Although the Taliban’s Afghanistan is internationally isolated, it remains internally and externally unchallenged.

Five years ago this month, the Taliban stormed into Afghanistan’s capital after a 20-year insurgency and restored their pariah emirate. Over the five years since the US withdrawal and the Taliban’s return, a plethora of experts—many who made a career out of Washington’s expedition to Afghanistan—debated whether or not the rule of the religious militant group would endure another year.

However, this year’s anniversary of the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan is particularly significant: it equals the lifespan of their first time running the country from September 1996 to November 2001.

But unlike their first five-year birthday, which roughly coincided with the September 11 attacks that triggered their inevitable overthrow two months later, the end of the reincarnated Taliban is nowhere on the horizon. Instead, their grip on Afghanistan is significantly firmer than before. What’s more, it is unlikely to loosen.

Why the Taliban Are Stronger Now Than in 1996–2001

There are several reasons why this emirate’s rule differs from the first.

First, the Taliban inherited a markedly different Afghanistan in 2021, compared to the one they seized 30 years ago. In 1996, the country was in chaos. Following a devastating decade of Soviet occupation, Afghanistan was scarred by a brutal civil war between the victorious Mujahideen factions scrambling for power. Beyond the rockets that reduced Afghan cities to rubble, the civil war subjected Afghans to ethnic and gender-motivated violence. The conventional wisdom often conveniently omits that the Taliban’s early formation and draconian restrictions on women were a reaction to the rape, abduction, assault, and murder of this period.

This was not the case in 2021. After 20 years of Western-backed nation-building, Afghans were more exposed to the global village. The country maintained a flawed democracy with presidential and parliamentary elections. Kabul hosted the American University of Afghanistan with liberal arts programs, a free press and media published critical opinion articles, hosted controversial debates, dubbed scandalous Turkish dramas, and aired reality singing contests. Scores of educated students graduated from secondary school and won university scholarships abroad. The latter, in particular, provided Afghans with a window into how other Muslim societies balance reform and religion.

Second, today’s Taliban are operating in a markedly different international system. Their first rule emerged at the peak of the post-Cold War unipolar moment and Pax Americana, leaving the group with no alternative superpower to engage with other than the United States for legitimacy, humanitarian aid, or economic support. Today, the return of multipolarity to the international system has given the new Taliban room to court patrons in Moscow and Beijing.

The turn in the Taliban’s foreign relations is drastic. During their first period in power, the movement was less Pakistan’s ally and more its proxy project. Islamabad financed, armed, and trained the Taliban to guarantee a subservient regime on their Western border, causing India to back the Taliban’s opponents within Afghanistan. Today, the new Taliban’s hostile relations with Islamabad have escalated into direct war, leading the group to pursue closer ties with New Delhi. 

Similarly, the first Taliban had hostile relations with Tehran and Moscow, both of whom also backed the Northern Alliance along with New Delhi. Since 2021, Iran has maintained pragmatic relations with the group that opposed the US presence on their Western border and has handed over the Afghan embassy in Tehran to Taliban representatives. And Russia became the first state to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government.

Third, the new Taliban do not face a serious armed opposition, and, perhaps most importantly, they control the entirety of Afghanistan’s territory. During their first rule, the movement took two years to capture the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998. By the time they were overthrown, the group had not managed to capture the remaining 10 percent of territory in the northeast of the country from the Northern Alliance. In stark contrast, it took the new Taliban just over three weeks from their storming of Kabul to crush the short-lived resistance and capture the Panjshir Valley in 2021.

But the absence of a serious armed challenge to Taliban rule owes less to the movement’s own military prowess than to the ineffectiveness of their opponents. Among them is the National Resistance Front (NRF), a rebranded Northern Alliance led by the London-raised son of its slain former commander, Ahmad Massoud. Unlike his father, who challenged the Taliban from within Afghanistan, Ahmad Massoud (Jr.) commands his movement remotely from Europe.

The NRF carries the same baggage that compromised the Northern Alliance’s legitimacy: warlordism, a history of collaboration with the United States, a documented record of war crimes during the 1990s civil war, a tendency to exploit ethnic grievances, and association with the corruption that defined the post-2001 Afghan Republic. Furthermore, rather than seeking legitimacy from within, the NRF has instead sought patronage from virtually any external actor across the political spectrum willing to support it.

The NRF is allied with the Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF), composed largely of former members of the republic’s army and led by Yasin Zia, the former army’s chief of staff. While Zia possesses the military pedigree and proven combat leadership that Massoud lacks, the AFF lacks a clear political vision or ideology, as well as a message that could garner broad-based local and international support. Yet reports of Pakistani backing for the AFF are ill-timed. Islamabad’s strikes on Afghan civilian targets have dealt a blow to Zia’s legitimacy, marking his forces as yet another foreign proxy in service of Afghanistan’s enemies.

Also vying for legitimacy from exile is the Afghan United Front (AUF), led by Sami Sadat, a military officer in the former republic accused of major war crimes. Sadat commanded the 215th Corps through the collapse of Helmand province, a campaign that inflicted extensive civilian casualties. He fled to the United States as Kabul fell, while the soldiers he once commanded were abandoned to face the Taliban’s vengeance. Like Massoud junior, Sadat now urges Afghans inside the country to fight the war he escaped from exile in Northern Virginia.

Unlike the ousted Mujahideen in the 1990s, the US-backed Afghan Republic has not announced a government-in-exile. All that remains is its seat at the UN General Assembly and a chorus of exiled, and often corrupt, former officials sustaining their political relevance through social media.

