A woman begs with a boy nearby along the road from Baghlan to Badakhshan in November. To be in most public places in Afghanistan, women are required to be chaperoned by a male, even if he is a child. Photo / Carolyn Van Houten, The Washington Post
Four years into its second stretch in power, Afghanistan’s Taliban government has been recognised by only one country: Russia.
But anti-immigrant sentiment, concerns about militant groups in Central Asia and a growing acceptance that the regime is unlikely to collapse anytime soon are allowing the Taliban movement to quietly make diplomatic inroads.
Many of Afghanistan’s neighbours, while not officially recognising the regime, have found ways to work with it.
White House counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka described the regime last month as “moderately co-operative”, even as he acknowledged that “this sounds strange coming out of my mouth”.
And Germany, home to Europe’s largest Afghan population, has accredited two Taliban Foreign Ministry officials to join representatives of the previous, Western-backed Afghan government as consular officials.
United States President Donald Trump last Friday added a new dimension, saying that the US is working to regain control of Afghanistan’s Bagram air base from the Taliban.
“We’re trying to get it back because they need things from us,” he said, suggesting that the base, which the US military left four years ago amid the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, is “an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons”.
It was not clear how far talks have progressed.
The Taliban government declined to comment and cited previous remarks that it would not tolerate a US military presence in Afghanistan.
That such talks are taking place at all signals how some governments increasingly regard the Taliban as an unavoidable negotiating partner.
“The Taliban are being dealt with as the rulers of Afghanistan, even if recognition has not yet been formally extended,” said Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, a former Pakistani foreign secretary.
The Afghan Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Each of the countries engaging with the Taliban has different motives.
In Europe, a surge in support for anti-immigrant parties is stoking calls for deportations to Afghanistan, which require the Taliban’s approval.
Many countries, including the US, share a common enemy with the Taliban: Isis, which has a presence in the Afghan-Pakistan border region as the Islamic State-Khorasan, or Isis-K.
For neighbours, Afghanistan is important as a transit hub and trading partner.
The emerging ties are “a significant strategic victory for the Taliban”, said Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.
The Taliban’s emergence from isolation remains tenuous.
While some officials have sought more international outreach, hardline leaders are pushing draconian restrictions on women’s and civil rights, limiting the extent to which Western governments can publicly engage with them.
The regime’s sanctioned Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, was recently unable to visit Pakistan and India after a United Nations sanctions committee declined to issue the necessary travel waivers, according to two Pakistani officials.
Many embassies in Kabul remain closed as foreign governments hedge their bets. China has been slow to invest in infrastructure projects of the kind it has rolled out elsewhere in the region.
The Taliban want to be treated as an ordinary government, said Muhammad Amir Rana, a Pakistani political analyst, but the idea remains far-fetched.
Among most countries now dealing with them, he said, “engagement is confined mainly to humanitarian aid and migration management”.
For diplomats who witnessed the negotiations that led to the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the past four years have been a disappointment.
Mansoor Ahmad Khan, who was Pakistan’s ambassador to Kabul when the Taliban reclaimed power, said the fighters’ pledges to work on constitutional rule, good governance, and human rights fuelled “a sense of optimism”.
Appointees to an initial cabinet were described as acting ministers. Early crackdowns on women’s rights were framed as temporary.
In recent months, the regime has dropped the pretence. Hardline Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada ordered his ministers last month to remove the “acting” designation from their titles.
Foreign diplomats are engaging with the regime anyway, analysts say, because they don’t view the Taliban fighters as a cohesive group.
Few negotiate directly with the hardliners in Kandahar.
Instead, they interact primarily with members of the regime who are seen as more pragmatic, such as representatives of Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani and Defence Minister Mohammad Yaqoob.
Diplomats who have visited Kabul say interactions have been challenging. Asif Durrani, Pakistan’s former special representative for Afghanistan, said he encountered Taliban diplomats who largely stuck to prepared lines. “Professionally, they’re not sound,” he said.
Before last week’s comments by Trump, the US appeared to focus primarily on counterterrorism co-operation and efforts to free Americans held in Afghanistan.
