In January 2025, a senior Taliban official stood before a madrasa graduation ceremony in Khost Province and said what no one inside the movement was supposed to say. Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister and the chief negotiator of the Doha Agreement that brought his movement back to power, called the ban on girls’ education “un-Islamic,” said the decision was “rooted in Akhundzada’s personal views, not Sharia,” and warned that “we are denying 20 million people out of a population of 40 million their basic rights.”
Within days, Akhundzada issued a travel ban against Stanikzai and reportedly ordered the country’s intelligence chief to arrest him and try him in a military court. Stanikzai left for the United Arab Emirates, citing health reasons. His position as deputy foreign minister was quietly filled by someone else. He has not returned.
The man who negotiated the Taliban’s return to international legitimacy is now nowhere. That, in concentrated form, is the story of political dissent in Taliban Afghanistan, and it is a story that has claimed figures far more powerful than Stanikzai.
The Architecture of Akhundzada’s Control
To understand what has happened to dissent inside the Taliban, it is necessary to understand what Hibatullah Akhundzada has built since 2021 and what he has dismantled.
Akhundzada rules from Kandahar with hardline loyalists while powerful ministers in Kabul have pushed for more pragmatic changes. His paranoia runs deep; he rarely meets ministers, communicates through clerics, and hides his face in public. Key decisions, including weapon distribution and security forces, have shifted to his loyalists, bypassing cabinet members entirely.
Since November 2025, Akhundzada has had direct control over Afghanistan’s weapons and military equipment, sidelining the Interior Ministry and the Defence Ministry. This is not administrative reorganisation. It is the systematic elimination of any institutional base from which a challenge could be mounted.
The result is a governing structure in which the Emir’s word is final, his theology is unquestionable, and his critics disappear into exile, into silence, or into the ground.
Stanikzai: The Pragmatist Expelled
Stanikzai’s case is the most diplomatically significant of the dissent cases because of what he represented. He was not a peripheral figure. He had served as the head of the Taliban’s negotiating team during the Doha talks between the Taliban and the United States from 2018 to 2021, the talks that produced the agreement legitimising the Taliban’s return and facilitating the American withdrawal. He was, in every meaningful sense, the face of Taliban engagement with the outside world.
His public criticism of the education ban was not his first. In 2023, he had urged reopening schools for women, framing it as essential for the country’s future and saying “justice should be ensured.” His calls for greater rights for women and girls had put him at odds with the Taliban’s hardline faction.
What January 2025 made clear was that the hardline faction had won, and that even the movement’s most senior diplomat, the man who had made international engagement possible, was not protected from the consequences of disagreement.
Stanikzai publicly criticised the bans on women’s education and employment, diverging sharply from the leadership in Kandahar, and left the country in protest against the leadership’s restrictive policies on women and other issues such as political isolationism. His departure removed from the Taliban’s governing structure its most credible voice for pragmatic international engagement. That removal was not incidental. It was the point.
Khalil Haqqani: The Death That Asked a Question
In December 2024, Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani, the Taliban’s de facto minister of refugees and repatriation, was killed in a suicide bombing, the most senior official to be killed since the Taliban seized power in 2021. Privately, most of Haqqani’s supporters accused his rivals in the Taliban of ordering his assassination.
Khalil Haqqani was a member of the Haqqani Network, one of the most powerful factions within the Taliban structure, with deep roots in eastern Afghanistan and longstanding relationships with both Pakistan and Gulf donors. His death was officially attributed to ISIS-Khorasan. The private accusations within the movement itself pointed elsewhere.
His nephew, Sirajuddin Haqqani, had been vocal in opposing Akhundzada’s policies before the event. After his uncle’s killing, that vocal opposition went quiet. Haqqani, who heads a powerful network of his own, cannot start a fight with the Kandahar faction and win.
The Haqqani Network, once arguably the most powerful armed faction within the Taliban’s umbrella, has been functionally contained. Its political voice has been silenced by a combination of institutional sidelining and a death that raised questions no one inside the regime is permitted to ask aloud.
Sirajuddin Haqqani: Neutralised Without Removal
Sirajuddin Haqqani’s trajectory is perhaps the most instructive example of how Akhundzada manages dissent within the senior leadership, not by elimination but by neutralisation.
As Interior Minister, Haqqani had been the most prominent voice for a more pragmatic Taliban, one that could engage internationally, manage the economy, and maintain the kind of institutional coherence that governance requires. Officials, including Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani and Defence Minister Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid, seemed to favour more pragmatic engagement with the world, economic growth and limited reforms.
