Five years on, the Taliban’s grip on Afghanistan looks less like governance and more like control by punishment.
Reports indicate former police officers, men who simply served under the previous government, have had their electricity cut for half a decade. No heat, no way to cook, collective punishment for a job that no longer exists. That’s not security policy. That’s retribution dressed up as rule.
Strip away the rhetoric of stability the Taliban likes to project abroad, and what’s left is a government that treats ordinary survival as a privilege to be revoked. Cutting power to a household isn’t a counterterrorism measure. It’s a message sent to every family that once had a connection, however distant, to the old order: you will pay for that connection indefinitely. There’s no due process in it, no appeal, no end date. Just punishment that outlasts the reason for it.
The fear runs both ways. Former President Hamid Karzai, one of the few figures with the national stature to unite Afghanistan’s fractured ethnic and political landscape, is reportedly confined to Kabul, barred even from visiting his home province, cut off from diplomats, former leaders, and his own staff.
Think about what that actually means. Karzai is not a warlord. He is not commanding fighters in the mountains. He is a 68 year old elder statesman whose main asset is legitimacy, the kind that comes from having led the country once and still being able to talk to nearly every faction in it. That’s precisely what makes him dangerous to a government that survives on the absence of alternatives. A regime that has to silence a figure like that isn’t projecting strength. It’s confirming how fragile its hold actually is.
And on the ground, that fragility is showing. Armed resistance is active in the north, Taliban positions have been overrun in Badakhshan, and now even political containment is the order of the day in Kabul. These are not isolated data points. They form a pattern of a government fighting on two fronts at once, one with rifles and one with house arrest, because it cannot afford to lose control of either.
That’s the real story here, and it’s one that gets lost when outside observers measure Taliban rule only by whether the roads are patrolled or the checkpoints are staffed. Order imposed through fear is not the same thing as a functioning state. A functioning state doesn’t need to starve its own former civil servants of electricity to keep them compliant. It doesn’t need to quarantine a former head of state in his own capital. Those are the moves of a government that knows its authority is borrowed, not earned, and that the moment it loosens its grip, the fractures underneath will reassert themselves.
There’s also a longer term cost to this approach that the Taliban seems either unwilling or unable to reckon with. Every former official left without power, every elder statesman kept isolated, is one more person with every incentive to want the current arrangement gone. Punishment doesn’t produce loyalty. It produces patience, and grievance, and eventually opportunity. Badakhshan is a preview of what happens when that patience runs out in the provinces. Kabul’s growing paranoia around Karzai is a preview of what the leadership itself expects could happen at the center.
A government secure in its rule doesn’t need to do either of these things. It doesn’t need collective punishment to keep former civil servants in line, and it doesn’t need to isolate a popular elder statesman from his own staff. Those are defensive measures, not governance, and defensive measures are what regimes reach for when they suspect their support is thinner than it looks.
A government that fears its own former president as much as it fears the fighters in the mountains has already told you everything about how secure its rule really is.
Taliban’s Paranoia Exposes Its Own Weakness
Five years on, the Taliban’s grip on Afghanistan looks less like governance and more like control by punishment.
Reports indicate former police officers, men who simply served under the previous government, have had their electricity cut for half a decade. No heat, no way to cook, collective punishment for a job that no longer exists. That’s not security policy. That’s retribution dressed up as rule.
Strip away the rhetoric of stability the Taliban likes to project abroad, and what’s left is a government that treats ordinary survival as a privilege to be revoked. Cutting power to a household isn’t a counterterrorism measure. It’s a message sent to every family that once had a connection, however distant, to the old order: you will pay for that connection indefinitely. There’s no due process in it, no appeal, no end date. Just punishment that outlasts the reason for it.
The fear runs both ways. Former President Hamid Karzai, one of the few figures with the national stature to unite Afghanistan’s fractured ethnic and political landscape, is reportedly confined to Kabul, barred even from visiting his home province, cut off from diplomats, former leaders, and his own staff.
Think about what that actually means. Karzai is not a warlord. He is not commanding fighters in the mountains. He is a 68 year old elder statesman whose main asset is legitimacy, the kind that comes from having led the country once and still being able to talk to nearly every faction in it. That’s precisely what makes him dangerous to a government that survives on the absence of alternatives. A regime that has to silence a figure like that isn’t projecting strength. It’s confirming how fragile its hold actually is.
And on the ground, that fragility is showing. Armed resistance is active in the north, Taliban positions have been overrun in Badakhshan, and now even political containment is the order of the day in Kabul. These are not isolated data points. They form a pattern of a government fighting on two fronts at once, one with rifles and one with house arrest, because it cannot afford to lose control of either.
That’s the real story here, and it’s one that gets lost when outside observers measure Taliban rule only by whether the roads are patrolled or the checkpoints are staffed. Order imposed through fear is not the same thing as a functioning state. A functioning state doesn’t need to starve its own former civil servants of electricity to keep them compliant. It doesn’t need to quarantine a former head of state in his own capital. Those are the moves of a government that knows its authority is borrowed, not earned, and that the moment it loosens its grip, the fractures underneath will reassert themselves.
There’s also a longer term cost to this approach that the Taliban seems either unwilling or unable to reckon with. Every former official left without power, every elder statesman kept isolated, is one more person with every incentive to want the current arrangement gone. Punishment doesn’t produce loyalty. It produces patience, and grievance, and eventually opportunity. Badakhshan is a preview of what happens when that patience runs out in the provinces. Kabul’s growing paranoia around Karzai is a preview of what the leadership itself expects could happen at the center.
A government secure in its rule doesn’t need to do either of these things. It doesn’t need collective punishment to keep former civil servants in line, and it doesn’t need to isolate a popular elder statesman from his own staff. Those are defensive measures, not governance, and defensive measures are what regimes reach for when they suspect their support is thinner than it looks.
A government that fears its own former president as much as it fears the fighters in the mountains has already told you everything about how secure its rule really is.
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