When Adam Boehler, Trump’s envoy for hostage affairs, visited Kabul to secure the release of US citizen George Glezmann in March, it was the highest-level publicly known contact since the Taliban takeover. Last week, Boehler made a second trip to Afghanistan.
China has stepped in when doing so suited its interests, such as brokering a deal between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Representatives from Kabul and Islamabad, meeting in Beijing in May, agreed to exchange ambassadors after years of deteriorating relations.
Negotiators were driven by a convergence of interests. Afghanistan, which was offered a trade deal as part of the agreement, wanted economic investment to help weather Western sanctions and global aid cuts.
Pakistan has been beset by insurgencies, for which it blames the Taliban indirectly. China has grown increasingly frustrated by attacks linked to those insurgencies on its infrastructure projects in Pakistan.
Russia’s recognition of the Taliban regime in July was probably also linked to security concerns.
“Everyone worries about ISK, but Russia really worries about it,” Kugelman said, referring to the Isis affiliate in Afghanistan. More than 130 people were killed when Isis-K gunmen attacked a concert hall in Moscow last year.
For the Kremlin, Kugelman said, recognising the Taliban government might also have been strategic.
“Russia wants to set itself apart from the US and the West - it wants to blaze its own trail,” he said.
“And I suspect that it also hopes that some of the other countries in the broader region, including China, would want to follow suit.”
It’s unlikely the Taliban will find a majority in the UN to grant it the recognition that would help unlock billions in frozen assets and give it a seat at international forums and donor conferences.
But in Europe, the Taliban are making significant inroads. Since their takeover, they’ve wrestled for control of Afghan consulates and embassies there, with growing success.
The US oversaw the closure of the Afghan Embassy in Washington after the Taliban takeover. Many of Afghanistan’s missions in Europe have remained open, run by representatives of the pre-Taliban government.
Early last year, the basement of the Afghan Embassy in Paris was still bustling with Afghans renewing their passports and foreign workers for nongovernmental organisations applying for visas.
That changed when the Taliban cut ties with many Afghanistan diplomatic missions in Europe that summer, saying they did not sufficiently co-operate.
Momentum has appeared to be shifting toward the Taliban in other ways, as well.
More than 400,000 Afghans have lodged asylum claims in the European Union since 2020, and the rise of anti-immigrant parties on the continent is putting pressure on governments to deport some of them.
In Britain, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, whose party has been outpolling the ruling Labour and opposition Conservative parties for months, has threatened to deport all Afghan adults who enter the country undocumented.
Germany’s new conservative government welcomed the two Taliban representatives to help with the deportation of Afghans convicted of crimes.
Afghans in the country were shocked.
“Germany claims that the basis for this action is to deliver justice,” human rights activist Zahra Mousawy said. “But in reality, it has invited war criminals.”
The German Foreign Ministry defends its interactions with the Taliban as being of a “technical” nature.
“Like all countries worldwide, except Russia, the Federal Government does not recognise the Taliban’s de facto government in Afghanistan,” the ministry said in a statement.
Several diplomats who represented the previous Afghan government in Germany were recently let go on instructions from Kabul, according to one current and one former Afghan diplomat.
While some Afghan diplomats have decided to co-operate with the Taliban, they said, the consulate in Bonn, Germany, is fighting for its independence.
The Bonn consulate is strategically important to the Taliban because it’s the administrative nerve centre of all the Afghan missions in Europe that still resist the regime. It also houses the data centre that stores the biometric and passport data of Afghans on the continent.
“With this data, it’s possible to trace your entire family back in Afghanistan: where you are from, your village, your district, your province,” the current diplomat said.
Lutfullah Lutfi, a former diplomat with the Afghan mission to the UN in New York, said he worries that many of his colleagues in Europe will soon share his fate.
When the Taliban took over, he said, he was encouraged by the UN refusal to recognise their ambassador. “We lost our country, but a part of Afghanistan was still ours,” he said.
But in early 2022, amid internal tensions over whether to collaborate with the Taliban, he was let go.
The most difficult part of the experience, he said, was that there was nobody left from whom he could seek help.
- Haq Nawaz Khan, Wadud Salangi, Ezzatullah Mehrdad, and John Hudson contributed to this report.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.