Afghanistan Three Years after the Taliban Takeover

A Taliban fighter walks next to women waiting in line during a World Food Program food distribution on the outskirts of Kabul on November 6, 2021. Hector RETAMAL / AFP

Afghanistan Three Years after the Taliban Takeover

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What has happened since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan?

The Taliban came back to power in Kabul as the previous Afghan government collapsed amid the U.S. and NATO withdrawal from the country in August 2021. The insurgents had been fighting the foreign troops for most of twenty years. Their victory put a stop to peace talks between their leadership and other Afghan factions. The Taliban soon declared a new government, which remains unrecognised to this day by any foreign state or international institution. Western donors immediately cut off the development aid that had covered 75 per cent of the previous government's expenditures. Along with the abrupt end of the war economy and other factors, the cutoff plunged Afghanistan into an economic and humanitarian crisis. Millions of Afghans struggled to survive that first winter under Taliban rule, with the state teetering on the brink of failure, civil servants going without salaries and the national currency plummeting in value.

Since then, the world has pursued a mix of isolation and selective engagement with the new regime. Western countries, frustrated especially at the Taliban regime's restrictions on the rights of girls and women, have enforced a raft of sanctions, asset freezes and banking restrictions. At the same time, they have devoted billions of dollars to mitigating poverty and preventing famine, while some have kept in discreet contact with the Taliban about security issues. Countries nearer to Afghanistan have gone further in dealing with the new regime in Kabul, striking trade agreements and accrediting Taliban ambassadors. They view concerns like security and water sharing as pressing and, in some cases, they are readier to overlook the Taliban's treatment of girls and women - or at least to believe that outside pressure is unlikely to force a change in tack.

Three years into the renewal of Taliban rule, some aspects of Afghans' lives have deteriorated and others have improved, though the institutionalised exclusion of women and girls from many aspects of public life curbs the benefits that half the population derives from the positive changes. None of the worsening trends are likely to bring about the regime's downfall, at least not anytime soon, while at the same time nothing that the Taliban accomplish - short of a radical reversal of their position on women's and girls' rights, which seems highly improbable - will matter sufficiently to Western powers to make them consider lifting the regime's pariah status.

What has got worse?

The most glaring deterioration is in the rights of women and girls. In this domain, the Taliban regime is the most discriminatory in the world.

The most glaring deterioration is in the rights of women and girls. In this domain, the Taliban regime is the most discriminatory in the world. Its draconian restrictions on women's and girls' rights permeate all other aspects of its record over the last three years. It has limited access for half the population to many essential services and public spaces. It has also curtailed women's autonomy and opportunities for self-development and expression. Among the dozens of gender-based decrees imposed by the Taliban emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, some of the most damaging have been edicts banning women and girls from attending public secondary schools and universities. Women have also been impeded from working for the UN and NGOs, while other rulings have blocked them from going to parks, public baths, gyms and beauty salons. In practice, compromises in parts of the country have softened the blow of some of these edicts - for example, replacing secondary schooling with "training courses" and "religious instruction" that use similar curricula for some high-school age girls. It is also true that in some rural areas the Taliban's education policy reflects what was already common practice. Still, the overall impact of Taliban rule has been a drastic rollback of freedoms that Afghan women, especially those who live in cities and towns, enjoyed under the previous, U.S.-backed government. The entrenched discrimination and inequality overshadow other developments over the last three years.

Political and media freedoms have also declined markedly. A bare-knuckles party system thrived in Kabul after foreign troops helped depose the first Taliban regime in 2001, with Afghan factions jostling for power in corrupt elections and occasional firefights between rivals. Local media flourished in the same pugnacious spirit. The Taliban's 2021 sweep into the capital brought an unnerving quiet to the political scene, as the new regime has little tolerance for any form of dissent. By outlawing political parties, the Taliban have in effect created a one-party state, discouraging most of the former politicians who remain in the country from dabbling in their old profession. Afghans who disagree with the new Islamist leaders have mostly fled, kept quiet or decided to side with the Taliban despite their qualms. Journalists, academics and analysts are choosing their words carefully in public venues. Dissidents and reporters who fail to obey the rules have been arrested and sometimes tortured. Women journalists face additional challenges, barred from studying journalism, showing their faces on air, attending press conferences without a chaperone or interviewing officials.

