August 15 marked the fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan. While much of Washington and the American media treated the anniversary as a footnote, the New York Times marked it with three interventions: an interview with Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi; an opinion essay by Obaidullah Baheer; and a feature on Afghan women.
Individually, none of these choices constitutes journalistic misconduct. Journalists should interview those who exercise power, including authoritarian leaders, and opinion pages should accommodate controversial voices. The problem is context: how the New York Times introduces people, which facts it omits, and whether the victims of the Taliban receive comparable attention.
In the New York Times’s coverage of Afghanistan, these choices form a pattern of normalization.
Before the Taliban’s return, the New York Times was among the most influential Western media outlets arguing that America’s “forever war” had become futile and that Washington needed to settle with the Taliban.
The problem is context: how the New York Times introduces people, which facts it omits, and whether the victims of the Taliban receive comparable attention.
There was a legitimate argument for ending the war. But criticism of American policy too often came without an equally rigorous examination of what a Taliban victory would mean. The clearest example was the New York Times’s 2020 publication of an essay by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s deputy leader and interior minister. Haqqani presented a supposedly transformed Taliban and promised an inclusive political order in which women and girls would have a role. His subsequent record makes those promises risible. Haqqani remains sanctioned by the United Nations. In 2022, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was found living in Kabul at a residence linked to the Haqqani network. In August 2026, Haqqani reportedly told supporters that “the liberation of Palestine would complete Afghanistan’s partial liberation.”
The New York Times’s editorial position on U.S. withdrawal was as consequential. As the Taliban entered Kabul, its editorial board declared that “the Biden administration was right to bring the war to a close.” On the last day of the United Nations-endorsed U.S. mission in Afghanistan, on August 30, 2021, the New York Times described it as “ending a two-decade occupation.” The newspaper was not merely arguing retrospectively that the war had failed; it was endorsing the decision to end it at the very moment of the Taliban’s victory. The newspaper’s current Afghanistan coverage is even more revealing because Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a former New York Times correspondent, was a U.S. Marine who served two tours in Afghanistan.
In May 2026, he returned to Afghanistan seeking closure with the Taliban and with the war he once fought. He revisited places where he served, met former Taliban commanders, and apologized to some of his former enemies. He exchanged telephone numbers with them and sought to understand them not simply as combatants but as individuals. There is nothing inherently objectionable about reconciliation. Indeed, it can be profoundly human. But reconciliation between former combatants is different from reconciliation with the ideology that motivated the conflict. The danger is when a former combatant’s personal reconciliation becomes a lens through which the victorious movement itself is understood. The Taliban’s victory deserves more than a story about former enemies finding common humanity. It requires asking what happened to those who could not reconcile—or who have no ability to negotiate with the victors.
When Elian Peltier, the newspaper’s new correspondent for Afghanistan and Pakistan, interviewed Amir Khan Muttaqi, the New York Times called him “Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister,” but his biography matters more than his title. As a prominent member of the Taliban’s leadership, Muttaqi’s whereabouts from 2001–2021 and the internal dynamic of the Taliban’s leadership, including the status of the Taliban’s hidden supreme leader, should have been explored in his first exclusive interview with a major U.S. media outlet. He also has been subject to U.N. Security Council sanctions. He is, therefore, less the foreign minister of a conventional government and more a senior official of an internationally unrecognized Taliban regime. Omitting such context is negligent. The Taliban foreign ministry has also excluded female employees from Afghanistan’s diplomatic missions and from its headquarters and provincial offices. The institution represented through its “foreign minister” has itself participated in purging women from public employment.
Likewise, the New York Times introduces Baheer as an “activist,” yet his public social media activity presents a broader picture. He has long acted as an English-speaking advocate and interlocutor for the Taliban, including in Track Two overseas engagements. That does not disqualify him from writing an opinion article, but it is information readers deserve to know when assessing his argument.
Human rights groups now speak of “femigenocide” to describe the systematic erasure and persecution of Afghan women and girls.
That question leads directly to Afghan women. The New York Times initially titled its anniversary article, “Experts Name a Hazard: Limiting Afghan Women,” though the paper changed the headline online in the face of criticism. Still, by framing Taliban restrictions on women as a “hazard,” the paper and its editors recast a deliberate system as a side effect. Since 2021, the Taliban have excluded girls from secondary and higher education, removed women from large sections of the workforce, restricted their movement, marginalized them from public life, and imposed increasingly intrusive rules governing their dress and behavior. Afghanistan ranks last in Georgetown University’s global index of women’s wellbeing. United Nations officials and experts have described the Taliban’s policies as systematic persecution. Human rights groups now speak of “femigenocide” to describe the systematic erasure and persecution of Afghan women and girls. International lawyers increasingly use the term “apartheid,” and the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Taliban leaders over alleged crimes against humanity involving persecution on gender grounds. Simply put, the Taliban are the hazard. Afghan women are the victims.
The New York Times can platform Muttaqi, but for Peltier to neglect Guantánamo, sanctions, women’s exclusion from his ministry, Al Qaeda and the Taliban’s broken promises is malpractice. Context is not an optional accessory to journalism; it is journalism.
The New York Times’s treatment of Islamist revolutionary movements has an older precedent: In 1979, it lent its op-ed page to an activist who sought to whitewash Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a “pious ascetic,” “spiritual leader,” and “religious leader,” without describing the abuse of human rights he counseled; more than four decades on, the same activist bestowed legitimacy on the Taliban.
This is not propaganda in the crude sense. It is something more sophisticated: normalization through framing.
The Taliban do not need Westerners to explain away their ideology. They have repeatedly articulated their own political project: an Islamic emirate governed according to their interpretation of Islam, subordinating women and constraining political pluralism. The same conceptual confusion affected U.S. policy after 2021. Washington moved from withdrawal to engagement, hoping that practical cooperation and billions of dollars might moderate the Taliban. The lesson is not that journalists and editorialists should refuse to interview revolutionaries; it is that they should test revolutionary rhetoric against ideology, history and conduct. This is part of a broader Western problem in understanding Islamist movements.
The New York Times presents itself as a defender of fact-based journalism against ideological propaganda and partisan misinformation, but cherrypicked facts and deliberate omission undercut such a mission. A newspaper can accurately report a Taliban official’s words while omitting the history that makes those words meaningful. It can introduce a Taliban advocate through a benign professional identity, and it can portray a former combatant’s reconciliation as a window into Taliban society while giving insufficient attention to those who have no ability to negotiate with the victors. This is not propaganda in the crude sense. It is something more sophisticated: normalization through framing.
The Taliban understand the power of normalization. Every interview, flattering profile and official title helps transform an outlawed Islamist movement into an ordinary government. The Taliban do not need the New York Times to endorse their ideology. They need it to make their rule appear normal. Unfortunately, whether to preserve its access to an authoritarian movement, naiveté, or a desire to whitewash Islamist rule, the paper is willing to play that role.
