Five years after the fall of Kabul, the Taliban have done what many predicted they could not: they hold nearly all of Afghanistan’s territory. What they have not built is a state most Afghans can call their own. Victory on the battlefield settled who controls the capital. It did not settle who belongs to the polity.
Amir Jahangir, writing in The News, makes the case that the conflict did not end with the Taliban’s arrival in 2021. The regime has secured control without resolving the question of national inclusion, and that failure now feeds an armed opposition spreading across the country. The argument deserves attention because it treats exclusion as a cause of instability rather than a side effect.
Start with how power is organised. Authority rests with Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and a tight Kandahari circle. Appointments and decisions flow from that circle, and loyalty to it counts for more than competence or local legitimacy.
Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and others have little say in who governs them, repeating a pattern from the 1990s. A state built around one network, one region and one doctrine treats everyone outside it as a guest at best and a threat at worst.
Exclusion is not only ethnic. The starkest example is the treatment of women and girls. Bans on schooling beyond the primary years, along with limits on work and public life, remove half the population from civic existence. No government can claim to represent a nation while legislating the absence of its women.
These restrictions also weaken the country’s ability to recover, and the economics bear this out. Per capita income has fallen even as headline growth continues, and millions of Afghans, many of them children, need humanitarian aid. A country cannot rebuild with half its talent kept indoors.
Then there is the fate of the former security forces. The amnesty announced in 2021 was the most inclusive gesture the Taliban made, and it could have anchored reconciliation. Yet UN monitoring recorded hundreds of extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions of former officials and personnel in the two years that followed.
An amnesty people do not trust is worse than none, because it teaches them that surrender is dangerous. Trained soldiers with local knowledge and no safe place to go become recruits for whoever will arm them. Repression, in this sense, replenishes the opposition it hopes to destroy.
This is why the geography of resistance matters. The field is widening, with the National Resistance Front, the Afghanistan Freedom Front and the newer Afghanistan United Front all claiming operations. The last even claims attacks in Kandahar and Helmand. Reported attack counts remain claims rather than verified totals, and these groups are vulnerable to the loss of key commanders and to their own fragmentation. Ambushes are not governance. Still, the pattern undercuts a comfortable story in which dissent is a northern or minority grievance. When armed challenge reaches the Taliban’s southern heartland, the problem looks less like ethnic rivalry and more like a governing model that has alienated people across every line.
The distinction must therefore stay political. Pashtuns are not synonymous with the Taliban, and no opposition front speaks for an entire community.
Many Pashtuns live under the same restrictions as everyone else. Reading Afghanistan as a contest between ethnic blocs misdiagnoses the situation and risks creating the very polarisation it describes. The more accurate account is that a narrow ruling group has captured the state and defined the nation to suit itself.
The opposition must also take a lesson here. Exclusion by the Taliban cannot be answered with a rival exclusion. Resistance movements owe Afghans credible political programmes, protection for civilians and a firm rejection of revenge.
If the alternative to one closed order is another, the cycle simply turns again, and Afghans have endured enough of those turns.
The regional stakes are real. Pakistan has understandable security concerns, and its interest is best framed as an Afghanistan that neither exports insecurity nor slides back into civil war. Yet demands on security, made in isolation, are unlikely to move a regime whose core weakness is its narrowness.
Engagement that pairs clear expectations on militancy with pressure for enforceable amnesty protections, accountability and wider participation offers a better chance of lasting stability than coercion alone. Instability born of exclusion in Kabul has a way of crossing the border.
The Taliban face a choice between two readings of their predicament. They can treat each attack as a policing problem and answer with more checkpoints, more detentions and more fear.
Or they can ask why so many people, with such different histories, have concluded that the state offers them nothing. The first path is familiar and may hold for years. The second is harder, because it requires sharing power, which is exactly what the movement’s structure resists.
Stability depends on whether citizens trust the government with their safety and future. Territorial control cannot manufacture that trust. Inclusion can: real offices for those outside Kandahar, schools for girls, an amnesty that is honoured, and a political process open to those who disagree. Until then, the Taliban will govern Afghanistan without ever quite representing it.