Thirdly, poverty and unemployment have worsened greatly. The Taliban takeover prompted foreign governments to stop all development assistance overnight. Donors halted numerous projects - including energy, transport and irrigation works worth more than $2.8 billion - and few have resumed. The World Bank estimated that the country lost about 26 per cent of its real gross domestic product in 2021 and 2022. Millions of people slipped into poverty in the first months after the Taliban's return, and many of them were inching toward starvation, with 55 per cent of the population suffering acute levels of hunger. The share of Afghans in the worst categories of food insecurity declined to 28 per cent by 2024, but the emergency still ranks among the worst humanitarian crises in the world. The burdens of malnutrition fall most heavily on girls in poor families, with doctors at therapeutic feeding centres reporting that mortality rates among girls are 90 per cent higher than among boys.

Economic stagnation is especially painful for Afghanistan because hundreds of thousands of young men and women enter the labour market every year.

Economic stagnation is especially painful for Afghanistan because hundreds of thousands of young men and women enter the labour market every year. Employment pressures are worsened by the vast numbers of Afghan migrants who have been forced back into the country, including more than 600,000 from Pakistan since September 2023 and similar numbers from Iran. A further half-million labourers who used to toil in the opium poppy fields became unemployed after the Taliban banned narcotics in 2022 (see below). Women's employment has been hit harder, going down by 25 per cent since the Taliban takeover, compared to a 7 per cent drop for men. Women are no longer allowed to do many government jobs. Rules on dress, gender-segregated facilities and mandatory chaperones complicate their work in the sectors still open to them.

The Taliban have brought a degree of stability to the economy, despite the hardships poor Afghans face. Key indicators have turned around, with improvements in export volumes, government revenues and the strength of the national currency, the afghani. The afghani collapsed against the dollar right after the Taliban seized power but the new authorities propped it up by banning transactions in foreign banknotes, among other measures.

Still, serious problems remain. Deflation comes with concerns about dampening economic activity. The central bank's assets remain frozen overseas, constraining monetary policy and placing obstacles in the way of economic recovery. Under those conditions, the World Bank's baseline scenario is zero growth over the next three years. Deepening cuts to foreign aid may even result in another spate of economic contraction.

Fourthly, Afghans have less access to several government services, partly because the state is short on funds now that donors are no longer paying the bills. Health, water and sanitation services have been worst affected. Hundreds of health facilities have closed since 2021, and those that continue operating lack medicine, equipment and trained staff. Part of the problem stems from the regime's restrictions on women, impeding the capacity of female personnel to work and provide services to other women, even if the Taliban have made exceptions for women health workers. Sanctions and banking issues also make it harder to import supplies: ordering, paying for and receiving basic items has grown burdensome. The result has been an increase in preventable illness, especially among children. A lack of supplies and maintenance has also degraded water systems, especially in urban areas, driving up the share of households without proper access to water from 48 per cent in 2021 to 67 per cent in 2023. Documents needed for travel, including birth and marriage certificates, and especially passports, have been mired in bureaucratic delays.

The last major deterioration is in relations with neighbouring Pakistan. Islamabad backed the Taliban during their rise to power in the mid-1990s and supported the Taliban insurgency, for instance sheltering its leaders, after 2001. But the relationship was always uneasy, with Pakistan also killing and torturing some Taliban members. Crucially, today, the Taliban are unwilling to crack down on the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), better known as the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group that, according to UN reports, at least partly operates from Afghan soil and swears allegiance to the main Taliban organisation. As a result, relations between Afghanistan's new rulers and their ex-patrons have soured. Pakistan blames the TTP for a rising number of attacks on its territory and accuses the Afghan Taliban of giving the group safe haven. In 2021 and 2022, the Taliban attempted to mediate in peace talks between Islamabad and the TTP, but the negotiations fell apart and, overall, such diplomacy has not worked. Islamabad has sought to press the Taliban to take action against the TTP, by means of occasional cross-border raids of its own and mass deportations of Afghans, but these tactics have failed to shift the Taliban's positions, while causing significant harm to civilians. Violence in the borderlands seems poised to get worse.

What has got better?

