Five years after the Taliban seized Kabul without a fight, Afghanistan has settled into a harsh calm. Armed men control the streets. The vice-and-virtue police beat men deemed insufficiently bearded. Women are barred from workplaces, universities and travel unless accompanied by a male guardian. Girls are banned from secondary school, and child marriage—now legal—has pushed many straight from classrooms into arranged marriages.
The Taliban's emir, Haibatullah Akhundzada, has consolidated his hold by building a loyal praetorian guard and securing lucrative mining contracts. Hardliners within the movement have suppressed more moderate voices. Even many Taliban fighters who spent years in exile no longer believe strict restrictions on women are essential to the movement's survival—but the ideological core has overridden them.
A 1,000-kilometer road trip inside the country, conducted this summer, found the country largely free of large-scale armed conflict, with the main security friction confined to intermittent clashes along the border with Pakistan. The relative quiet comes at a price most Afghans did not choose.
Afghanistan's collapse in August 2021 was not the result of a military defeat. President Joe Biden ordered a complete withdrawal after President Donald Trump had already set the timetable. The moment America's departure became certain, the calculations of every armed faction shifted. Warlords switched allegiances. Government soldiers abandoned their posts. The elected government fell almost instantly, and the Taliban took power with almost no resistance. Civilians desperate to flee clung to the wheels of departing U.S. military aircraft and fell to their deaths.
The Taliban had governed before—from 1996 until the U.S.-led coalition ousted them in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Their first government banned girls' education, stoned gay people to death and hosted al-Qaeda. After their removal, they spent two decades waging a guerrilla campaign against the democratic system the United States tried to build, killing judges, police officers and anyone they labeled a collaborator. When Biden completed the withdrawal, a 20-year nation-building effort ended in failure.
The consequences extended beyond Afghanistan. Other governments drew their own conclusions about Washington's willingness to defend partners. Six months after Kabul fell, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Donor-funded governance programs inside Afghanistan over those two decades produced limited results for reasons scholars have since documented. Western aid was structured around donors' domestic political priorities rather than Afghan state development. Theories of change were applied repeatedly even when they did not fit conditions on the ground. Successive rotations of diplomats launched reform efforts that lost momentum before they could take hold. The centrality of Kabul-based politics was never adequately addressed by programs aimed at local governance.
Now, with most Western governments having cut or drastically reduced their humanitarian budgets for Afghanistan, the argument being made by analysts and editorial observers is straightforward: stopping aid does not punish the Taliban, it punishes the roughly 40 million Afghans living under their rule. Data-gathering inside the country is limited—the Taliban do not treat statistics as a priority—but the direction of health and poverty indicators is not in dispute.
The case for diplomatic engagement rests on a similar logic. The Taliban are not going to be removed by isolation. China and Russia have maintained ties with Kabul since 2021, and further Western disengagement pushes Afghanistan deeper into their orbit. A country that borders Iran, China, Pakistan and three Central Asian states is not geopolitically neutral, and treating it as such serves no Western interest.
Most Afghans, the reporting from inside the country makes clear, want more freedom. That desire exists even within parts of the Taliban itself, where fighters with experience outside Afghanistan have updated their views on education and women's roles. Reform, if it comes, will not be imposed from outside. It will take decades and will have to originate from within the movement and society. But the argument that engagement is the same as endorsement misreads how diplomacy works. Democracies maintain embassies in dozens of countries with governments they find repugnant.
Music is banned in Afghanistan today. Women cannot leave home unescorted. Girls who might have attended secondary school are instead being married off as children. These are the conditions that five years of international disengagement has not changed. The question is whether continued disengagement changes them—and the evidence from the past five years suggests it does not.
