It did not take the Taliban long.

On Sept. 16, 2021, the Taliban took a bulldozer to a centuries-old fort whose defenders once wounded the 14th-century warrior Timur, earning him the nickname Timur the Lame or, in its Anglicized form, Tamerlane. While Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad repeatedly assured that the Taliban had changed, the Taliban appears the same group that, in 2001, destroyed the famous 6th-century Bamiyan Buddhas that, until the Taliban dynamited them, were a UNESCO World Heritage site.