While the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan, the rest of the international community sat waiting for how the group with its model of insurgency all these years was going to handle the role of governing a state. Three years later, the picture is clearer than ever: the tenuous grip on power of the Taliban government is starting to slip under the strain of civil war, economic ineptness, and governmental collapse. As various fractions of the movement are engaging one another in a bloodthirsty battle for supremacy, it increasingly emerges day by day that the regime is not able to provide stability and prosperity as it had committed to provide. Even when it gives an impression of harmony, the senior leadership of the Taliban is fractured internally by immense ethnic, tribal, and ideological differences.
Whereas it is universally presumed that the factional clashes within the Taliban are limited to merely the two power centers of Kandahar and Kabul—two central centripetal fulcra of the organization—the presumption is as ignorant as it is not true. What actually works rather deeply below are these ideological and ethnic ties which go a rather good way toward defining the organization of the movement itself. Over this fault line runs the leadership crisis.
The leadership of Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada is increasingly being tested to hold the various factions together in one umbrella. Unlike his predecessor Mullah Omar, who was respected and revered, Akhundzada has not been able to invoke the same devotion among his ranks. His reliance on the Noorzai clan to build power has left other groups on the periphery isolated, making him even more susceptible. The lack of strong and popular leadership has bred discontentment in the rank and is weakening the cohesiveness of the Taliban. Three years into his rule, the Taliban are nowhere near shifting from an insurgency movement to a functioning government.
Instead of building stability and spearheading economic development, the dress has established itself in the Afghan natural resources, particularly in mining. Individuals like Haji Bashir Noorzai, among the members of characters within the Taliban economy, have also established themselves in their offices, enslaving Afghans. With the economy on its knees, the nation’s resources in no one’s control whatsoever, and prices through the roof, unemployment at full throttle, the only place where the regime has been woefully short of expectations is in having the nation’s resources under its control. Its greatest need is perhaps its growing isolation among the nations of the world. The rejection of world legitimacy by the group and its hardline policy—especially its gender apartheid—is drawing the world into international condemnation. Despite early hopes that the Taliban will moderate itself in exchange for world legitimation, its regime is now identified with repression and isolation. That Taliban good faith, if it ever did exist, especially during the time of Doha peace negotiations, is lost now, and their inability to negotiate has made Afghanistan isolated in the international arena from the rest of the world. The problem of internal instability is being heightened by increased internal instability.
The latest ICC global arrest warrants issued against some of the top Taliban leaders, including Akhundzada himself, opened a new war front in the struggle for factional control internally. Legal attacks have also contributed to tattering Akhundzada’s leadership role, as other opposition factions attempted to capitalize on his position of vulnerability. The risk of international prosecution only added to cracks within the Taliban and potential eventual collapse of leadership. By doing so, all the international community has is the option of pressing forward aggressively in order to spur the collapse of the regime further.
The ICC warrants are an asset of delegitimization for the Taliban regime and can be leveraged by diplomatic pressure to create cracks between the rival factions. Foreign aid to the Taliban must be withheld as well at the same time, with money redirected to directly benefit the Afghan people. This would weaken the Taliban hold on Afghanistan’s financial resources and prove the actual scale of their administrative weakness. One of the most important components of the international strategy will have to be cooperation with the Afghan opposition movement.
Though the Taliban are wedded to Kandahar and Kabul, there are nascent ethnic and tribal-political parties that are shoving their influence on increasingly more aggressive terms. Opposition forces must be persuaded by the world community and by the US in particular so that they exert more pressure on the Taliban. With the Taliban’s collapse and support for opposition forces, the chance exists to implement a more pragmatic regime of governance that answers the people’s immediate needs in Afghanistan and undermines the Taliban’s grip on the nation The future is dark and foreboding in Afghanistan, but one certainty exists: the Taliban regime will soon fall.
As fissures within widen, diplomatic isolation intensifies, and economic mismanagement spirals to all-time highs, the government’s clock is indisputably ticking away. Not if it will fall, but when it will fall and whether it will be replaced with something stronger, more inclusive Afghan state. The world will be forced to continue pushing, so the Taliban incompetence is exposed and their grip on power weakened. The world may be witnessing the end of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan—time’s up, and the clock has run out for this unstable government.