Two weeks ago, at the vast Bagram air base north of Kabul, Taliban troops held a parade to celebrate the third anniversary of their victory over the US-led coalition. Beside massive amounts of hi-tech, mostly American equipment – armoured vehicles, helicopters and heavy weapons abandoned during the chaotic final days of the war – one notable feature was the presence of diplomats from Iran, China and Russia, seated in places of honour among Taliban leaders watching the procession.
The Taliban regime – the self-styled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan – has been getting a lot of love lately. A week before the Bagram parade, the Taliban’s so-called Ministry of Mines and Petroleum announced a $US80m ($118m) oil sale to China, enabled in part by huge investments from Xinjiang-based oil company CAPEIC. Two weeks earlier, Chinese engineers and Taliban officials broke ground at Mes Aynak, southeast of Kabul, where the mining concession for the world’s second-largest known copper deposit is held by China Metallurgical Group Corporation, a Chinese state-owned enterprise.
These economic developments reflect a deepening political partnership. Chinese and Taliban officials have conferred frequently since the fall of Kabul, and Xi Jinping received a Taliban ambassador to Beijing in January.
Russia, for its part, has been inviting Taliban delegations to its annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum since 2022 and is now rumoured to be about to recognise the Taliban. Iran is resetting its relationship with its former adversary after cross-border clashes last year. This is a sensible move for Tehran: Taliban control of Afghanistan offers Iran and China a secure land route across Central Asia, beyond the reach of the US navy, enabling Iranian oil exports to China under a 25-year co-operation agreement signed in 2021. Even the US has been giving the Taliban aid, with more than $US3bn flowing into Afghanistan since the fall of Kabul, technically for humanitarian assistance, though millions have been diverted by Taliban leaders for their own purposes.
Those purposes became clearer last week when the regime’s so-called Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice issued guidelines forbidding women from looking at men, speaking, singing or reading in public, travelling without a male relative as guardian or going uncovered. Women must wear a long, loose, thick garment that covers their entire body, including their feet, and a full veil covering their entire face. They may not drive a car, use a gym, attend school or university, own a business, play sport or practise a profession. Earlier this year the Taliban reintroduced stoning for women accused of adultery.
Less publicly, though well-known to anyone with friends in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters continue forcing young girls into abusive marriages, under conditions tantamount to sexual slavery, and using the threat of such marriages to extort money from their families. Suicide rates among Afghan women, already some of the highest in the world, continue to rise. Former female judges, police officers, members of parliament or civil officials continue being killed and kidnapped.
In this respect, at least, Taliban oppression is gender-neutral: men with connections to the former government are equally at risk. Police and military veterans, especially former members of the intelligence service or special forces, have been viciously persecuted since the collapse, with hundreds hunted down, tortured and killed, and thousands imprisoned or forced to flee. Tens of thousands are in hiding or on the run.
One former pilot, trained in the US, who flew for former president Ashraf Ghani, has been trapped in Afghanistan since Kabul fell, hunted constantly and frequently forced to relocate from one hiding place to another. He and many like him have no source of support apart from the ad hoc, self-funded Western veterans’ groups who continue helping evaders stay alive, funnelling money to their families and – increasingly infrequently these days – enabling their escape across Afghanistan’s borders. As a reminder of the humiliation of 2021, such volunteer groups are tolerated, at best, by Western governments that would rather the whole thing went away.
The fact that Russia and China are cosying up to the Taliban while even erstwhile adversaries such as the EU and the US are funding the regime reflects a widespread international assumption that, oppressive as it is, the Taliban now firmly controls Afghanistan.
As a result, this thinking goes, the best option for the international community is to accept its rule, try to ameliorate it through engagement and offer humanitarian aid to the Afghan people.
But this assumption is fundamentally flawed. The Taliban may seem strong from the outside, but its rule is brittle, and increasingly so. Far from being firmly in control, the Taliban is more factionalised and fragile than it appears. It also depends on international assistance, which last year accounted for more than 30 per cent of Afghanistan’s GDP, giving the global community significant leverage if it were willing to exercise it.
Senior Taliban leaders are divided: some profess loyalty to the current authoritarian and reclusive emir, Haibatullah Akhundzada, while others support a more pragmatic group around Taliban defence minister Mohammad Yaqoob, son of the movement’s founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Commanders distant from Kabul remain restless – many feel that a cabal of soft, entitled leaders who sat out the war in safety from Pakistan is denying them the spoils they deserve after carrying the main combat burden through to the final, victorious campaign.
For their part, Taliban central leaders feel pressured to reward regional commanders with lucrative roles for which they are untrained and unsuited, simply to keep them quiet. This is hardly a recipe for stability.