Akhundzada has had direct control over Afghanistan’s weapons and military equipment since November 2025, sidelining the Interior Ministry. Haqqani retains his title. He has lost his leverage. The ministry he heads has been stripped of the institutional resources that gave it independent weight. He is present in the structure but absent from the decisions.
This is Akhundzada’s preferred method for managing figures too powerful to remove directly: keep them in position, remove their power, and wait for their silence to become permanent.
Juma Khan Fateh: The Commander Who Said No
The most recent and most kinetically significant case of dissent is Juma Khan Fateh, the Tajik Taliban commander known as the “Conqueror of Darwaz,” whose dispute with Kandahari leadership has escalated from administrative friction to the edge of armed confrontation.
Fateh was removed from his post as deputy governor of Zabul amid an escalating dispute over influence and control of mineral-rich areas in Badakhshan province, formally replaced by decree of the supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada. A key factor in the contention is competition for control over economic assets, especially the gold mines in Badakhshan, one of Afghanistan’s wealthiest mining regions, whose control yields considerable economic returns while simultaneously bolstering the political and security power of local commanders.
Observers believe his dismissal without being assigned another position is part of a broader effort to sideline non-Pashtun commanders within the Taliban’s power structure. Fateh’s ethnicity, Tajik, is not incidental to this reading. The consolidation of power under Akhundzada has proceeded alongside the progressive marginalisation of non-Pashtun figures within Taliban governance.
Fateh has not accepted the removal quietly. Despite offers from the Taliban regime for negotiations and a new official position, Juma Khan has rejected returning to the government’s ranks, placed his forces on high alert, and ensured they are fully prepared both militarily and logistically. He has stated, simply: “I am in my own home.”
Fateh has also positioned himself explicitly on the counterterrorism question that the Taliban leadership has systematically avoided. He publicly stated his long-standing opposition to the presence of foreign armed groups in Afghanistan, explicitly naming TTP and the BLA, saying he has opposed these foreign entities from the very first day and expressed firm support for any actions aimed at suppressing and eliminating these groups.
A dissident Taliban commander taking a more responsible position on cross-border terrorism than the regime he is dissenting from is a detail that deserves international attention.
The Pattern Behind the Cases
The figures examined here, Stanikzai, Khalil Haqqani, Sirajuddin Haqqani, and Juma Khan Fateh, are not a random sample of Taliban personalities. They represent a specific type: the pragmatist, the networked power broker, the non-Pashtun regional commander, the internationally engaged diplomat. The figures who have been sidelined, silenced, exiled, or killed are precisely those whose continued presence and influence would have constrained Akhundzada’s consolidation of personal and ideological authority.
Tensions exploded in late 2025 when Akhundzada ordered a nationwide internet shutdown, viewing online content as un-Islamic. Kabul ministers, seeing the move as disastrous for governance and the economy, reversed the order within days, a rare open rebellion against the supreme leader’s direct command. That episode illustrated both the depth of internal dissent and its limits: ministers can reverse a decree, but they cannot challenge the system that produces such decrees without facing the consequences Stanikzai faced.
The regime has shown no commitment to democratic institutions and has allowed no political activity unaligned with the Taliban. No political parties or civil society organisations were permitted to function in 2023 and 2024. Dissent within the movement is managed through exile and neutralisation. Dissent outside the movement is managed through imprisonment, violence, and fear.
Closing Observation
The political history of Taliban Afghanistan since 2021 is, in significant part, the history of competent and pragmatic figures being removed from positions of influence by a supreme leader whose governing philosophy brooks no qualification, tolerates no disagreement, and recognises no authority above his own.
Abbas Stanikzai negotiated the deal that brought the Taliban back to power. He is in the UAE. Khalil Haqqani ran the ministry for refugees. He is dead. Sirajuddin Haqqani heads the Interior Ministry. He has been stripped of the tools that made that position meaningful. Juma Khan Fateh commanded thousands of fighters in Afghanistan’s northeast. He has been dismissed, rejected the regime’s offers, and is now mobilising in Badakhshan.
Each of these trajectories tells the same story: that the Taliban’s governing model has no mechanism for incorporating dissent, no framework for managing internal difference, and no tolerance for the kind of pluralism, even within its own ranks, that durable governance requires.
A movement that eliminates its pragmatists, sidelines its diplomats, kills its power brokers, and dismisses its regional commanders is not building a state. It is building a one-man system whose stability depends entirely on the continued authority of one man, and whose fractures deepen with every figure it pushes out.
