AMIT KUMAR

Towards the end of 2025, the Taliban registered a quiet diplomatic win. The closure of the embassy of Afghanistan’s former republican government in Tokyo marks an important shift in how Western alliance democracies are adapting to political reality in Kabul. On 26 December, the Afghan embassy in Japan announced it would suspend all its functions by 31 January 2026, a decision made in close consultation with Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The move may signal growing willingness to disengage from a defunct Afghan Republic without formally recognising Taliban rule.

Japan is the first democracy of the US-led Western alliance system to formally dismantle, with consultation, the diplomatic presence of the pre-2021 Afghan state. Tokyo has acquiesced to the closure without extending recognition to the Taliban, but also without preserving the fiction that the government it once supported continues to exist in any meaningful political sense. What is being shuttered is not merely an embassy but a symbolic commitment to a political order that now survives largely on paper.

For nearly four years, that symbolism mattered. Maintaining republican embassies allowed democracies to condemn the Taliban while avoiding the strategic implications of their return to power. It enabled moral opposition without engagement, and solidarity with a fallen republic without acknowledging the permanence of its collapse.

Japan’s move breaks from that approach. It implicitly recognises that symbolism can no longer substitute for policy. The closure of the embassy removes the last institutional obstacle to normalisation. While it does not constitute recognition of the Taliban, it makes recognition procedurally easier. Accrediting a Taliban-appointed mission becomes a technical question rather than a dramatic political rupture. This is typically how recognition unfolds: quietly, incrementally and without ceremony.

The same quiet shift is evident beyond formal diplomacy. In my interviews and conversations with Afghan diaspora activists in the United States and Europe, it is clear that there is a narrowing space for overtly anti-Taliban political activity. Protests that once proceeded routinely are delayed, restricted, or reframed as security concerns. Events critical of the authorities in Kabul increasingly encounter administrative resistance. No formal policy has changed, but official behaviour has.

Major democracies and Western-aligned states increasingly behave as if the Taliban were a durable reality.

This is not driven by ideological sympathy for the Taliban. Instead, it reflects the abandonment of the belief that Taliban rule is temporary or reversible. Major democracies and Western-aligned states increasingly behave as if the Taliban were a durable reality. Once that assumption takes hold internally, other calculations follow. Supporting exile movements or symbolic opposition is no longer a moral obligation but a diplomatic liability, one that complicates engagement with Kabul without offering any realistic prospect of political change.

The denial of a US visa to Ahmad Massoud, leader of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF), and his exclusion from an anti-Taliban event illustrate how even symbolic resistance is now treated as an unnecessary complication. There has also been misplaced faith in moderation through dialogue. Engagement with religious interlocutors has yielded little. The Taliban have held sustained discussions with clerics abroad, even addressing sensitive issues such as women’s rights. Yet despite high-profile engagements, including Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Muttaqi visiting a Deoband seminary in October 2025, Taliban policy on women’s education, mobility, and public participation remains unchanged. Diplomatic outreach has expanded, but repression has not eased.

Japan’s move fits a broader pattern of institutional disengagement followed by political recalibration. By severing ties with a government in exile, Tokyo is stepping away from arrangements that constrain diplomatic flexibility without yielding leverage or reform. In India, the closure of the Afghan republic’s embassy in November 2023 created the procedural conditions under which the Taliban later appointed Mufti Noor Ahmad Noor as its chargé d’affaires in New Delhi, in January 2026. Institutional withdrawal came first; political adjustment followed.

But Japan’s decision contrasts starkly with that of other democracies. For instance, Australia has imposed travel restrictions on Taliban leadership, framed around human rights and governance failures. Germany has cautiously pursued limited technical engagement with the Taliban for defined purposes facilitated by Doha. Japan has moved further, dismantling the remaining diplomatic infrastructure of the Afghan Republic. The result is not strategic pluralism but fragmentation.

Western governments show no coherent approach on Afghanistan, each improvising responses to diplomatic fatigue, domestic pressure, and diminishing leverage. By contrast, regional powers have been decisive. Russia has formally recognised the Taliban. China has pursued extensive and sustained engagement, including exchanging ambassadors and expanding trade. India, Iran, Pakistan and the Central Asian states have all adopted pragmatic approaches prioritising security and stability. The outcome is clear. Afghanistan under Taliban rule is not isolated regionally; it is strategically embedded.

Against this backdrop, Western strategy appears hollow. Sanctions and conditionality have failed to alter Taliban behaviour, particularly on women’s rights. What they have achieved is a steady erosion of Western influence and a faster realignment of Kabul towards non-Western partners. Japan’s decision quietly acknowledges this impasse.

Recognition is rarely a single act. It emerges through cumulative institutional adjustments that align diplomatic practice with political reality. The closure of the republican embassy in Tokyo is one such adjustment. It does not legitimise the Taliban outright, but it removes a key procedural barrier, exactly as India has already done.

Western governments can continue to insist that Taliban rule remains illegitimate. But symbolism without strategy offers no leverage. Normalisation is already underway; pretending otherwise ensures it proceeds without coordination, accountability, or direction.

The article appeared in the lowyinstitute