As the U.S. and NATO withdrawal ended twenty years of war, the main improvement since the Taliban took over is in peace and security. In the war's final stages, tens of thousands of Afghans lost their lives every year, making it for some years the world's deadliest conflict. Millions of people fled their homes. The chaos subsided with the Taliban victory, as the former insurgents gained control of more of the country's territory than any government had enjoyed in decades. Anti-Taliban resistance, notably from the South Asian branch of Islamic State and remnants of the former security forces, simmers in remote areas, but the number of clashes has steadily declined. Transnational jihadist threats emanating from Afghanistan are harder to gauge, because the level of risk posed by Islamic State, al-Qaeda and other groups lurking in the country is difficult to quantify. Taliban intelligence is clearly monitoring such groups, however, and the regime's crackdowns on Islamic State have been brutal. Taliban methods of handling other jihadists have been more nuanced, focusing on relocating militants away from sensitive borders. The Taliban have channels open with Western counterparts; U.S. and European security officials consider Islamic State the main source of danger, and many of them see the Taliban as a bulwark against it. Regional governments, many of which - including China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as Pakistan - are fighting militants who shelter in Afghanistan, have also engaged with the Taliban to address their security concerns, albeit with limited results.

While the previous government tended to neglect those living in remote places, the Taliban treat rural Afghans as a key part of their support base and encourage foreign aid for these neglected communities.

Humanitarian and other access to rural areas has also got better. The war had the effect of dividing the country into zones controlled by pro- and anti-government forces, with millions of people in the latter often beyond the reach of aid organisations. While the previous government tended to neglect those living in remote places, the Taliban treat rural Afghans as a key part of their support base and encourage foreign aid for these neglected communities. Access challenges remain, and Afghanistan's terrain is at times hard to traverse, but veteran aid workers say their reach into the far corners of the country is greater than during any period in recent decades. Despite the Taliban's ban on women staff at NGO offices, exceptions for field workers and other categories of humanitarians are allowing aid to get to women. The Taliban have also dismantled hundreds of roadblocks and invested in repairs to highways and tunnels. They have even encouraged foreign tourism, although the nascent industry took a hit when Islamic State gunmen killed three Spanish sightseers in May. Overall, travel is much safer: many Afghans are rediscovering their own country, reuniting with relatives in places too dangerous to visit during the war. Again, however, gender matters: rules officially forbidding women from journeying long distances without a male chaperone and from travelling after dark hamper half the population in taking advantage of these changes.

Relative security has helped the new authorities repair some of the country's decaying infrastructure, particularly transport and waterworks. Though they face serious budgetary constraints, they have also restarted projects, including some that were under way before being halted when donors cut off funds. Authorities completed several dams and pushed ahead with the construction of the Qush Tepa canal on the northern border, which is designed to irrigate 550,000 hectares of farmland. The Taliban are also building or fixing up transport routes like the Salang tunnel linking Kabul with the north of the country and a road that will connect Afghanistan with China.

Meanwhile, the Taliban have cleaned up much of the corruption for which the former U.S.-backed government was notorious. From 2001 to 2021, crooked officials siphoned off billions of dollars of foreign assistance. The Taliban retained much of the previous bureaucracy but took strict anti-graft measures. Due partly to reduced corruption and partly to the centralisation of the state apparatus, some state functions, such as tax collection, have become more streamlined. By one estimate, moreover, the regime's housecleaning at customs and checkpoints eliminated about $1.4 billion in bribes. Business owners have begun to complain that corrupt practices are reappearing, but nothing on the scale of what occurred in previous years.

A related change is the dramatic drop in narcotics production. Afghanistan ranked as the world's largest producer of opium when the Taliban took over, and the new authorities took over a state apparatus staffed by many officials who took payoffs from drug traffickers. Soon after coming to power, the new regime launched a campaign against narcotics of all kinds, rounding up drug addicts, destroying opium and cannabis fields, and arresting traders. The UN estimates that drug production has fallen by 95 per cent - by hectarage of deterred cultivation, the most successful anti-drug effort anywhere in the world in recent decades. The campaign, however, has badly hurt the livelihoods of approximately 7.5 million farmers and farm labourers, including many women who depend on agriculture to make a living, without providing a viable alternative. Some analysts predict that this economic impact will make the ban hard to sustain, but for now the Taliban seem intent on enforcing it and redirecting the economy toward licit activities.

Few outsiders have taken note of a surprising last positive indicator: the surge of primary school attendance for both girls and boys. The world has rightly protested the Taliban's ban on girls in public secondary schools and universities. But the numbers show primary school is a different story, for girls especially. According to a World Bank survey, 60 per cent of girls aged seven to twelve were enrolled in primary schools in 2023, up from 36 per cent before the Taliban takeover. The rise appears to be a by-product of the war's end, as well as the fact that some families view Taliban-run schools as more religiously or culturally acceptable than those of the previous system. More boys have also gained access to schooling, and the gender gap is narrowing. The biggest factor limiting further improvement at the primary level is a dearth of schools, especially in rural areas.