Silencing the Taliban: The Rise of Akhundzada’s One-Man Rule
In January 2025, a senior Taliban official stood before a madrasa graduation ceremony in Khost Province and said what no one inside the movement was supposed to say. Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister and the chief negotiator of the Doha Agreement that brought his movement back to power, called the ban on girls’ education “un-Islamic,” said the decision was “rooted in Akhundzada’s personal views, not Sharia,” and warned that “we are denying 20 million people out of a population of 40 million their basic rights.”
Within days, Akhundzada issued a travel ban against Stanikzai and reportedly ordered the country’s intelligence chief to arrest him and try him in a military court. Stanikzai left for the United Arab Emirates, citing health reasons. His position as deputy foreign minister was quietly filled by someone else. He has not returned.
The man who negotiated the Taliban’s return to international legitimacy is now nowhere. That, in concentrated form, is the story of political dissent in Taliban Afghanistan, and it is a story that has claimed figures far more powerful than Stanikzai.
The Architecture of Akhundzada’s Control
To understand what has happened to dissent inside the Taliban, it is necessary to understand what Hibatullah Akhundzada has built since 2021 and what he has dismantled.
Akhundzada rules from Kandahar with hardline loyalists while powerful ministers in Kabul have pushed for more pragmatic changes. His paranoia runs deep; he rarely meets ministers, communicates through clerics, and hides his face in public. Key decisions, including weapon distribution and security forces, have shifted to his loyalists, bypassing cabinet members entirely.
Since November 2025, Akhundzada has had direct control over Afghanistan’s weapons and military equipment, sidelining the Interior Ministry and the Defence Ministry. This is not administrative reorganisation. It is the systematic elimination of any institutional base from which a challenge could be mounted.
The result is a governing structure in which the Emir’s word is final, his theology is unquestionable, and his critics disappear into exile, into silence, or into the ground.
Stanikzai: The Pragmatist Expelled
Stanikzai’s case is the most diplomatically significant of the dissent cases because of what he represented. He was not a peripheral figure. He had served as the head of the Taliban’s negotiating team during the Doha talks between the Taliban and the United States from 2018 to 2021, the talks that produced the agreement legitimising the Taliban’s return and facilitating the American withdrawal. He was, in every meaningful sense, the face of Taliban engagement with the outside world.
His public criticism of the education ban was not his first. In 2023, he had urged reopening schools for women, framing it as essential for the country’s future and saying “justice should be ensured.” His calls for greater rights for women and girls had put him at odds with the Taliban’s hardline faction.
What January 2025 made clear was that the hardline faction had won, and that even the movement’s most senior diplomat, the man who had made international engagement possible, was not protected from the consequences of disagreement.
Stanikzai publicly criticised the bans on women’s education and employment, diverging sharply from the leadership in Kandahar, and left the country in protest against the leadership’s restrictive policies on women and other issues such as political isolationism. His departure removed from the Taliban’s governing structure its most credible voice for pragmatic international engagement. That removal was not incidental. It was the point.
Khalil Haqqani: The Death That Asked a Question
In December 2024, Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani, the Taliban’s de facto minister of refugees and repatriation, was killed in a suicide bombing, the most senior official to be killed since the Taliban seized power in 2021. Privately, most of Haqqani’s supporters accused his rivals in the Taliban of ordering his assassination.
Khalil Haqqani was a member of the Haqqani Network, one of the most powerful factions within the Taliban structure, with deep roots in eastern Afghanistan and longstanding relationships with both Pakistan and Gulf donors. His death was officially attributed to ISIS-Khorasan. The private accusations within the movement itself pointed elsewhere.
His nephew, Sirajuddin Haqqani, had been vocal in opposing Akhundzada’s policies before the event. After his uncle’s killing, that vocal opposition went quiet. Haqqani, who heads a powerful network of his own, cannot start a fight with the Kandahar faction and win.
The Haqqani Network, once arguably the most powerful armed faction within the Taliban’s umbrella, has been functionally contained. Its political voice has been silenced by a combination of institutional sidelining and a death that raised questions no one inside the regime is permitted to ask aloud.
Sirajuddin Haqqani: Neutralised Without Removal
Sirajuddin Haqqani’s trajectory is perhaps the most instructive example of how Akhundzada manages dissent within the senior leadership, not by elimination but by neutralisation.
As Interior Minister, Haqqani had been the most prominent voice for a more pragmatic Taliban, one that could engage internationally, manage the economy, and maintain the kind of institutional coherence that governance requires. Officials, including Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani and Defence Minister Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid, seemed to favour more pragmatic engagement with the world, economic growth and limited reforms.
