Five years after conquering Afghanistan, the Taliban have squandered every opportunity to form a functional government—and unrest is beginning to mount.

The military takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, and the devastating images of desperate Afghans clinging to the fuselage of departing military planes at Kabul airport, captured in a single frame the desperation, fear, and abandonment that swept the country five years ago today. 

Those images were the epitaph of a fairly modern democratic state order, built over 20 years by a grand coalition of Afghanistan’s rival political factions and sustained by a vast commitment of international resources—and hundreds of thousands of lives from the Afghanistan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). The sacrifices they made could not save the Islamic Republic, which collapsed after the US-Taliban Doha deal, the ensuing release of Taliban prisoners, and the Taliban’s subsequent mass offensive coinciding with the US withdrawal. 

In June, writing in these pages on the renewal of UNAMA’s mandate, I argued that the anniversary would be the last realistic chance to convert stalemate into a political process before the country drifted into a more dangerous and less controllable phase. Two months on, that drift is underway—only faster, and more violently, than most Western capitals had priced in.  

The Taliban’s Post-2021 Rule Has Failed at Every Level  

Five years gives outside observers enough perspective to grade the Taliban’s rule, and the facts on the ground are damning at every level. Nationally, the Taliban have done none of what they promised the international community in 2021: they have not delivered unity, security, inclusivity, Islamic legitimacy, or even economic function. The World Bank reports that even as headline growth inched upward in 2025, GDP per capita fell by 5.6 percent, as refugee inflows from Pakistan and Iran outpaced the economy’s capacity to absorb them. The UN’s 2026 appeal estimated that 21.9 million people, nearly 45 percent of Afghanistan’s population, were in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Locally, Afghanistan’s myriad ethnic groups— Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and even non-Taliban Pashtuns—live under a brutal security apparatus that treats them as suspected traitors. 

Regionally, the “peace” that was promised by the Taliban’s return to power and the nominal end of the civil war has failed to materialize. After years of intimate ties between Pakistan and the Taliban, the group has turned against its benefactor, exporting the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) insurgency back across the long porous border and dragging the two countries into open conflict. Washington’s accounting found that terrorism-related attacks and casualties inside Pakistan rose more than 50 percent in 2023 alone, a trend that has continued in the years since. According to the Global Terrorism Index, Pakistan is the country most affected by terrorism in the world in 2026, driven mainly by its newfound animosity with the Taliban. 

Internationally, the Taliban have made Afghanistan a safe haven for an alphabet soup of international and regional terrorist groups and a byword for human rights atrocities of unprecedented scale. The situation for women and girls was described as “gender apartheid” in a 2023 finding by a UN special rapporteur; it has only worsened in the years since. 

In short, when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021, the prevailing assumption was that they would benefit from a “peace dividend” that would allow them to establish a workable order and win popular legitimacy and support. Five years in, the Taliban have completely run out of options on every front. This is precisely why 2026 looks different from 2022 or 2023; the grievances and exhaustion are no longer only social and economic, but are now visibly shifting into political—and increasingly military—resistance. 

Opposition to the Taliban Is Growing Across Afghanistan 

For four years, the conventional description of anti-Taliban resistance was that it existed but had not become a national movement. 2025 and 2026, which saw a dramatic upsurge in both militant activity and civil resistance, are bucking this trend. 

• The largest and best-organized groups—the National Resistance Front (NRF) and the Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF)—have each extended their reach, sustained cross-border and frontal attacks have hit Taliban positions along the frontier rather than confining themselves to the interior. 
• In the south—the Taliban’s historic home ground—General Sami Sadat’s Afghanistan United Front announced the opening of a new front of operations, claiming attacks in Badghis, Helmand, and Kandahar provinces. These claims might have been dismissed as bravado eighteen months ago; they are now being taken seriously by regional intelligence services. 
• The “Green Trend” under former vice president and intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh continues to provide both a military- and civic-facing political voice. 

Of course, these groups have been active on a small scale for years. What is genuinely new is the emergence of younger, more localized fronts led by former ANDSF officers who came of age during the post-2001 war rather than the turmoil of the 1980s and 1990s. 

