The Taliban are only pretending they aren't barbaric mass murderers

 Afghanistan's new rulers are irredeemable; Biden should reject proposals that try to leverage US assistance to reform them.

The Taliban would like the world to know that they’re no longer the child-bride-marrying mass murderers that they used to be.

At a press conference Tuesday, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed said there would be no reprisals against Afghans who worked with the U.S. military. Women would be free to work and study, and the media free to broadcast what it wished, so long as both stayed “within our cultural frameworks.” How enlightened.

These promises are discredited by events on the ground. Those Afghans hanging from a U.S. military jet taking off from Kabul clearly do not take the Taliban at their word. Nor do the women who Taliban gunmen escorted from their jobs at a Kandahar bank and ordered not to return. Nor do the journalists who work at a radio station in Kabul who saw their station manager murdered earlier this month by Taliban gunmen.

But Mujahed is not trying to convince Afghans about the intentions of the Taliban. He is hoping his make-believe will persuade President Joe Biden and his administration to keep subsidizing the Afghan government these jihadists just overthrew.

It’s easy to see why. Mujahed’s boss, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the likely interim president of Afghanistan, managed to sucker U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad into thinking the Taliban were interested in a political settlement to share power. It’s now apparent that the Taliban used those negotiations as a political weapon to demoralize the Afghan military, with no intention of ever reaching an agreement. The plan worked surprisingly well, as the rapid collapse of the Afghan army attests.