Akhundzada has had direct control over Afghanistan’s weapons and military equipment since November 2025, sidelining the Interior Ministry. Haqqani retains his title. He has lost his leverage. The ministry he heads has been stripped of the institutional resources that gave it independent weight. He is present in the structure but absent from the decisions.
This is Akhundzada’s preferred method for managing figures too powerful to remove directly: keep them in position, remove their power, and wait for their silence to become permanent.
Juma Khan Fateh: The Commander Who Said No
The most recent and most kinetically significant case of dissent is Juma Khan Fateh, the Tajik Taliban commander known as the “Conqueror of Darwaz,” whose dispute with Kandahari leadership has escalated from administrative friction to the edge of armed confrontation.
Fateh was removed from his post as deputy governor of Zabul amid an escalating dispute over influence and control of mineral-rich areas in Badakhshan province, formally replaced by decree of the supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada. A key factor in the contention is competition for control over economic assets, especially the gold mines in Badakhshan, one of Afghanistan’s wealthiest mining regions, whose control yields considerable economic returns while simultaneously bolstering the political and security power of local commanders.
Observers believe his dismissal without being assigned another position is part of a broader effort to sideline non-Pashtun commanders within the Taliban’s power structure. Fateh’s ethnicity, Tajik, is not incidental to this reading. The consolidation of power under Akhundzada has proceeded alongside the progressive marginalisation of non-Pashtun figures within Taliban governance.
Fateh has not accepted the removal quietly. Despite offers from the Taliban regime for negotiations and a new official position, Juma Khan has rejected returning to the government’s ranks, placed his forces on high alert, and ensured they are fully prepared both militarily and logistically. He has stated, simply: “I am in my own home.”
Fateh has also positioned himself explicitly on the counterterrorism question that the Taliban leadership has systematically avoided. He publicly stated his long-standing opposition to the presence of foreign armed groups in Afghanistan, explicitly naming TTP and the BLA, saying he has opposed these foreign entities from the very first day and expressed firm support for any actions aimed at suppressing and eliminating these groups.
A dissident Taliban commander taking a more responsible position on cross-border terrorism than the regime he is dissenting from is a detail that deserves international attention.
The Pattern Behind the Cases
The figures examined here, Stanikzai, Khalil Haqqani, Sirajuddin Haqqani, and Juma Khan Fateh, are not a random sample of Taliban personalities. They represent a specific type: the pragmatist, the networked power broker, the non-Pashtun regional commander, the internationally engaged diplomat. The figures who have been sidelined, silenced, exiled, or killed are precisely those whose continued presence and influence would have constrained Akhundzada’s consolidation of personal and ideological authority.
Tensions exploded in late 2025 when Akhundzada ordered a nationwide internet shutdown, viewing online content as un-Islamic. Kabul ministers, seeing the move as disastrous for governance and the economy, reversed the order within days, a rare open rebellion against the supreme leader’s direct command. That episode illustrated both the depth of internal dissent and its limits: ministers can reverse a decree, but they cannot challenge the system that produces such decrees without facing the consequences Stanikzai faced.
The regime has shown no commitment to democratic institutions and has allowed no political activity unaligned with the Taliban. No political parties or civil society organisations were permitted to function in 2023 and 2024. Dissent within the movement is managed through exile and neutralisation. Dissent outside the movement is managed through imprisonment, violence, and fear.
Closing Observation
The political history of Taliban Afghanistan since 2021 is, in significant part, the history of competent and pragmatic figures being removed from positions of influence by a supreme leader whose governing philosophy brooks no qualification, tolerates no disagreement, and recognises no authority above his own.
Abbas Stanikzai negotiated the deal that brought the Taliban back to power. He is in the UAE. Khalil Haqqani ran the ministry for refugees. He is dead. Sirajuddin Haqqani heads the Interior Ministry. He has been stripped of the tools that made that position meaningful. Juma Khan Fateh commanded thousands of fighters in Afghanistan’s northeast. He has been dismissed, rejected the regime’s offers, and is now mobilising in Badakhshan.
Each of these trajectories tells the same story: that the Taliban’s governing model has no mechanism for incorporating dissent, no framework for managing internal difference, and no tolerance for the kind of pluralism, even within its own ranks, that durable governance requires.
A movement that eliminates its pragmatists, sidelines its diplomats, kills its power brokers, and dismisses its regional commanders is not building a state. It is building a one-man system whose stability depends entirely on the continued authority of one man, and whose fractures deepen with every figure it pushes out.
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