The Taliban’s Internal Cohesion

The Taliban’s internal cohesion has proven remarkably durable. Despite periodic friction between the isolationist clerical establishment in Kandahar and the more pragmatic faction in Kabul seeking international engagement, the movement has so far avoided the open infighting many predicted. Having witnessed how factional warfare delegitimized the anti-Soviet Mujahideen in the 1990s, the Taliban’s leaders cite their firm solidarity as the very foundation of their success.

As in the 1990s, Washington and much of the West continue to designate the Taliban as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs), with the Haqqani Network remaining a State Department-listed Foreign Terrorist Organization. In contrast, Syria’s Hay-at Tahrir al-Sham saw its sanctions and terrorist designation lifted within two years, was welcomed by Western heads of State, and now maintains a formal representative in Washington. This is a degree of diplomatic normalization the Taliban are yet to achieve.

In the five years since the Taliban returned to power, 2.4 million Afghan Girls have been barred from schooling beyond sixth grade, a superficially partial rather than total ban, unlike the sweeping prohibition of the 1990s. Yet, functionally, little has changed, and the ramifications of the partial ban are no less detrimental than those of a total ban. That earlier “temporary” ban lasted the Taliban’s entire first five years in power, and this one shows every sign of enduring even longer. The Taliban’s draconian restrictions on the lives of Afghan women have effectively erased them from public life, a level of control so repressive that many experts now describe it not merely as discrimination, but as systematic “gender apartheid.”

The consequences extend well beyond the classroom: the denial of girls’ education is driving an exodus of educated Afghans, who see no future for their daughters under Taliban rule. This brain drain, more than any other single factor, threatens Afghanistan’s long-term capacity for economic recovery and post-war reconstruction.

Like the movement’s founder, the Taliban’s current emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, continues to rule as a faceless leader confined to Kandahar. He never travels to the capital and rarely makes public appearances. One of the few foreign dignitaries that the emir has reportedly met is the prominent Pakistani cleric Maulana Fazlur Rehman, a detail that has fueled suspicions that Akhundzada maintains ties with Pakistan’s intelligence establishment. As with Mullah Omar in the 1990s, Afghanistan is once again ruled by an authoritarian figure cloaked in an aura of prophetic infallibility intended to convince Afghans that submission to his regime is synonymous with submission to Islam itself.

Afghanistan’s Scattered Opposition

The most significant threat to the Taliban’s stranglehold on power occurred this summer in Badakhshan, the northeastern edge of the country. On July 17, fighters from a militia calling itself Sepahiyan-e Maihan briefly seized the district of Yaftal-e Payin, disarming Taliban personnel and lowering their flag before reinforcements restored control hours later. Days later, Zia’s AFF claimed a coordinated assault on Taliban positions around Zebak. By July 24, the AFF asserted that the fighting had left at least 21 Taliban fighters dead, including several senior commanders, with dozens more wounded.

Badakhshan is not an isolated flashpoint. Armed opposition to Taliban rule is slowly growing broader, more active, and more geographically dispersed, with clashes now reported across Panjshir, Takhar, and Baghlan. The Taliban, meanwhile, face genuine fractures within their own movement, from tensions between the Kandahar leadership and Kabul-based pragmatists over how forcefully to respond to local commanders who chafe under central control.

And yet neither development amounts to a credible threat to Taliban rule, at least not yet. The missing ingredient is not resistance; scattered resistance clearly exists. What is missing is the machinery required to convert that resistance into an insurgency capable of actually contesting, let alone seizing, power: a unified command structure, a coherent political program, reliable external backing, and the capacity to hold territory rather than raid it. Episodic rag-tag attacks are not an organized challenge to the state.

The opposition fails every test that the Taliban’s own insurgency once passed. When the Taliban were driven from power in 2001, they retained the assets and structure that made a durable insurgency possible. Foremost was sanctuary from a committed state patron: as the US launched Operation Enduring Freedom, Pakistan airlifted Taliban leadership to safety while simultaneously working with CENTCOM planners on entering Afghanistan, a maneuver US Special Forces later dubbed “Operation Evil Airlift.” The Taliban also had money, first from the opium economy, later from taxation, mining, and extortion. And they had unity: a single organization, under a single leader, bound by one ideology, standing against both the Afghan government and the American mission.

Crucially, the Taliban’s own history is an ill omen against complacency. The movement that now rules Afghanistan was itself declared militarily defeated and politically finished in 2001, dismissed by policymakers and analysts alike as a spent force incapable of returning to power. It returned anyway. A weak insurgency is not the same as a nonexistent one, and a movement that owes its own resurrection to patience, adaptation, and the slow accumulation of strength from the margins should be the last to assume that its opponents cannot do the same.

About the Authors: Lemar Farhad and Adam Dehsabzi

Lemar Farhad is a US Army foreign area officer with over two decades of experience spanning defense, diplomacy, intelligence, and security cooperation. He currently directs China and Taiwan security cooperation programs at US Army Pacific, capping senior assignments across the Indo-Pacific, Central and South Asia, Europe, and Afghanistan. His views are his own and do not represent those of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the US government.

Adam Dehsabzi is a Washington, DC-based defense and foreign policy researcher. Previously, he served as research assistant to Professor John Mearsheimer at The University of Chicago, where he completed his MA in International Relations. His research focuses on Middle Eastern security affairs, transatlantic relations, nationalism, and minority self-determination.

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