your quotation is wrong. I said “legitimate”, not rightful.

“Legitimate”, as in they’re the dominant governing body within the country and have been accepted by nearly every country as the genuine government of Afghanistan.

And it is fear-mongering. I was in kindergarten when 9/11 happened, I grew up seeing the US villainize Islam and Arabs in real time. In my youth, we were told that the Taliban were the greatest evil to ever walk the planet. There is a lot to criticise about the Taliban, they’re not leftist and their interpretation of Islam is heretical. But they’re not the human embodiment of the devil Americans so desperately want to believe they are.

In the instance of this headline, western news publications want people to think “Taliban = hate”, then think “if Putin works with the Taliban, that means he endorses them”. Thus stoking anti-Russia sentiments by using the decades of anti-Muslim fear-mongering they’ve been giving us since the 1990s.