Afghanistan is becoming a ticking time bomb for terror again

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Adnan R. Khan is an independent journalist based in Haarlem, The Netherlands, and Istanbul.

When the Taliban signed the Doha agreement with the Trump administration in 2020, spelling out the path to peace in Afghanistan, they made one key promise: to never allow their nation to regress back to the kind of fragmented state it had been in during their first period of rule in the late 1990s.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the world declared mission accomplished and just walked away, allowing armed extremists like the Taliban to emerge. Even after they took over in 1996, their control was so tenuous that the various terrorist groups that had fought the Soviet Union in the 1980s were able to operate unmolested in remote parts of the country. The most famous of the jihadis, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, were not only tolerated, but welcomed.

This time would be different, the Taliban’s negotiators vowed. But that was an odd promise coming from a group that many countries in the world, Canada included, had deemed to be itself a terrorist organization; it was even more surprising considering that what was called “the Taliban” at the time was not a singular entity, but an array of groups that had helped it win the war against the U.S-backed government in Kabul. While many observers at the time were focused on whether the Taliban could be trusted, the question no one was asking was whether they were a stable organization capable of holding the country together.

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The question of trust was resolved almost immediately. Within days of signing the deal, Taliban attacks against Afghan security forces surged. Instead of the inclusive intra-Afghan peace process the deal had called for, the Taliban – almost exclusively made up of ethnic Pashtuns – spent the next year and a half leveraging the U.S. drawdown to take Afghanistan by force.

The policy of abandonment continued under Joe Biden’s administration. The chaotic withdrawal of Western forces following the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, laid bare the façade of the deal Mr. Trump had signed. This was not a peace agreement; it was a deal to walk away from the mess America had created in Afghanistan over the course of two decades of failed policy, formalized corruption, and just plain incompetence.

With the U.S. gone, the Taliban began breaking more promises. They refused to share power with other ethnic groups. They also refused to keep their promise to give women and girls some degree of rights, barring girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade and all but erasing women from public life. For the gangs of morality police patrolling Afghanistan’s city streets, a woman walking alone to the bakery to buy bread was cause for a beating, and the sound of a woman laughing in public was intolerable.

In Washington, none of these broken promises apparently merited much more than a few hollow admonitions. What really mattered, it seemed – more than the lives of Afghans, and more even than American honour and credibility – was whether the Taliban could keep its promise of preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists that could threaten the American homeland.

At first, the Taliban seemed to comply, including by ramping up attacks against the Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate (ISKP). But that pretense didn’t last long either. In July, 2022, less than a year after the Taliban’s takeover, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the co-founder of al-Qaeda, was killed in a CIA drone strike while hiding in a mansion owned by a senior member of the Haqqani Network, a powerful faction inside the Taliban, in Kabul’s posh Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood.

Since then, more and more evidence has emerged of a Taliban movement struggling to control corruption at the highest levels of its leadership while grappling with the social and political fault lines criss-crossing Afghanistan.

In a damning report published just this month, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction accused the Taliban of diverting billions of dollars of international aid to enrich itself and serve its own political goals, including regularly diverting funds to the Pashtun ethnic majority that comprise the Taliban’s base.

It also found that Taliban officials regularly manipulate currency rates to profit from auctions of imported U.S. dollars, force aid agencies to hire Taliban-affiliated businesses, and collude with corrupt UN officials to demand kickbacks for vendor contracts. In some instances, the Taliban have reportedly diverted aid intended for needy Hazara communities to Taliban-run religious schools and military bases where al-Qaeda and other foreigners are being trained.

The Taliban’s ethnic and ideological favouritism is perplexing, though, considering the group already faces deep internal divisions, even among its own ranks.

The Haqqani Network, under the leadership of Afghanistan’s acting interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, has emerged as a powerful source of pragmatism in opposition to the Taliban’s ideological fervour. The Haqqanis proved themselves to be the most effective fighters during the war against the U.S. and NATO, fielding highly trained special forces as well as a suicide squad. Most experts agree that without Haqqani help, the Taliban would not have emerged victorious. But the Haqqanis have also proven themselves to be flexible and adaptable; they are as interested in business and money-making as they are in ideological purity.

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In public, Mr. Haqqani has been careful to reinforce the image of unity, emphasizing the importance of obedience to the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, and insisting that issues like girls’ education are an internal matter while criticizing the international community for meddling in Afghanistan’s affairs. But in private gatherings with religious leaders, he has opposed Mr. Akundzada’s rigidity and his disinterest in compromise, reportedly going as far in one gathering some time last year to say the situation “can no longer be tolerated.”

