After the Taliban takes over Afghanistan, its biggest challenge is to prove its legitimacy. With such a challenge, coming both within and without, but mostly from the outside, it is then not hard to understand why the Taliban has erected checkpoints around the Kabul Airport but without conducting any mass killing, and it even promised to set-up an inclusive government that allows women to work and study.

There is a high probability that once the hostage issue at Kabul Airport is resolved, and after personnel has left Kabul, the West might change its stance. After all, to recognize the Taliban regime is, to a certain extent, to admit the mistakes of certain Western politicians. Therefore, the West will likely continue to exert pressures to interfere in Afghanistan's internal affairs and create disputes.

The problem is that once this happens, the Taliban will inevitably intensify its oppressions, that is, the application of Sharia law to a large extent. If the Taliban strictly enforces Sharia law to suppress the opposition forces in Afghanistan, it will provide the West with more excuses, and that achieving national reconciliation and maintaining political stability in Afghanistan will be futile. The problems and challenges faced by the Taliban are actually history repeating itself. For this reason, the past actually tells us what the future will be.

In the 1980s, Afghan leader Mohammad Najibullah, who was supported by the Soviet Union, proposed a national reconciliation plan that has women's rights as one of its priorities. As it stood, the opponents of the plan were mainly Islamist factions backed by the United States. History repeats itself again now. This tells us that the so-called realism without a moral bottom line, especially Kissingerian speculative pragmatism, is short-sighted, being an outdated and incorrect geopolitical theory. I believe that there will be more and more people in this world who will embrace historical realism, and they will be able to interpret history objectively, utilize historical experiences, and surpass the so-called academia of this era.