Afghanistan Peace CampaignInternational Institute for Strategic Studies
- Volume: 32
- Publisher: IISS
- October 2026
- Within Afghanistan, the Taliban has consolidated power and avoided mass famine, state collapse and renewed civil war. Yet the country remains economically fragile, politically repressive and far from international integration even as its rulers are increasingly accepted as an enduring political reality.
In the five years since returning to power in Afghanistan, the ruling government known as the Taliban has had considerable success in building relationships in its neighbourhood. It has, for instance, engaged seriously with nearly all of the Central Asian states as well as India, and its diplomatic links with Pakistan have survived severe strains over security issues. Western governments have shown little interest in removing the Taliban from power or arming resistance groups. It has sent de facto ambassadors to Central Asia, the Gulf states, Pakistan and Türkiye, and Kabul now hosts ambassadors from countries including China, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia and Türkiye. The city has hosted a European Union delegation and regular visits from the United Kingdom’s special envoy for Afghanistan.
The Taliban has capitalised on the willingness of countries such as China, Pakistan and Türkiye to treat its envoys like formal ambassadors, even if they do not formally recognise Afghanistan’s government. Senior Taliban leaders and officials periodically travel abroad in high-profile visits. In June 2024, Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani performed the Hajja in Saudi Arabia and led a delegation to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where he met President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. In June 2026, a Taliban delegation travelled to Brussels for talks with EU officials on facilitating the deportation of Afghan asylum seekers convicted of crimes. While these engagements represent a gain in de facto acceptance, Russia remains the only state to have formally recognised the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, which underscores limitations in the government’s ability to convert cooperation into diplomatic recognition.
Relations with Pakistan
Afghanistan’s relationship with Pakistan has not broken down, but it remains extremely tense. For Islamabad, the armed group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is the principal concern and the government’s position is that the Afghan Taliban must choose between the TTP and Pakistan. Islamabad’s other policies – from the mass deportation of Afghan refugees to prolonged border closures and airstrikes inside Afghanistan – are intended to apply pressure on Kabul. Pakistani negotiators argue that the TTP, which pledged allegiance to the Taliban’s emir, Mullah Akhundzada, has openly defied his edict in which he declared the jihad to be over. They criticise the Taliban’s failure to rein in the group and attribute its reluctance partly to fears that a confrontation would prompt disaffected TTP fighters and some Afghan Taliban members to defect to Islamic State–Khorasan Province (IS–KP).
For years, Pakistan’s official narrative attributed the TTP’s rise to external factors, such as spillover from the United States’ war in Afghanistan and support from the Indian and former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan intelligence services. The past five years have highlighted the role of the Taliban’s Afghan nationalism alongside its Islamist ideology. Anti-Pakistan sentiment, long a feature of Afghan political and social discourse, remains an outlet for nationalist expression under the Taliban as it was under the former republic.
The past five years have highlighted the role of the Taliban’s Afghan nationalism alongside its Islamist ideology.
However, within the Taliban, attitudes towards Pakistan also vary. For the Haqqani network, which ran its operations from North Waziristan for decades and developed close ties with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan was a place of refuge. Others have more bitter memories. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now deputy prime minister for economic affairs, was arrested in Karachi in 2010 in a joint Pakistani–US operation. Pakistan’s participation in the operation was partly motivated by Baradar’s outreach to the government of Hamid Karzai without Islamabad’s approval. He spent eight years in Pakistani custody before being released in 2018 at Washington’s request to facilitate peace talks. Many Taliban leaders who spent the insurgency in Quetta or Peshawar likewise resent the control that Pakistan exercised over them. These differences complicate Islamabad’s search for sympathetic and reliable interlocutors in Kabul.
The Taliban’s strategic calculus has diverged sharply from Islamabad’s expectations. Shaped by deep ideological affinity with the TTP, and seeing the group as a source of leverage, the Taliban has refused to sever ties with it or to treat it as a terrorist threat. Taliban officials point to their efforts to move TTP fighters and their families away from the border areas and blame Pakistan for making it impossible for the Taliban to establish permanent security posts along the border. Despite a sharp rise in TTP violence in the former tribal areas and some settled areas of Pakistan, including Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan, the group has failed to destabilise major Pakistani cities such as Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore as it did in the past. This partly reflects sustained pressure from intelligence-led operations against the TTP, as well as the group’s limited sophistication and use of young Afghan fighters who lack the local knowledge and identification documents needed to infiltrate areas with tighter security.
