Agencies

Expectations were building as the Taliban were taking time in announcing a government after taking over the country in a lightning offensive and decimating oppositions on the way.

The cabinet list announced on Tuesday was entirely filled with leaders of the Islamist militant movement, and veterans of a guerrilla war that ended with a Taliban victory last month after two decades of fighting.

World powers have told the Taliban that it needs to have an inclusive government that backs up its pledges of a more conciliatory approach which upholds human rights if it wants peace and development.

Regional analysts also urged them to curb in the global jihadist elements of the movement and promote the nationalistic elements.

But the list of ministers, although interim in nature, didn’t go with the expectations.

Mullah Mohammad Hasan Akhund, who is on a UN sanctions list, was named as leader of the new government, while Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar was named as his deputy.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of the founder of the notorious Haqqani Network, has been named as interior minister.

Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, son of Mullah Omar, has been named as defence minister. Hedayatullah Badri will be the acting minister of finance, while Amir Khan Muttaqi, a Taliban negotiator in Doha, was named foreign minister.

Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford said many of the appointments involved “old faces”.

“It’s also important to say that a lot of these names, the vast majority of them are actually Pashtun and are not taking into consideration, arguably critics would say, the vast great ethnic diversity of this country.”

Commenting on the Taliban’s announcement, Obaidullah Baheer, of the American University of Afghanistan, said it did not do “their cause for international recognition any favours”.

“The amount of time spent wasn’t on discussing or negotiating inclusivity or potential power sharing with other political parties. That time was spent on knowing how to split that pie amongst their own ranks,” Baheer told Al Jazeera from Kabul.

Yesterday, Afghanistan’s last resistance group the National Resistance Front (NRF) denounced the Taliban’s new interim government as “illegitimate”, after its leader Ahmad Massoud called for a nationwide uprising against the country’s Islamist rulers.

“The narrative of a modern Taliban is over... there is no Taliban in favour of an inclusive government,” NRF spokesperson Ali Maisam Nazary said.

“This is going to become a pariah government, an illegitimate government... just look at the amount of terrorists in this cabinet. And we expect they are going to reform?”

Nazary said the new government does not represent Afghanistan’s diverse ethnic mosaic.

All the top posts went to key leaders from the Taliban and the Haqqani network -- the violent faction known for carrying out some of Afghanistan’s bloodiest bombings and suicide attacks in recent years.

By excluding representatives from Afghanistan’s many ethnicities -- including its sizeable Shia and Hazara communities, the Taliban “have deepened” social divides, he said.

In the 20 years the Taliban spent as insurgents, Afghan society transformed into a much younger population with a taste for greater freedom, Nazary added.

As a result, the Taliban will struggle to force people into accepting their restrictive interpretation of sharia law.