement strategy. Syria after Assad will be chaotic regardless of how the West treats HTS. The choice is not between engagement that produces good outcomes and disengagement that produces bad ones. The choice is between honest acknowledgment of limited influence and dishonest pretense that influence exists where it does not.
The pattern has repeated enough times that its next iteration is predictable. Within three to five years, Syria under HTS will implement systematic restrictions on women and minorities that contradict every assurance al-Jolani has offered. When this happens, Western officials will express surprise and disappointment. They will note that their engagement was premised on expectations that were not met. They will face no consequences.
This is the final pathology: the absence of accountability. No one was fired for believing the Taliban. No careers ended for promoting engagement despite accumulating contrary evidence. The institutional incentives that reward optimism remain intact. The same analysts who urged engagement with the Taliban now urge engagement with HTS, their credibility apparently undiminished by the Afghan outcome. The United States Institute of Peace acknowledged the dilemma in 2023: Washington was “wanting to condemn and hold accountable the Taliban regime for persecuting women and girls, harboring terrorists and failing to govern inclusively, but also wanting Afghanistan to avoid famine and civil war.” Their conclusion—that “a shift toward more engagement is the least bad policy option”—rested on the hope that “expanded engagement…might not succeed in changing the Taliban’s reprehensible social policies” but afforded “more opportunities for progress over time.”
Three years later, the Taliban codified slavery. The engagement produced no moderation. It produced normalization of barbarism as the cost of administrative convenience. Former President George W. Bush warned in 2021 that withdrawal would “create a vacuum, and into that vacuum is likely to come people who treat women as second class citizens.” He understated the outcome. “Second class” fails to capture the legal status of ghulam now codified in Afghan law, fails to capture the provision authorizing husbands to beat wives with impunity provided they avoid visible bruising, fails to capture life imprisonment with flogging every three days for women accused of apostasy.
The architecture of illusion is not built from inadequate intelligence. The Taliban never concealed their ideology; they governed according to it from 1996 to 2001, and they told the world in August 2021 that they would govern according to it again. Western institutions simply chose to hear something else. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham never ceased being a jihadist organization; it merely adjusted its presentation for international audiences. Western governments simply chose to accept the performance as transformation. These were choices made by specific people in specific institutions. The officials who negotiated with the Taliban while the slavery provisions were being drafted have names. The analysts who recommended al-Jolani’s rehabilitation while massacres were being documented have names. The politicians who lifted sanctions and declared progress have names. They made predictions that can be evaluated. They offered assurances that can be tested against outcomes. The gap between what they claimed and what occurred is measurable. Yet no one will be held accountable. No careers will end. No officials will resign. The same analysts who urged engagement with the Taliban despite all evidence now urge engagement with HTS, their credibility mysteriously intact. The institutional incentives that reward optimism and punish accuracy remain unchanged. The same frameworks that produced Afghanistan will produce Syria.
This is what makes the empathy suicidal—not for those who practice it, but for those who live under its objects. The diplomats return to Brussels and Washington. The analysts publish new reports. The women in Kabul are flogged every three days. The Alawite families are buried in mass graves. The distance between Western conference rooms and Afghan prison cells, between think tank seminars and Syrian killing fields, is measured in consequences that flow only one direction. The slave code is not an aberration. It is a confirmation. It confirms what the Taliban always intended, what accurate analysis always predicted, what institutional convenience always obscured. And when Syria arrives at its own confirmation—when the pragmatist reveals himself as the jihadist he never ceased being, when the protected minorities discover what protection means, when the women learn their place—the same officials will express the same surprise, face the same absence of consequences, and proceed to the next illusion.
There is a woman in Kabul today who will be flogged this week because she holds beliefs her government has criminalized. There is a girl in Syria who will not attend school next year because her new rulers consider her “inherently unsuited” to education. Their suffering is not unfortunate. It is produced—produced by frameworks that prefer fiction to truth, by incentives that reward self-deception, by institutions structurally incapable of learning from their failures. The victims have no voice in the debates that determine their fates. They do not testify at think tank panels or publish in foreign policy journals. They experience the consequences while the decision-makers experience nothing.
This is the final truth about suicidal empathy: it is not suicidal at all. The ones who practice it survive. The ones who live under it die.