Relations with the US and counter-terrorism issues
The Taliban’s relationship with the US is essentially frozen, which it currently perceives to be one of its main barriers to sanctions relief, international investment, a seat at the United Nations and normalised relations with the wider world. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the main obstacles to closer US–Taliban ties were the Taliban’s record on women’s rights and, to a lesser degree, its refusal to formally renounce and cut ties with al-Qaeda. The former issue was championed by the Afghan diaspora in the US, by members of the former government (most of whom are based in Türkiye, the UAE or the US) and by human rights and Afghanistan-focused non-governmental organisations. The EU and Western European governments, including the UK, have prioritised the same issues in declining to normalise relations with the Taliban. Their officials have called for a more active US role and a diplomatic presence in Kabul. US normalisation could encourage closer European engagement in pursuit of counter-terrorism, deportation and migration-control interests.
Instead, US–Afghanistan relations deteriorated further towards the end of the Biden administration. In October 2024, the US Department of State announced that Thomas West would step down as special representative for Afghanistan, without naming a successor. His responsibilities passed to the deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia, a broader portfolio, and to the chargé d’affaires at the time, Karen Decker, at the Afghanistan Affairs Unit in Doha. The unit had replaced the US embassy in Kabul as Washington’s diplomatic mission to Afghanistan but lacked regular contact with the most senior Taliban figures. By the time US President Donald Trump’s second administration took office, diplomatic relations were limited.
The Taliban initially saw the second Trump administration as one of its best opportunities to achieve some form of normalisation with Washington, under a president it believed it knew how to work with. After Trump’s re-election in November 2024, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, spokesman for the Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, posted on X that the Taliban hoped the incoming administration would take a ‘pragmatic approach to ensure tangible advancement in bilateral relations allowing both nations to open a new chapter of relations grounded in mutual engagement’. He cited the Doha agreement, signed in February 2020, during Trump’s first term, as evidence that the two sides could work together. Although contact with the Taliban began during Barack Obama’s presidency and the withdrawal was completed under Biden, the agreement that set the terms of the withdrawal of US forces was negotiated during Trump’s first term by Zalmay Khalilzad, then-US special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation. The Taliban’s foreign minister, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, has since invited the US to reopen its embassy in Kabul and urged the Trump administration to explore mining opportunities in Afghanistan.
Yet despite Trump’s de-emphasis of human rights in US foreign policy, and his willingness to engage adversaries directly and at a senior level from the outset rather than at the culmination of talks, his administration has further downgraded US–Afghanistan relations during its second term. One limiting factor is the Taliban’s unpopularity across the US political spectrum. Another is Trump’s preference for running foreign policy from the White House through special envoys – often trusted associates from outside the diplomatic establishment – bypassing normal Department of State channels and reporting directly to the president, or through unofficial intermediaries such as Jared Kushner and Khalilzad. This centralisation has coincided with a major restructuring involving substantial personnel cuts and the consolidation or elimination of offices, including on the Afghanistan desk, weakening the team’s influence.
The result is a US foreign-policy apparatus with less bureaucratic capacity for sustained attention to issues that are not White House priorities. The administration has made the release of detained US persons its principal issue of engagement with Afghanistan. For much of Trump’s second term, the only public contact between Taliban officials and the US government has come through Adam Boehler, former special presidential envoy for hostage response, sometimes accompanied by Khalilzad in a personal capacity and on at least one occasion by Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council. At least 11 Americans have been released from Taliban custody since 2021, roughly half under Biden and half during Trump’s second term. Boehler is now unwelcome in Kabul following a heated exchange with senior Taliban officials on his previous trip.
The Taliban has refused to formally sever ties with al-Qaeda, owing to long-standing ideological bonds, a sense of obligation to former partners in jihad and, as with the TTP, fears that doing so would alienate hardline members and aid recruitment by competitors such as IS–KP. It therefore treats the issue as non-negotiable.
As the emir refuses to shift policy on al-Qaeda or women’s rights, the Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with his support, has offered cooperation in other areas in the apparent hopes of improving relations with the US. These include counter-terrorism cooperation against IS–KP, the eradication of poppy cultivation, investment opportunities and the release of detained Americans. The Taliban has contained IS–KP, preventing the group from holding territory, and authorities claim that IS–KP attacks have fallen by more than 90% since 2021. However, IS–KP has begun to target Chinese interests in Afghanistan. The most significant attack came on 19 January 2026, when an IS–KP suicide bomber killed seven people, including a Chinese national, at a restaurant in Kabul’s Shahr-e-Naw neighbourhood. Although Kabul is not a heavily securitised city and has relatively few checkpoints, its newest Chinese restaurant now operates under the protection of a Taliban security detail.
