What the Taliban has to gain is the confidence of Afganistan. There were US campaigns in the 80s and 90s for womens rights in Afghanistan which were beginning to gain quite a bit of traction bit were deligimitised by beconing associated with the Afghanistan war by an invading and then occupying force.
Islam values education: There is a weak Hadith that states:
Seek knowledge even if you go as far as China, for seeking knowledge is a duty on every muslim.
And a stronger Hadith:
The Messenger of Allah said, "Seeking knowledge is obligatory on every muslim." Classified as sahih (authentic) by Al-Albani in Sahih Sunan Ibn Majah.
These speak for themselves, although opinion is divided upon to what extent this means worldly knowledge and knowledge of deen (religion), and hence, sharia. Nevertheless, the world - and I mean by this, the universe - is sometimes referred to as the cosmological qu'ran having come from the breath of Allah. Recall, that the Qu'ran is literally the words of Allah (and this isn't a million miles away from the first verse of the gospel of John).
Saudia Arabia and its brand of Islam, Wahaabism, is often used as a whipping in the West for all that's medieval and backward in the countries that aspire to Islam. In particular, for womens rights. Yet, Riyadh, the capital of Saudia Arabia has the Princess Norah bint Abdul Rahman university. It is the largest womens university in the world with 34 colleges in Riyadh and neighbouring cities with 34 thousand female students, 3800 academic staff and 2100 administrative staff.
And once one begins to dig into the history of this university one sees that womens education was being ptomoted in Saudia Arabia. The university was founded in 1970 (forty years after Saudia Arabia was instituted by a nation by king Saud) as a college dedicated tonwomens education. Within 25 years, there were an additional 102 similar colleges inn7w cities cateting to 60,000 female students. This is remarkable growth by any standards.
However, one has to remember that Saudia Arabia was swimmimg in black gold (but perhaps not for much longer given how fossil fuels are viewed today in the current climate change crisis). Thiley had plenty of fumds to build those 10w colleges, to pay the staff, and also give stidents grants to study and pay the college fees. This is not true for Afghanistan. Moreover, Saudia Arabia has been a secure country since its foundation with no threats at its borders. This is quite in contrast to Afghanistan, which has been involved in a proxy war due to the Cold War and the war that has just ended and part of the War on Terrorism. This has had major repurcussions on both Afghanistans infrastructure and many socioeconomic factors.
Personally speaking, I'm not particularly keen on the Taliban. However, they aren't ISIS amd nor are they Nazi's. If self-determination of a nation in the democracy of nations is to have any meaning, they should be left alone to reconstruct their nation and find their own way in integrating womens rights into how they see and interpret Islam.
As Afghanistan has proven (and as Vietnam did earlier), trying to force a full scale social revolution at the point of a gun is bad politics. You cannot bomb a population into submission. I suspect that the Taliban are weary of this moral finger wagging by the West and a lot of their recalritance on this issue is due to this.
Take a hypothetical situation, suppose China invaded Britain because they felt they were doing their own population an injustice by cleaving close to a capitalist system with monarchical characteristics - whereas in their own eyes, a communist system with Chinese characteristics is much more forward thinking. I do not think the British people would take to this kindly (nor I, even when I do count myself as a communist). Nobody likes being preached at the point of a gun and most often, what is being preached is often deliberately flouted.
The essential point I'm making here, and which seems to require spelling out is that the campaign for womens rights in Afganistan, in Afghan eyes, has become delegitimised by becoming associated with the War on Terror in Afganistan. This essential point has been made by Rafia Zakaria in her book, Against White Feminism where she describes how a US campaign called the Feminist Majority was campaigning for gender equality in Afghanistan in the 80s & 90s and which was consulted and then latched onto by the State Department and the White House before the invasion was announced.
One final point. The woman hidden under a hijab is now often taken as a symbol of the backwardness of Islam. Yet when I visited Bangladesh as a young child, I rarely saw any woman in a burkha. Why? Because we lived in a rural area of Bangladesh where an extended family would live in a compound (in mine, I had five uncles with at least five kids adding to thirty five people when you include my own family). Since the women were all related to the men, there was no need to wear a burkha. The only time you would see a woman wear one, was when they went to the bazaar or to go visit a relative or friend in a faroff village (more often, a relative). Since the bazaars were often dirty and manky, its not surprising they sent their menfolk to do the legwork. And nor would they have been happy to be told they had to work there (remember, its dirty and manky) and again, rather have their men-folk do that work. Now, Afghanistan is mostly rural ... and it needs to work out its own path in integrating modernity into its Islamic worldview.