On Tuesday, 28 September, 2020, the Taliban announced that they planned to adopt King Zahir Shah’s constitution of 1964 to govern Afghanistan – minus any provisions that are in conflict with Sharia or with the “principles of the Islamic Emirate”. Taliban’s Minister for Justice, Shaikh Abdul Hakeem Sharaee, was quoted as having told this to the Chinese ambassador in Kabul.
But Pakistani Senator Afrasiab Khattak had made the startling revelation in his piece in the Prothom Alo over an entire month earlier on 25 August, that the Taliban’s Pakistani patrons (read the Pakistan army and the ISI in particular) had come up with the bright idea of a constitutional cover such that a Taliban-run Afghanistan can be presented to the world with a semblance of a state that is run under some form of rule of law, and not as an absolute dictatorship of a terror group.
He wrote, “Sources in Islamabad say that the Pakistani deep state is persuading the Taliban to bring their Islamic Emirate under the cover of the 1964 Constitution of Afghanistan for making it acceptable to (the) international community. The 1964 Constitution was promulgated by the former King Zahir Shah for transitioning his absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy – and it formed the basis of democratisation. In the proposed new arrangement the Taliban top leader would fill the place of the monarch.”