• Sipayan-e-Mihan—the “Guardians of the Homeland”—briefly seized the district headquarters of Yaftal-e-Payeen in central Badakhshan in July, the first time in four years that any resistance formation had held a district center at all rather than simply raiding it. Still, rather than stand their ground, the rebels opted to fall back, and Taliban forces retook it within hours. 
• The Freedom and Justice Movement, active in several provinces and connected to former ANDSF officers, has been organizing in parallel. 

Neither group is yet a national force. Both matter precisely because they are not led by the same ANDSF commanders who led the Republic’s security sector to ruin, and because they represent a post-2021 generation choosing to fight rather than go into exile.  

Alongside the armed formations, civil resistance has re-emerged in places the Taliban had declared pacified: 

• Herat saw large protests in June after Taliban forces detained dozens of women for alleged dress-code violations. The Taliban met the protests with gunfire, killing at least two people. 
• Badakhshan has seen its own recurring unrest and arrests, from poppy-eradication and illegal mining clashes to the detention and violence against women rights advocates. This is the sector the Taliban most need to suppress and can least afford to. 

To be clear, none of this amounts to a force capable of overtaking a major urban center and holding it against a Taliban onslaught. But the trend line is pointing in the right direction; such broad offensives would have been unthinkable in 2023 or 2024. More importantly, the Taliban can no longer act as though no serious internal challenge exists to their rule. Neither can anyone advising Western or regional governments on Afghanistan policy. 

The United Nations’ own reporting bears this out. Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council that armed opposition groups claimed responsibility for 18 attacks across 10 provinces in Afghanistan between February and April 2026—16 of which UN monitors independently verified. The UN’s numbers suggest that overall security incidents in Afghanistan rose 57.7 percent year-on-year from 2025. Notably, this is a conservative floor, not a ceiling; it captures only what UN monitors could verify, not the fuller pattern of defections, local uprisings, and clashes now being reported. 

Separately, opposition figures have begun coordinating more visibly than at any point since 2021 under several platforms to align the various fronts’ political messaging even where their military commands remain distinct. Fragmentation has been the opposition’s historic weakness. It is being addressed, though more slowly than many would like.

All of the Taliban’s Neighbors Hate Them, Too 

Perhaps the most consequential change is the Taliban’s military posture since 2021 has not been in its military outlook, but its geopolitical relations. 

For three decades, the Taliban’s ultimate insurance policy was its ability to take sanctuary in Pakistan’s remote northwest, aided by a blind eye from Islamabad. That policy no longer applies. The TTP blowback against the Pakistani government has led to open warfare between Pakistan and the Taliban, and the recent outbreak of open fighting along the Durand Line border—which the UN Security Council’s own monitors have called ”the greatest short-term threat” to the Taliban’s stability—has made Pakistan a source of pressure rather than a guarantor. The Taliban’s soured relationship with Pakistan has major strategic implications; a negotiated settlement is no longer only in the interest only of the opposition, but in the Taliban’s interest too, whether or not its leadership in Kandahar is prepared to admit it. 

This is the opening that the current moment of rising insurgency creates, and it is also the opening that could be squandered. An emirate cornered militarily but offered no political off-ramp does not surrender; it digs in, or fragments violently along geographic, ideological, or ethnic lines. Afghanistan does not need the Taliban merely defeated and forced back into another decades-long insurgency. It needs the pressure and perhaps military defeat to be channeled into a political settlement and a stable transition of power, or the country will simply slide into chaos once again.  

Afghanistan Needs a New Political Program 

This is where the current moment is most dangerous, and where policymakers are most likely to get it wrong. The rising anti-Taliban resistance is necessary, but it is not sufficient on its own. Military pressure without a viable political program produces only anarchy—a lesson Afghanistan has learned all too painfully since 1979.  

