"Not now?"
"Less so."
"How do you feel about the Taliban compared to the current government?"
"That's difficult to answer. Both governments are terrible but in different ways. The Taliban were -- still are -- brutal fanatics. And yes, they did kill gays. They caught two guys making love, dragged them through the streets, and stoned them to death. Really horrible. They're hysterical homophobes, it totally freaks them out. The whole society is very repressed about this. If you're queer, you have to stay in the closet, even now. But if you did stay there, the Taliban didn't break into the closet and kill you. They didn't want to know about it.
"Women were persecuted too. If they were openly Western, they could get into major trouble, even be killed.
"All that's despicable, and I'm glad there's less of it now.
"But there's another side to this. Western propaganda uses this to whip up war fever. The media in Europe and North America have seared all sorts of atrocity stories -- some of them true, some of them not -- into people's minds to justify invading the country and bombing the people.
"The Taliban are bad guys, no doubt about it. I'm not fond of them at all. They killed hundreds of people, including friends of mine. They would've killed me if I had stayed.
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