Why the Taliban victory did not end Afghanistan’s political problem — it merely inverted it.
A personal preface
Recently, I received New Year’s wishes from an Afghan colleague I had worked with many years ago, back when Afghanistan was still the object of large-scale international programmes, donor coordination meetings, and endless PowerPoint decks about “capacity building.” He now lives in the UK. The message was warm, ordinary — and quietly disarming.
It reminded me how long it has been since I last tried to understand what is actually going on in Afghanistan today. Like many others who have served there for a long time in one role or another, I instinctively stopped following the country after the collapse of the internationally supported government in 2021. Not out of indifference, but because it was painful to watch so much money, effort, and human energy apparently evaporate.
This post is an attempt to look again — calmly, structurally, and without nostalgia.
The Taliban were never a monolith
The media still speak of “the Taliban” as if it were a single, unified actor. It never was.
Historically, the Taliban functioned as a loose coalition of regional, tribal, clerical, and militant networks. What bound these networks together was not a shared blueprint for governance, but a narrower set of common denominators:
- a fundamentalist religious worldview,
- rejection of foreign domination and foreign ideas,
- reliance on local legitimacy rather than abstract institutions,
- and, ultimately, victory.
That victory in 2021 did not resolve internal differences. It simply suspended them.
Insurgent movements tend to fracture after they win, not while they fight. Afghanistan is no exception.
Three fault lines inside Taliban rule
1. Clerical absolutism vs. operational realism
At the core of today’s Emirate lies a clerical leadership that sees the Taliban’s success as a divine mandate. For this group, governance is primarily a moral and religious project. Compromise, pragmatism, or external conditionality are viewed not as tools, but as corruption.
Opposing this outlook — quietly, often indirectly — are Taliban figures responsible for security, administration, borders, and economic survival. They face the everyday reality that a country cannot function on ideology alone. Their concern is not liberal reform, but basic governability.
This tension explains much of the regime’s paralysis: cohesion is prioritized over competence.
2. Security networks vs. traditional authority
A second fault line runs between the old clerical core and powerful security-oriented networks that control intelligence, policing, and internal coercion. These actors are more accustomed to regional bargaining, informal diplomacy, and transactional relationships.
Their influence is practical rather than theological. That makes them indispensable — and suspect.
3. Centre vs. periphery: the Afghan constant
Afghanistan has never functioned as a strongly centralized state in the modern sense. Authority has always been negotiated locally.
The internationally backed governments after 2001 tried to impose centralization: ministries, national systems, uniform laws, donor-driven coherence. With hindsight, the failure was predictable.
Ironically, the Taliban succeeded partly because they did not try to out-centralize the state. They tolerated local variation, informal authority, and pragmatic arrangements.
Now, as rulers, they face the same paradox as every Afghan government before them: governing requires central authority — but enforcing it risks fragmentation.
Women’s rights as a proxy battlefield
The harsh restrictions on women and girls are often described as simple ideology. Internally, they serve a second function: they are a mechanism of power.
By enforcing uncompromising social rules, the clerical core asserts dominance over pragmatists and technocrats. Opposition becomes heresy rather than policy disagreement.
The result is a state that signals purity at the cost of functionality — and deepens its own isolation.
The Najibullah comparison: useful, but limited
Some analysts compare today’s Taliban rule with the late Najibullah period of the 1980s: a regime surviving through local deals, external support, and careful balancing.
The comparison is instructive — but inverted.
Najibullah presided over a centralized state trying to buy local compliance. The Taliban preside over a decentralized movement trying to become a state.
The warning from history is not collapse, but dependency: Afghan regimes become fragile when they cannot arbitrate between local power centers or sustain the flows (financial, political, symbolic) that keep those centers aligned.
What slow fragmentation actually looks like
If fragmentation comes, it is unlikely to resemble a dramatic civil war — at least not initially.
More likely scenarios include:
- An Emirate on paper, provinces in practice: national decrees exist, but enforcement varies widely.
- Competing centres of gravity: clerical authority and security-administrative power drift apart without a formal split.
- Warlordisation under a single flag: local strongmen retain Taliban branding while operating autonomously.
This kind of fragmentation is quiet, deniable, and often stable — until it suddenly isn’t.
Why Afghanistan faded from Western attention
Afghanistan did not disappear because it became peaceful, nor because its problems were solved. It faded because it stopped fitting the Western geopolitical narrative.
For two decades, Afghanistan was framed as a test case: of liberal state‑building, of counter‑terrorism doctrine, of the belief that institutions, elections, and aid could rewire political legitimacy. Once that test was lost, attention moved on. There was no rival great power visibly “winning” Afghanistan in 2021 — no Cold War mirror image, no adversary to contain, no geopolitical drama that required sustained explanation.
Unlike Ukraine, the Middle East, or the US–China relationship, Afghanistan no longer offered a stage for strategic signalling. What remained was something Western politics is deeply uncomfortable with: a failure that could not be blamed on an external enemy.
In that sense, Afghanistan became politically inconvenient rather than strategically urgent.
State‑building as geopolitics — and its quiet collapse
The post‑2001 state‑building project in Afghanistan was never ideologically neutral. It was embedded in a broader geopolitical ambition: to demonstrate that Western‑backed governance could succeed where earlier imperial or Soviet efforts had failed.
There is a crucial and uncomfortable difference, however, between the Soviet experience and the later US‑led one.
The Soviet intervention unfolded within a clear geopolitical contest. The Afghan resistance was heavily funded, armed, and sustained through regional and international channels. The collapse of Soviet control can be read — at least in part — as the outcome of external opposition.
The Western project faced no comparable external spoiler.
There was no superpower arming a rival Afghan state, no sustained counter‑intervention designed to bleed NATO forces into withdrawal. What undermined the project was not foreign competition, but internal contradiction: the attempt to impose a centralized, technocratic state on a society whose political logic had never been centralized to begin with.
The Afghan Republic did not fall because it was outgunned by an external enemy. It collapsed because the institutions built in its name were not organically rooted in Afghan legitimacy structures. When external support was reduced, the system did not resist — it evaporated.
That makes the failure bleaker than earlier interventions. It failed under its own assumptions.
A closing thought
The Taliban understood Afghanistan’s political grammar better than their predecessors, which is why they prevailed militarily. But military victory does not resolve the deeper Afghan paradox: authority must be local to be legitimate, yet centralized enough to govern.
Every attempt to rule Afghanistan has eventually collided with that contradiction.
The Taliban have not escaped it. They have merely inherited it.
This post was generated by ChatGPT, based on me playing the devil’s advocate with it, verified news sources, and game‑theoretical analysis patterns. It was moderated and approved by a human editor (me) for clarity, neutrality, ethical framing, and attribution. Responsibility for the views expressed remains entirely my own.
Tags: #Afghanistan #Geopolitics #State-building #Governance #Institutional failure
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