Idk about the others, but for Afghanistan, it’s probably because it was taken over by religious fundamentalists trained, supported, and armed by Pakistan, Iran, and the US in order to fight off Soviet Union influence, along with some other countries (China, UK, probably some others). They basically invaded because they were called in by the local government afraid of these terrorist groups, who also called problems in the Soviet Union (similar to the US invading after 9/11). (Interestingly enough, the Pakistan influence can also be said to be a result of colonialism since it’s existence is basically a result of English colonialism in India and the Middle-East.) After this, Afghanistan was basically a civil war zone between religious fundamentalist warlords fighting each other, the most extreme being the Taliban, but the other US allied ones weren’t great, either, and were all still fundamentalist Muslim.
The official anti-LGBT laws were vague when the Republic (the Soviet friendly government) was in charge, all of the terrible attitudes were probably still there but under religious rules and unofficial, and being invaded by the USSR for years never helps those kinds of things, either. It was more intense when the US friendly war lords were in charge and made Sharia more official, making LGBTQ laws worse as a sort of collateral. It then got even worse when the Taliban officially took over, now it’s even more explicit and the punishment even worse (death). I haven’t read the article yet so not sure if it talks about any of these things, or if I got anything super off, but I’ve just been listening and reading stuff about this lately and felt I could contribute lol.
Well, there’s a difference between settler colonialism (which replaces the indigenous population) and the sort of imperialist and classic colonialism in a lot of parts of this map, where people move in and resources are extracted, but you’re left with a traumatized population instead of a genocided one, like in North and South America as well as Australia, so we’d expect the results to probably be different.
Not that I think religion helps these matters, as the US which is slowly turning Christo-fascist and reversing LGBTQ rights, probably not coincidentally, shows. I just don’t agree with the Islamophobia part. Christianity looks pretty draconian on these issues too in some parts of Africa.