At the local level, the Taliban rank and file are ill-educated, oppressive, corrupt and unskilled in civil administration. Many have little taste for the boring daily grind of governance.
There is also an ethnic dimension: since the fall of Kabul, ethnic Pashtuns have been systematically marginalising and excluding non-Pashtun Taliban, particularly Tajik and Uzbek fighters who were key to their victory in Afghanistan’s north. Several non-Pashtun leaders have left the Taliban in protest or mounted uprisings.
Militarily, the Taliban armed forces have only about 160,000 active fighters, divided into eight territorial corps, each responsible for a region of the country. Typically, each corps has three or more brigades plus a quick-reaction force and covers four or five provinces.
Despite their impressive array of abandoned US equipment, the Taliban simply lacks the numbers to control a vast country of almost 45 million people and 18 major cities, much of whose population opposes their rule.
They would certainly struggle to contain a widespread uprising, especially one involving simultaneous challenges from both urban unrest and rural guerrilla opposition.
Unlike the internationally recognised republic, whose support was strongest in the cities, the Taliban has stronger support in rural areas while urban populations (almost a third of the country’s total population) tend to oppose it. The farther away from Kabul, the less control Taliban leaders can exert over the general population or their own local commanders.
The Taliban’s difficulty suppressing regional rebellions has been highlighted repeatedly as leaders in Kabul have had to denude other areas to send loyal fighters to outlying provinces to restore order. Only a few cities – notably, Kandahar – are secure enough that their garrisons can be spared for mobile operations.
Higher-tier organisations such as the Badri 313 Battalion and the Sara Kheta (“Red Unit”) have better equipment, greater mobility and more experienced fighters than the regional garrisons but are too small to secure the country on their own.
Local communities also have risen up in several provinces against heavy-handed Taliban governance. Most recently, in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, locals rioted when the Taliban killed two inhabitants. Simultaneously, women protested against the appointment of an all-male government and violence broke out across three districts.
The Taliban sought to paint the unrest as driven by drug-growers opposed to their eradication of Badakhshan’s opium crop, but local journalists reported that ethnic conflict, corruption, rape of local women and Taliban destruction of houses and livestock were the real drivers. A Taliban patrol was ambushed, three Taliban killed and six wounded, and the regime was forced to replace local leaders. Unrest continues in Badakhshan and other provinces.
Ironically, the Taliban faces a remarkably similar set of challenges in 2024 to those the internationally recognised government faced in 2021: forced to rely on a small number of capable, loyal fighters, they risk exhausting these troops by using them as a country-wide fire brigade, responding to far-flung crises. While they can handle challenges in one or two regions, simultaneous widespread opposition would rapidly overwhelm their limited capacity.
The harshness of Taliban repression – against women, urban dwellers, the Afghan middle class and anyone of suspect loyalties – is actually therefore a sign of weakness. Taliban leaders know they must crack down at the first sign of dissent since they lack the manpower, local support and cohesion to suppress sustained resistance.
In effect, then, by accepting the convenient fiction of a strong Taliban government able to control the country, the international community has given itself an excuse to sell into slavery Afghanistan’s entire female population, and millions of Afghan men, for no good reason.
Nobody who pays close attention sees much prospect of the Taliban moderating in return for international engagement, and in any case the movement lacks the long-term ability to stabilise the country, even as terrorist groups grow and a democratic resistance movement expands.
Despite claims that the Taliban would contain the influence of al-Qa’ida, instead it has allowed the terrorist group to flourish and again use Afghanistan as a safe haven, as before the 9/11 attacks. As of July this year, there were al-Qa’ida training camps in 12 Afghan provinces, along with safe houses, religious schools, a media operations centre and a weapons storage facility, according to analysts at the Long War Journal, a well-regarded independent source of information on the group.
Again, however, even while acknowledging al-Qa’ida’s resurgence in Afghanistan, international organisations continue to pretend the Taliban is working to limit the group’s reach.
Given that Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the al-Qa’ida-allied Haqqani Network, is the Taliban’s current minister of interior, this seems highly unlikely.
Beyond al-Qa’ida, Islamic State-Khorasan Province poses the most serious terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan. The fall of Kabul allowed 1800 IS-KP detainees – including the movement’s leader at the time, Islam Farooqi – to escape detention and rejoin the movement.
Farooqi had been captured by Afghan forces, along with 106 others including 30 senior IS-KP cadres, in 2020. He was reported killed in 2022 and replaced by Sanaullah Ghafari (known in the movement as Shahab al-Muhajir), who has proven himself brutal and energetic. IS-KP has mounted attacks on Taliban forces and committed numerous atrocities against civilians, particularly Shi’ite Muslims and ethnic minorities.
