New Delhi, April 24 -- Four years after seizing control in 2021, the Taliban regime is not consolidating control; it is unraveling from within. Far from the "peace and stability" they promised, Afghanistan today is a pressure cooker of human rights abuses, economic despair, and simmering popular resistance. Recent reports from Human Rights Watch, the UN, and a bombshell BBC investigation paint a damning picture, a regime so paranoid and brittle that it responds to discontent not with reform, but with ever-harsher crackdowns. The result is exactly what the Taliban's own leader feared; internal rot that is eroding their legitimacy and fueling the very opposition they claim to have defeated.

The cruel and misogynistic nature of the regime i...