Afghanistan Peace CampaignOn July 3, Russia won itself the dubious distinction of becoming the world’s first nation to formally recognize the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” The same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin had an hour-long conversation with President Donald Trump. Although both leaders talked about a range of issues, the Taliban regime or its formal recognition didn’t feature among the topics discussed. Apparently, the Russian president thought it too insignificant an issue t0 interest President Trump. Russia, however, waited four long years to give the Taliban de jure recognition. The Taliban had the entire world united against them since they seized Kabul at gunpoint on August 15, 2021.
The Taliban defend this misogyny in the name of Islamic Shariat and Afghan (Pashtun) culture. In projecting what the United Nations calls gender apartheid onto Islam and thousands of years of Afghan heritage, the Taliban darkly stain both. That’s why none of the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has indulged them with the long-sought national recognition. Russia is not a Muslim-majority country, but 20 percent of its population is Muslim, while its Muslim-majority republics now number seven, including Chechnya. Moscow has become “Europe’s largest Muslim city.”
President Putin often presents himself as an outspoken defender of Islamic icons. When the burning of Qurans was on the rise in Europe, Putin criminalized desecration of the Quran in all of Russia through a legislative measure. He rebuilt Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya, which was razed to the ground in a war with Moscow, and topped its skyline with what was billed Europe’s biggest mosque. In a meeting with the visiting Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain in 2016, Putin told him: “We are all Muslims” (not in the confessional sense, but as the victims of oppression). Since their seizure of Kabul in 2021, the Taliban have been playing to Putin’s Muslim-friendly inclinations to soften his view of their purging of the female gender from Afghan public spaces.
In this endeavor, they were greatly helped by former Taliban commanders and soldiers who defected from the Taliban movement to join a more virulent version that has become the Taliban’s sworn enemy, namely Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K). IS-K’s terrorist violence has shaken a region that spans south, central and west Asia, and extends to Eurasia. IS-K’s massacre at a concert in Moscow in 2024, in which 133 people were killed, forced Putin to reassess Afghanistan through the prism of terror. As IS-K has its bases in Afghanistan, it was ostensibly only natural for Putin to upgrade Russia’s relations with Afghanistan to blunt the gathering threat of IS-K’s violence.
The strength of the Taliban’s rivals, especially IS-K and Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP), can be gauged from the Taliban’s aversion to ever naming or condemning them for their atrocities. These militant outfits commit trans-border violence not just in Russia, but in Iran, Pakistan and the neighboring Central Asian Republics. Yet the Taliban are helpless to rein them in. As the wide swath of IS-K and TTP’s ranks are filled with former members of the Taliban movement, the leaders of the latter are kept up late at night because these defectors are former insiders who know their way around the Taliban.
Russia was already treating Taliban authorities as de facto rulers. While the rest of the world had abandoned Kabul since 2021, Moscow kept its embassy open and fully staffed at the highest level. In April this year, Russia even dropped the terrorist group designation for the Taliban, which it had enforced for two decades. By denying the Taliban regime the legitimacy of formal recognition, Moscow was in alignment with the rest of the world, and yet it was still benefiting from full diplomatic relations with Kabul.
Moscow seems most interested, with this recognition of the Taliban, in dissing the rest of the world, especially the West. In the West, any passion for human rights or women rights has already cooled. The State Department has shuttered its human rights offices at home and abroad. So, human rights diplomacy or the use of what Joseph Nye termed soft power to achieve moral advantage in international relations has slid way down in U.S. priorities. This is certainly good news for the Taliban. Yet President Trump is far from recognizing their regime any time soon, despite Trump’s interest in reclaiming Afghanistan’s largest air base at Bagram, which Americans built.
Splits in the Taliban’s ranks are now coming into the open. Dissidents like Abbas Stanikzai, who was initially presented as the Taliban’s favorite choice for prime minister and is still deputy minister for foreign affairs, earlier this year exiled himself to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He feared for his life because of his public advocacy for girls and women’s education and employment. The UAE is also home to Afghanistan’s former President Ashraf Ghani who immediately preceded the Taliban.
An even more lethal divide has opened up between the supreme leader of the Taliban and his potent rivals in the Haqqani Network. The Network’s leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, like Stanikzai, took a public stance in favor of girls and women’s education, and reprimanded the Taliban’s orthodox leadership for misinterpreting the faith. Early this year, Haqqani who is minister for the interior has absented himself from Kabul for months on an overseas trip to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where he has been reportedly lobbying for a planned parting of the ways with the misogynist Taliban leadership. He made similar but even stronger overtures to the United States, which recently lifted a $10 million bounty on his head. The New York Times described him as Afghanistan’s best hope for change.
Russia’s formal recognition of the Taliban regime may not go far enough to save the Taliban from collapsing under the weight of an ugly power struggle or their inhumane policies. Some nations may find it tempting follow Russia’s lead—for instance, Pakistan or India—but they will likely find their move stalled by progressive opposition within their own societies. Even if they remain an exception, Russia is nevertheless contributing to the orphaning of human rights and the undermining of the international order.
- This article was published by FPIF