ISPI (Italian Institute for International Political Studies) 12 Aug 2026 Five Years of Taliban Rule: Five Major Trends

 ISPI (Italian Institute for International Political Studies) 

12 Aug 2026

Five Years of Taliban Rule: Five Major Trends

Five years after the Taliban’s return to power and the restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, five major trends can be identified.

Commentary Asia · Middle East and North Africa

Five years after the Taliban’s return to power and the restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, five major trends can be identified.

The first is the stability of the Emirate’s government and institutions. The Taliban have so far managed the complicated transition from a jihadist guerrilla movement to a regime exercising a monopoly over state power, while containing internal centrifugal forces and maintaining a diplomatic balance in a regional context undergoing rapid geopolitical change.

As Antonio Giustozzi explains in his article, they have emerged virtually unscathed from the war waged by Israel and the United States against Iran – a country with which Afghanistan shares a long and porous border – which subsequently spread across the region. However, that conflict has complicated the process of formal recognition of the Emirate by certain regional actors that might have otherwise been willing to do so. The intermittent but highly serious conflict with Pakistan complicates matters even further and “represents not only the most glaring failure of Taliban foreign policy, but is also having a significant impact on the Emirate’s broader diplomatic prospects.”

The second major trend is the increasing control exerted by the Taliban over the population through two principal instruments: a monopoly over the use of force – which is not seriously challenged by any military group within the country, despite some recent small-scale successes in Badakhshan – and a monopoly over education. The ideological reshaping of educational institutions, a hallmark of every new regime, is particularly emphasised in the two articles addressing the human rights situation in Afghanistan.

The first, by Shaharzad Akbar, depicts what is described as “the worst women’s rights crisis in the world,” explaining how, since 2021, the de facto authorities have progressively expanded legal and administrative restrictions affecting nearly every aspect of women’s lives. These restrictions are implemented through the activities of two main branches of the Islamic Emirate: the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Amr bil-Maruf) and the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI).

According to the International Criminal Court and the experts writing here, this systematic, intentional discrimination amounts to the crime against humanity of gender persecution. It also carries profound economic and social consequences, reducing labour-force participation, limiting household incomes, weakening educational attainment and constraining Afghanistan’s long-term development prospects by tearing at the same fabric of the society.

The second contribution on this issue – an interview with Richard Bennett, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan – places the human rights situation within a broader trajectory that coincides withthe third major trend evident today:the gradual normalisation of the regime despite its record of human rights abuses. This process now also involves non-regional actors that have increasingly grown accustomed to what they pragmatically, or cynically, regard as the status quo.

A paradigmatic example is the June meeting in Brussels between a delegation from the Islamic Emirate and representatives of the European Commission and 15 EU member states to discuss deportations. According to Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett, the meeting reveals a “paradox or double standards: on one hand, countries who say they support human rights, who throw up their hands and make very strong statements in the Human Rights Council and the Security Council and the General Assembly about the appalling treatment of women, which is totally unacceptable. And on the other hand, they are starting to normalise the Taliban.”

The significance of this meeting goes beyond the usual mismatch between normative commitments and foreign policies inspired by realpolitik. It points to a politically consequential trade-off that is examined by Thomas Ruttig: the prioritisation of deportations over human rights. In his view, the “EU neglecting of human rights principles, such as non-refoulement, contributes to legitimising the Taleban regime and encourages it to raise demands toward them.”

Although it is set to grow, the number of Afghan migrants repatriated from European countries remains relatively small. The situation is markedly different for those returning from Iran and Pakistan. “Over the past five years,” writes Jelena Bjelica in her contribution, “Afghanistan has shifted from being primarily a country of outward migration to one experiencing one of the world’s largest episodes of forced return. Despite remaining unable to absorb large numbers of returnees, the country has received some 6.3 million people who had been pressured to leave neighbouring Pakistan and Iran.” Many returnees arrive with few possessions and limited financial resources in a country already facing overlapping humanitarian, economic and governance crises, characterised by “economic collapse, dependence on humanitarian assistance and severe restrictions on women’s participation in public life.”

This brings us to the fourth long-term trend. Rather than constituting a temporary humanitarian emergency, Afghanistan increasingly exhibits the characteristics of a self-reinforcing cycle of crisis that is becoming progressively more difficult to reverse. With regard to forced returns from Iran and Pakistan, as Jelena Bjelica notes, the phenomenon “should be understood not merely as a migration issue, but as a multidimensional development and humanitarian challenge.” Without sustained investment in livelihoods, housing, education and social services, “the country risks entering a cycle in which forced returns generate chronic poverty, deepen pressures on host communities and ultimately encourage further irregular migration.”

The fifth major trend is politically sensitive: Afghanistan’s multidimensional crisis cannot be attributed solely to the current regime, but also reflects Euro-Atlantic policies that have further marginalised impoverished and vulnerable Afghans. The Taliban’s restrictive policies on civil liberties, education, employment and political participation have significantly undermined economic activity, including by discouraging international investment. However, ordinary Afghans also bear the cost of what Antonio Donini and Norah Niland call a punitive post-occupation policy.

The Taliban’s return to Kabul in August 2021 opened a new economic chapter for Afghanistan, a country that, after two decades of foreign presence, has become more deeply and structurally dependent on the outside world: “international development aid to Afghanistan mostly disappeared. […] Washington also abruptly ended its economic support to Kabul that had covered some 75% of government expenditure. In addition, Washington, in collaboration with some European allies, seized some US$9.1 billion of Afghanistan’s sovereign external reserves, thereby significantly disabling the country’s central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB).”

This dynamic is a form of “double jeopardy,” whereby civilians become trapped between authoritarian governance and external political strategies that often fail to adequately distinguish between the regime and the wider population. Without addressing this underlying structural constraint, Donini and Niland suggest, humanitarian assistance risks becoming a permanent substitute for development or a “window-dressing for Europe’s new deportation priority” (qui andrebbe linkato pezzo di Ruttig), rather than serving as a bridge towards recovery.

Five years after the Taliban’s return to power, it is clear that they have successfully capitalised on the absence of a consistent policy on the part of the international community. It is time to place the needs and rights of ordinary Afghans at the centre of international decision-making, and to adopt a new, consistent, comprehensive and principled approach aimed at promoting both humanitarian protection and long-term stability, while holding both the de facto authorities accountable for human rights violations in the country and external actors accountable for the harmful consequences of political reprisals.