The Taliban has made little to no progress on the counterterrorism and human rights benchmarks the EU requires to gain diplomatic recognition.

Five years after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Afghan Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, the European Union is still scrambling to formulate a coherent Afghanistan policy—and failing. The bloc’s narrow focus on domestic political concerns, such as migration, is driving tactical, ad hoc responses that lack strategic logic and contradict the Union’s own positions and interests.

In June 2026, European officials sat down with representatives of the Taliban regime in Brussels. The episode deserves scrutiny—not because diplomacy with difficult actors is inherently wrong, but because this particular engagement exposes a widening gap between the principles Europe proclaims and the outcomes its policies deliver. 

Several EU member states, notably Sweden, Belgium and Germany, pushed for the hastily arranged meeting. As a host country, it fell to Belgium to issue the visas for a five-member strong Taliban delegation—led by the foreign ministry’s spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi. The visa applied only to Belgium, not the whole Schengen area, and was valid for only 24 hours. 

The fact that the Belgian minister of migration and asylum, from a Flemish nationalist party, initiated the process clearly indicates the meeting’s agenda. It’s all about getting as many Afghans deported from Europe back to Afghanistan as possible. Notably, the Belgian foreign minister opposed the invitation on the grounds that it would legitimize the Taliban but was outvoted in his own government. 

The EU Commissioner for internal affairs and migration, Magnus Brunner of Austria, tried to spin the talks as purely technical, ie, far below the threshold for formal recognition of the Taliban. But members of the European Parliament’s sub-committee on human rights opposed the talks. Many in the human rights community and experts on Afghanistan suspect that the EU’s single-minded focus on migration is providing a slippery slope leading to formal recognition. 

Their concerns are not without merit. The Taliban delegation demanded, in exchange for cooperation, control over Afghanistan’s consular offices in the European countries. While ostensibly a practical measure to manage deportations, securing such control would be a significant symbolic gain for the Taliban. 

The EU’s gains are much less evident. After the Taliban takeover in 2021, the EU has defined five benchmarks to grant recognition, including firm commitments on counter-terrorism, human rights, particularly women’s rights and the right of girls to education, and inclusive government. 

Five years later, the record on all those accounts is consistently bleak. The hopes that the Taliban have changed have proven to be baseless. 

Take counterterrorism. According to Carter Malkasian, a former US official who advised the US forces in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2021, Taliban representatives told US interlocutors that they “had no intention of permitting anyone on Afghan soil to plan or carry out a terrorist attack overseas. But they muddied the waters by maintaining relations with Al Qaeda.”

Malksasian, in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, recalls that the Taliban negotiators in Doha, Qatar, admitted to working with Al Qaeda, all while resisting US requests to ban Al Qaeda fundraising, recruiting, and training. 

Not only that, but the United Nations assessments have documented more than 20 terrorist organizations currently operating from Afghan soil, with up to 13,000 foreign fighters—including roughly 6,000 Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants, 2,000–3,000 ISIS-Khorasan operatives, in addition to hundreds of Al Qaeda members. 

These groups enjoy sanctuary, freedom of movement, and permissive operating space under Taliban rule. As a result, according to Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN, Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, his country alone recorded more than 5,300 terrorism incidents and over 1,200 fatalities in 2025 linked to militants operating from Afghan territory and has identified more than 60 terrorist camps and staging areas inside Afghanistan. 

Pakistan is far from being the sole target. In November 2025, attacks originating from Afghanistan killed five Chinese nationals and injured five others in Tajikistan within four days.
European officials are not unaware of this. EU Special Envoy Gilles Bertrand acknowledged as recently as June 2026 that terrorist safe havens, training camps, arms supply chains, and financing networks continue to function inside Afghanistan. 

The contradiction is difficult to reconcile: engaging the Taliban while simultaneously documenting the terrorist threats that emanate from its territory without addressing those threats. Bertrand resigned in August without explanation, pointing to disarray in EU Afghanistan policy.

Basic protections of human rights, including women’s and girls’ rights, are another key EU benchmark. Yet the Taliban’s record on these issues remains catastrophic. More than 2.6 million Afghan girls are excluded from secondary and higher education, according to UNICEF. Women face severe restrictions on employment, movement, and public participation.

Religious and ethnic minorities are not faring much better. Shia Hazaras—who suffered large-scale massacres at the hands of the Taliban in 1998—experience systematic discrimination in government services, public positions, and justice. Shia religious rights are trampled on, with key Muharram and Ashura observances restricted and Shia clerics arrested.

The Taliban’s power structure reflects this exclusionary vision. Of approximately 1,185 senior leadership positions, Pashtuns hold around 90 percent, even though they represent only 40–45 percent of Afghanistan’s population. Tajiks hold just 5.3 percent, Uzbeks 2.5 percent, and Hazaras only 0.6 percent. Women hold none. 

These are not isolated failures. They are patterns. And they suggest that Taliban commitments under Doha agreements with the United States were tactical instruments rather than genuine obligations. As long as the ultimate power rests with the hardline Taliban supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, the prospects for change appear scarce. 

Given this record, the unconditional European engagement risks gradually normalizing the regime that extracts concessions while offering none in return. By framing migration as the sole matter of concern, the EU is giving the Taliban undue leverage while squandering its own. 

The EU should not discard dialogue, but it must stop pretending that migration cooperation is a strategy. The Taliban have learned that the EU will eventually come to them—for deportations, for border management, for anything that serves a domestic political need. 

That dynamic must be reversed. Engagement should be conditional, reversible, and contingent on verifiable steps: dismantling terrorist infrastructure used by TTP, ISIS-K, and Al Qaeda; restoring girls’ access to secondary and higher education; ending sectarian discrimination against Shia Hazaras and other ethnic and religious groups.

Where the Taliban refuse—as they have for five years—the EU should be prepared to walk away. The alternative is what we are watching now: a slow normalization in which Europe concedes legitimacy and gets nothing in return. That is not strategy. It is drift. 

About the Author: Eldar Mamedov

Eldar Mamedov is a Brussels-based foreign policy expert. Since 2009, Mamedov has served as a political advisor to the Social Democrats on the European Parliament’s (EP) Foreign Affairs Committee and oversees the EP delegations’ inter-parliamentary relations with Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula. He has worked at Latvia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as a diplomat at Latvian embassies in Washington and Madrid. He has degrees from the University of Latvia and the Diplomatic School in Madrid, Spain.

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