How do Afghans perceive Taliban governance?

Given the Taliban's intolerance for dissent of any kind, determining the regime's level of public support is difficult.

Many Afghans undoubtedly chafe under the Taliban's rule. Broadly speaking, their opponents include many people from ethnic groups other than the Pashtun, the predominant ethnicity among the Taliban; men and women who are against the Taliban's restrictions on women and girls; and people who prefer a constitutional order and freedoms they previously enjoyed to the opaque theocracy the new regime has imposed. Even some Taliban seem irked by the emir's decisions, especially younger officials who worry that their government has failed to keep pace with a modernising society. Protests by opium farmers suggest that the Taliban's crackdown on narcotics also cost them popularity in some provinces.

On the other hand, part of the population supports the Taliban. Again, it is hard to assess the extent of this sentiment, but particularly in the rural south and east, many Afghans portray the change of regime as a triumph for self-determination: their side won the war, and their political views now have greater sway in the capital. Concentrated among Pashtuns, this constituency includes women who are either pro-Taliban or against the violence perpetrated for years in large parts of the country by the former government's security forces and its foreign backers. Some Afghan women even participated in the insurgency - as spies, smugglers, couriers, medics and recruiters - and their political agency in fighting foreign troops should not be discounted.

A third category of Afghans neither supports nor opposes the regime - or considers it a mixed bag, particularly when compared with the governing systems that preceded it. Some, for example, might appreciate the newfound security after decades of war but wish that girls and women faced fewer barriers. Many Afghans who dislike the Taliban's rule were also angered by the corruption and predation of previous governments. The size of these constituencies is especially hard to measure, as Afghan polls have been badly flawed.

How should foreign capitals respond to prolonged Taliban rule?

During the two decades of U.S.-NATO intervention in Afghanistan, key decisions about the country's future rested in the hands of foreign officials. The Taliban takeover has drastically reduced the degree of outside leverage. That said, donors still have important choices ahead of them, as they respond to UN appeals for billions of dollars to provide Afghans with humanitarian assistance; in addition, as it is increasingly clear that the Taliban regime is here to stay, Western and regional capitals face tough decisions regarding potential normalisation of the regime.

The little influence remaining to foreigners who work on Afghanistan should be used judiciously.

The little influence remaining to foreigners who work on Afghanistan should be used judiciously. Outsiders should keep speaking up about deeply exclusionary practices, such as the barring of millions of girls and women from schools and universities. That said, nothing thus far suggests that the Taliban will soften their hardline stances on gender and other issues anytime soon. Their intransigence will keep the regime mostly sidelined on the world stage, even if some regional actors tiptoe toward a form of recognition. Rather than seeking sweeping political change from an ideologically driven regime, backed by a rank and file who want to see their leaders stand up to what they perceive as Western interference, foreign powers should pursue a principled, case-by-case approach of engagement with the Taliban that focuses on achievable goals. The driving principles of such engagement should revolve around addressing the needs of Afghan citizens, ensuring regional stability and preserving international security - all of which require working with the Taliban to achieve sustainable results at national scale.

While continuing to advocate for women's rights and accountable governance, donors should slow down the aid cuts that have left the humanitarian response only 20 per cent funded in mid-2024. Donors should further shift from short-term humanitarian assistance to long-term development aid that can help Afghanistan become more self-sufficient. In concrete terms, they should support more projects such as the CASA-1000 electricity corridor, which will light millions of homes but requires working with the Taliban-controlled utility. Regional and international states should heed the call from 2023 UN review calling for greater cooperation with the Taliban on issues like economic stability, climate adaptation and counter-terrorism, even while, as Crisis Group has previously laid out in detail, maintaining a separate track of talks on eventual normalisation of relations with the outcast regime. Practical steps that do not imply recognition, such as providing technical assistance for water management or rehabilitating the central bank, can improve Afghans' lives despite the regime's pariah status. Such an approach focused on tangible progress will be more effective than trying to compel wholesale changes in the Taliban's governance through isolation and pressure. It is also the best way to support Afghan men and women under a regime that shows no sign of collapsing in the near future.

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