IS-KP also has launched external attacks, firing rockets into Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, conducting suicide bombings in Iran, claiming the attack on the Crocus City concert hall in Russia, and infiltrating attack teams into Europe and the US. With a presence in Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asia and Pakistan, IS-KP fields at least 9000 members in Afghanistan. Taliban efforts to suppress the group, though more sincere than its claimed opposition to al-Qa’ida, have been ineffective so far.
Further illustrating the Taliban’s lack of capacity to stabilise Afghanistan, numerous pro-democracy groups also are resisting Taliban rule, involving both non-violent resistance and armed struggle. Women, students, small business owners and other urban population groups continue peaceful protests, and Taliban internal-security units are forced to mount frequent searches and sweeps looking for underground cells, safe houses and opposition activists.
As well as this non-violent opposition, the Taliban faces three main armed resistance groups. The best-known, and the first to mount armed attacks after the fall of Kabul, is the National Resistance Front, a mostly Tajik group centred on Afghanistan’s northern provinces. Well funded and with a good international profile, NRF includes Afghan military veterans and has conducted ambushes and assassinations of Taliban leaders, focusing on military rather than civilian targets.
The Afghanistan Freedom Front, led by a former defence minister, is a smaller group that mounts assassinations and small-scale ambushes, mainly operating in the region around Kabul, but claiming attacks as far south as Kandahar and partnering with the more northern-oriented NRF.
Finally, the Afghan United Front is led by highly respected, combat-experienced commanders from the former Afghan special forces. The AUF has the strongest professional military cadre, and arguably the greatest combat potential of any of the resistance groups. It has yet to mount major attacks, as it focuses on building networks of support across the country.
Aside from significant access to high-tier combat veterans, the AUF has the strongest presence in the Taliban heartland in southern Afghanistan and is multi-ethnic, with a significant proportion of Pashtuns in the group.
Critically, AUF’s political platform is very sophisticated. In addition to its multi-ethnic makeup, it has pledged allegiance to the existing, internationally recognised 2004 constitution of the Afghan republic, and operates strictly in compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights.
The AUF seeks to partner with all existing pro-democratic resistance groups, and maintains contacts with the NRF, AFF and other groups.
All these organisations, including non-violent protest movements and the armed resistance, draw from the new generation of Afghan leaders who grew up under international presence in Afghanistan. They are generally Western-educated, pro-democracy, religiously moderate, supportive of women’s rights and human rights more broadly, and – crucially – unpolluted by the corruption and self-dealing of the older group of Afghan elites under whose leadership the republic collapsed three years ago.
General Sami Sadat, last commander of Afghan special forces and head of the AUF, who held on in Helmand until the war’s final hours, argues that “we may have lost the campaign (in 2021) but we have the Afghan people on our side. Twenty years of the republic and international support transformed Afghanistan into a freedom-seeking, open society. This is the international community’s real investment since 2001, and this new Afghan society can overcome the Taliban – with a bit of help.”
As of today, armed resistance groups such as the AUF are nowhere close to being able to overthrow the Taliban on their own. Likewise, unarmed opposition in the cities is continually being brutally suppressed by Taliban enforcers and has yet to coalesce nationwide. Still, the mere fact that protests and uprisings continue despite Taliban repression, while armed resistance groups continue to grow and attack Taliban targets, suggests that a real groundswell of opposition exists.
If the resistance groups succeed in unifying, or simply co-ordinating operations, they could pose a bandwidth challenge for the regime.
To deal with rural armed resistance, the Taliban would have to send scarce top-tier units away from the cities, leaving an opening for urban resistance and protest movements. Likewise, to keep a lid on the cities, the Taliban would have to pull units away from rural areas, giving the armed resistance breathing space. This type of guerrilla strategy has a long track record of success – notably in Cuba in the 1950s – and although embryonic, Afghanistan’s emerging anti-Taliban resistance could pursue the same strategy.
None of this will matter, however, if the international community continues to credit the Taliban with a level of competence and control that it simply does not possess. Psychologically, for many Westerners, the fall of Kabul three years ago marked the end of the war on terrorism. The current US administration – humiliated by the frenzied scenes at Kabul airport in the war’s last days – has changed the subject, seeking to move on, while allies who fought alongside the US have followed the American lead.
Treating the Taliban as a real government, capable of controlling the country, is simply a cope – an attempt to pretend that what happens in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan.
More than two decades after 9/11 and three years after the fall of Kabul, we should know better.
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On the surface the Taliban seem strong, but things are not as they appear. In reality, its control is brittle and several sources of resistance are rising.