The new Taliban regime is not quite as medievally brutal as the last. Its enforcers are avid social-media users who no longer seek to ban television. Since the Taliban seized back control of Afghanistan over a year ago, even those Afghans who tried in vain to flee on the last American flights out of Kabul have settled, somehow, into a new kind of life. But the fundamental values of the Taliban haven’t changed. There is a de-facto ban on secondary schooling for girls, undoing decades of progress in women’s education. Can Taliban run the the country in a democratic way ?