A State Built for the Few
Five years after the fall of Kabul, the Taliban have done what many predicted they could not: they hold nearly all of Afghanistan’s territory. What they have not built is a state most Afghans can call their own. Victory on the battlefield settled who controls the capital. It did not settle who belongs to the polity.
Amir Jahangir, writing in The News, makes the case that the conflict did not end with the Taliban’s arrival in 2021. The regime has secured control without resolving the question of national inclusion, and that failure now feeds an armed opposition spreading across the country. The argument deserves attention because it treats exclusion as a cause of instability rather than a side effect.
Start with how power is organised. Authority rests with Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and a tight Kandahari circle. Appointments and decisions flow from that circle, and loyalty to it counts for more than competence or local legitimacy.
Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and others have little say in who governs them, repeating a pattern from the 1990s. A state built around one network, one region and one doctrine treats everyone outside it as a guest at best and a threat at worst.
Exclusion is not only ethnic. The starkest example is the treatment of women and girls. Bans on schooling beyond the primary years, along with limits on work and public life, remove half the population from civic existence. No government can claim to represent a nation while legislating the absence of its women.
These restrictions also weaken the country’s ability to recover, and the economics bear this out. Per capita income has fallen even as headline growth continues, and millions of Afghans, many of them children, need humanitarian aid. A country cannot rebuild with half its talent kept indoors.
Then there is the fate of the former security forces. The amnesty announced in 2021 was the most inclusive gesture the Taliban made, and it could have anchored reconciliation. Yet UN monitoring recorded hundreds of extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions of former officials and personnel in the two years that followed.
An amnesty people do not trust is worse than none, because it teaches them that surrender is dangerous. Trained soldiers with local knowledge and no safe place to go become recruits for whoever will arm them. Repression, in this sense, replenishes the opposition it hopes to destroy.
This is why the geography of resistance matters. The field is widening, with the National Resistance Front, the Afghanistan Freedom Front and the newer Afghanistan United Front all claiming operations. The last even claims attacks in Kandahar and Helmand. Reported attack counts remain claims rather than verified totals, and these groups are vulnerable to the loss of key commanders and to their own fragmentation. Ambushes are not governance. Still, the pattern undercuts a comfortable story in which dissent is a northern or minority grievance. When armed challenge reaches the Taliban’s southern heartland, the problem looks less like ethnic rivalry and more like a governing model that has alienated people across every line.
The distinction must therefore stay political. Pashtuns are not synonymous with the Taliban, and no opposition front speaks for an entire community.
Many Pashtuns live under the same restrictions as everyone else. Reading Afghanistan as a contest between ethnic blocs misdiagnoses the situation and risks creating the very polarisation it describes. The more accurate account is that a narrow ruling group has captured the state and defined the nation to suit itself.
The opposition must also take a lesson here. Exclusion by the Taliban cannot be answered with a rival exclusion. Resistance movements owe Afghans credible political programmes, protection for civilians and a firm rejection of revenge.
If the alternative to one closed order is another, the cycle simply turns again, and Afghans have endured enough of those turns.
The regional stakes are real. Pakistan has understandable security concerns, and its interest is best framed as an Afghanistan that neither exports insecurity nor slides back into civil war. Yet demands on security, made in isolation, are unlikely to move a regime whose core weakness is its narrowness.
Engagement that pairs clear expectations on militancy with pressure for enforceable amnesty protections, accountability and wider participation offers a better chance of lasting stability than coercion alone. Instability born of exclusion in Kabul has a way of crossing the border.
The Taliban face a choice between two readings of their predicament. They can treat each attack as a policing problem and answer with more checkpoints, more detentions and more fear.
Or they can ask why so many people, with such different histories, have concluded that the state offers them nothing. The first path is familiar and may hold for years. The second is harder, because it requires sharing power, which is exactly what the movement’s structure resists.
Stability depends on whether citizens trust the government with their safety and future. Territorial control cannot manufacture that trust. Inclusion can: real offices for those outside Kandahar, schools for girls, an amnesty that is honoured, and a political process open to those who disagree. Until then, the Taliban will govern Afghanistan without ever quite representing it.
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