Mr. Akhundzada, meanwhile, surrounded by the Taliban’s hard-line leadership in Kandahar, which he rarely leaves, has tried to keep the upstart Mr. Haqqani in line. Last April, he reportedly replaced more than a half-dozen senior police officials with his own supporters without first consulting Mr. Haqqani. The move came after Mr. Haqqani met with Mr. Akhundzada a month earlier and called for the creation of a commission, led by the Haqqani network leader, that would be responsible for deciding on all security-sector appointments.

Two months later, during Eid-ul-Adha celebrations, Abdul Kabir – the acting minister for refugees and a Haqqani ally – hosted an event at Sapedar Palace in Kabul, separate from the celebrations hosted by the Taliban at the Presidential Palace. Despite assurances by Taliban officials that this should not be taken as a sign of division, the optics were revealing all the same: two palaces, two centres of power.

The divisions paint a much more dire picture of the Taliban’s grip on power than its leaders would like to admit. Recent events have complicated the picture further as mass deportations from neighbouring countries deepen Afghanistan’s economic crisis. Since September, 2023, more than four million Afghans have returned from Iran and Pakistan alone, many of them single young men who in many cases were sending money to their desperate families back in Afghanistan. Turkey and Germany have also been deporting them back to a country, where, according to the United Nations Development Program, an estimated 85 per cent of Afghans live on less than US$1 a day.

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Once there, they also face Taliban reprisals: According to a 2024 report published last March by the human rights organization Rawadari, “the number of targeted, mysterious, and extrajudicial killings of individuals accused of collaborating with anti-Taliban groups have doubled” since 2023. A July report from the UN’s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, meanwhile, accused the Taliban of turning its sights on returnees they perceive to be enemies of the state, including former soldiers from the Afghan National Army, civil society activists, human rights defenders, musicians and journalists.

This poverty and oppression have led to a skyrocketing number of desperate young men, offering immense recruitment opportunities to extremist groups. In February, the UN Security Council deemed ISKP a threat, despite the Taliban’s attempts to eliminate it: “The group consolidated its support base while seeking to capitalize on the growing dissatisfaction among ethnic Tajiks against Taliban rule in northern provinces,” the assessment noted. It also reported that while al-Qaeda has remained operationally dormant, it has used the permissive environment created by the Taliban to “strengthen co-operation with regional terrorist organizations of non-Afghan origin that operate in the country,” primarily the Pakistani Taliban, which has dramatically increased its attacks on Pakistan since 2021.

Historically, the Haqqanis have had close ties to al-Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and other extremist groups. This leaves the Taliban no choice but to appease with “ideologically driven and ideologically consistent policy making,” according to Radboud University professors Romain Malejacq and Niels Terpstra. The persistent presence of the two-dozen-plus jihadist groups in Afghanistan, they wrote, “incentivizes the Taliban leadership, and Emir Hibatullah Akhundzada chief among them, to cater to the movement’s most extreme members” to cultivate domestic unity and prevent defections.

That is the quandary the Taliban find themselves in: If they agree to international demands on the status of women and minorities, they may be able to co-opt the Haqqanis – but at the same time, they would risk losing their most extreme members to the ISKP, al-Qaeda, and the Pakistani Taliban, ultimately strengthening those groups and, by extension, the Haqqanis. Regardless, extremism wins.

So the Taliban will likely break their last, most crucial promise to the West: to prevent Afghanistan from turning back into a safe haven for extremists. But then again, it’s clear they never really intended to abide by the Doha Agreement. On its fifth anniversary last February, they officially announced they would no longer recognize it.

Now the question is: What will the international community do? In June, Dorothy Shea, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, said Afghanistan policy is “under review.” It’s unclear what that means beyond a focus on anti-terrorism, according to Ms. Shea, though we shouldn’t expect much. On March 25, the U.S. quietly dropped its US$10-million bounty for Mr. Haqqani, and a day later, the Taliban was excluded from the National Intelligence Agency’s annual report on terrorist threats to U.S. national security.

In short, the West is signalling this to be another mission accomplished. While history may not be repeating itself, the rhyme is undeniable.

Editor’s note: Aug. 25, 2025: This article has been updated to correct the author's statement reference to a UN Security Council report. The author's intended statement is that the report deemed ISKP a threat, despite the Taliban’s attempts to eliminate it.