Rosy projections of the Taliban’s fall from power in the imminent future are far too optimistic. Yet the signs are clear that the Taliban’s rule is faltering around the edges. To stabilize Afghanistan, the group is likely to resort to extreme violence, the only tool it knows how to use. This is a strategy that failed to work under the communist government of the 1980s or during the Mujahidin era; in both times, it bred short-term, localized stability and long-term resentment, weakening the central government’s position. It is unlikely to work for the Taliban today. Sooner or later, their government will either fall or be pushed into an unsustainable corner. What happens next is the only question that matters—and it is a political question, not a military one. 

Here there is real, if underreported, cause for guarded optimism. Afghanistan’s civil and democratic forces, both inside the country and in exile, have converged around at least three shared principles: inclusive governance that ends the monopoly of any single faction or ethnic network on the state; accountability and transitional justice that neither whitewashes the record of the past four decades nor becomes a platform for vengeance; and rights-based reintegration that puts women’s full legal and civic standing back at the center of the state rather than treating it as a negotiable concession. 

That convergence is deepening rather than fraying. I have heard directly from political and civil society figures inside the country—in Herat, in Badakhshan, in the Eastern provinces, and in Kabul itself—who are actively working to build a large and genuinely inclusive coalition, one they intend to bring openly into a political process that civil and democratic forces in exile have been contemplating for the past four years. 

That is the raw material of a settlement. It does not yet have a framework, a convener, or a guarantor, and this is where the international and regional response has fallen short.  

What Can the World Do to Support Afghanistan? 

Since the start of the year, a general consensus has emerged among the major civil and political forces about the priorities for an inclusive government. What is missing is an overarching framework that can turn that consensus into a negotiation rather than a wish list, and a champion willing to build it. For this to happen, three things need to follow.  

First, international and regional stakeholders need to move from statements to structure: a defined framework, not indefinite mandate renewals and ad hoc envoys. The pattern of the past three years—short UNAMA rollovers, competing regional contact groups, and no shared vision of the endgame—has produced paralysis. 

Second, that framework needs a champion. It does not need a body that treats the Taliban and Afghanistan’s civil and democratic forces as equivalent parties; it needs one state, or a small coalition of states, willing to offer genuine support to Afghanistan’s opposition, inside and outside the country, and to the broader coalition now taking shape. 

Third, and most delicate, regional diplomacy has to defuse the win-lose framing that currently paralyzes several of Afghanistan’s neighbors. Some regional states still believe that a weakened Taliban is a safer bet than an uncertain opposition coalition, or fear that the success of a resistance movement simply means the return of the US and Western influence or a prolonged internal war on their border rather than a peaceful resolution. Both fears are reasonable and both are addressable—but only through direct regional diplomacy that offers those states a stake in the outcome of a settlement. Absent that work, the danger is not that the Taliban government survives, but that its collapse produces exactly the fragmented, prolonged conflict that every regional capital has sought desperately to avoid. 

A Better Future Is Possible for Afghanistan 

Five years ago today, the collapse of the republican government looked to outside observers like the end of democracy in Afghanistan. The truth is that the underlying principles have not changed. Afghanistan deserves an inclusive, human rights-based and forward-looking future, and it will never receive these things under the present Taliban-dominated government. The people of Afghanistan themselves know this. The silence of 2021 to 2025 has given way to something louder and harder to ignore: increasing military attacks, cross-border operations, a younger generation of commanders and civil society activists willing to act rather than wait, and a political opposition converging on shared terms for the day after. 

None of this guarantees a good outcome. Afghanistan’s history offers too many examples of military opportunity squandered for want of political preparation. But the country’s civil and democratic forces are doing their part: building consensus, building coalitions, and preparing to be visible partners rather than exiled petitioners. The open question is whether the states that will decide how this settlement is brokered are prepared to do theirs, before the opportunity this anniversary represents closes for good. 

About the Author: Nasir Andisha 

Ambassador Nasir A. Andisha is an Afghan diplomat, author, and former Deputy Foreign Minister of Afghanistan. He currently serves as the Permanent Representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations Office at Geneva. His work and public engagement focus on Afghanistan’s foreign policy, constitutional governance, human rights, accountability, regional security, and the future of an inclusive political settlement in Afghanistan.

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