Perhaps there's a little room for some benefit of doubt.
By all accounts, the mostly young men had the hallmarks of the same Taliban of 1996, traditional clothes, beards, kohl-rimmed eyes and guns at their side.
Taliban fighters with smartphones
But there was one glaring difference between these men and their predecessors, each held a smartphone and was busy taking selfies with murals of the nation’s one-hundredth independence celebration behind them.
Al Jazeera English: Kabul near standstill on day one of the Taliban’s ‘Emirate’.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/16/kabul-near-standstill-on-day-one-the-talibans-emirateI guess it's possible we've been conditioned to believe we'd be seeing images similar to what occurred under ISIS, mass executions and public beheadings, but perhaps not. Maybe the worst for Afghanistan is actually behind it.
Notwithstanding the possibility China takes a crack at the Graveyard of Empires.