Domestic conditions
Since September 2021, girls have been barred from attending school beyond the sixth grade. In March 2022, the Taliban briefly reopened girls’ secondary schools, only to reverse this decision on the same day, announcing that girls’ education above the age of 11–12 was suspended until further notice. West, then-US special representative for Afghanistan, responded by cancelling planned meetings with Taliban officials in Doha. In December 2022, the Taliban extended the restrictions to women attending university, and in July 2023 it banned beauty salons. The emir, who rules from Kandahar, has maintained the restrictions on women’s education. In January 2025, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, then-deputy foreign minister for political affairs, who had also served in the first Taliban government, publicly argued that there was no justification for the ban on girls’ education. He subsequently left Afghanistan for exile in the UAE. Many senior Taliban leaders and technocrats support reopening girls’ schools, but the most conservative leaders close to the emir do not.
On 7 September 2025, Taliban security forces began barring Afghan women, including UN staff, contractors and visitors, from entering UN premises across the country, impeding humanitarian operations and further restricting women’s participation in the humanitarian sector and programmes for women and girls.
Nevertheless, the extent to which women remain part of public life varies across the country depending on local customs and the enforcement of restrictions. In Kabul, women remain visible on the streets, especially in areas where cultural norms are less restrictive, such as the Hazara neighbourhood of Dasht-e-Barchi. Their movement between cities is limited without a mahram (a close male relative who acts as a chaperone). Formally, women may not travel more than 72 kilometres from home without one, but in practice the rule is enforced inconsistently by individual Taliban members and even bus drivers, sometimes more strictly than the formal standard. Afghan women are not permitted to leave the country without a mahram, although exceptions are often made for women of Afghan origin who hold foreign passports or permanent residency abroad.
Economic fragility has so far had limited political consequences for the Taliban.
Although Afghan women have been almost entirely removed from the public sector and public-facing jobs, they are still employed in several industries. These include the back offices and women’s branches of banks, medical clinics, the family sections of higher-end restaurants and entrepreneurial ventures such as women-owned bakeries and handicraft shops. These women-owned firms account for around only one in ten businesses and are concentrated in the clothing and food sectors. The medical sector remains the most important of these, since female patients are generally expected to be treated by female staff, but the Taliban’s ban on women attending medical institutes could reduce this workforce over time, even though apprenticeship-style training is occurring at individual clinics.
According to the World Bank, Afghanistan’s economy grew by an estimated 4.8% in the 2025 fiscal year, but the return of some 3.7 million people pushed population growth to around 11%, so GDP per capita fell by 5.6%. Inflation averaged 3.6% over the year before climbing to 7.6% by March 2026, driven by a poor harvest, higher demand and trade disruptions. Food insecurity has reached about 40% of the population. While aid has fallen, domestic revenue has risen due to lower levels of corruption and mining licences. Afghanistan’s private banks maintain correspondent banking relationships with banks in the region but have few or no such connections beyond it. Economic fragility has so far had limited political consequences for the Taliban.
Outlook
Taliban officials have expressed disappointment at what they see as unfair treatment by the US and its close partners, and at the limited recognition of the sharp fall in poppy cultivation following the emir’s ban. The government’s regional experience indicates that bilateral cooperation can grow without formal recognition. The fact that Europeans are interested in migration control and counter-terrorism offers an opening to pursue a similar approach in those capitals, even as the chances of achieving broader normalisation are low. Without unforeseen developments, US–Afghanistan relations are unlikely to advance under the Trump administration. The risks associated with large-scale investment and connectivity projects in Afghanistan continue to limit their appeal. While licensing mining rights, often to Chinese firms, has helped sustain government revenues, large mining projects have been slow to take off.
Engagement with Washington will probably remain limited, with little prospect of Taliban concessions on al-Qaeda or women’s rights.
The Taliban is likely to retain its ties to the TTP, prolonging tensions with Pakistan and the risk of further border clashes. Engagement with Washington will probably remain limited, with little prospect of Taliban concessions on al-Qaeda or women’s rights. Meanwhile, mass returns and shrinking aid are likely to keep the economy under strain, with living standards continuing to fall.