In August 2021, after forcing the withdrawal of Western coalition forces from Afghanistan and taking the major cities, the Taliban re-established their Islamic emirate. Although they won back power by creating a parallel administration with a less corrupt justice system than that of the previous regime, supported by the West (1), the rudimentary institutions they have since put in place don’t meet the needs of Afghanistan’s rapidly growing population (more than 40 million), impoverished by four decades of armed conflict.

Doing better in administering justice than the negligent governments of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani may have been enough to guarantee popular approval (2), but now they are back, the Taliban cannot simply disregard the many political, social and economic problems for which they have no solution. Afghans today expect them to resolve land disputes and prosecute theft and murder, but also supply their basic needs in food, education, healthcare and jobs. The Taliban need a completely new approach to running the country, especially as they now control not only the rural areas, always receptive to their conservative, patriarchal ideology, but also the cities and the Shia-majority Hazarajat region, which strongly opposed their return.

However, they are trying to run their government in a country bled dry by 43 years of war and 20 years of nepotism and corrupt rule. The biggest international intervention in history neglected infrastructure: three quarters of its funding merely passed through Afghanistan on its way back to the West via a long chain of subcontractors. Most of the money that was spent in Afghanistan was misappropriated by senior government figures. Just before the fall of Kabul on 15 August 2021, the Ghani administration’s $6bn budget still came largely from international aid, and cooperative projects or NGOs financed by the West provided many essential services.

The Taliban are trying to run a stripped-back administration, funded by customs revenues that were largely misappropriated in the past. They are also trying to ensure that small businesses pay their taxes. They have finally increased taxes on road haulage, mobile phone top-ups and coal exports to Pakistan. But with aid cut off, the government scraped together just $2.6bn in 2022, less than half of what it had in previous years. So while a majority of civil servants kept their jobs in September 2021, many have subsequently been fired.

No policies for schools or hospitals

Just as Afghanistan is facing its worst ever famine (predictable given droughts in recent years), the state is reduced to its most basic functions. Some 95% of Afghans are now below the poverty line, and half don’t have enough to eat. Education and healthcare provision have also deteriorated sharply, even though these were areas where the Western intervention had produced major gains.

The Taliban never really developed policies for schools and hospitals, though there was an obvious desire for them from the Afghan people. In the late 2000s, popular pressure forced the Taliban to stop attacking whatever infrastructure had been put in place by the then government. They allowed Western organisations to fund schools and hospitals in territory under their control, but ensured they flew the Taliban flag and that their own people were in charge. Now that they are in power, the Taliban are having to make up for the departure of organisations linked to the West even though education and healthcare are not their top priorities.

Facing hard choices, the Taliban have put rebuilding their administration first. After the war ended, many Taliban judges and cadres were assigned to assist new government ministers and provincial governors rather than preside over courts. Meanwhile, relations between civil servants appointed under the previous regime and Taliban officials are not easy. The new prosecutor-general of Balkh province has complained about having to work with, on one hand, lawyers recruited under the old government, familiar with the work but prone to corruption and disloyalty, and on the other, Taliban judges whose loyalty and integrity is unquestionable but who lack the skills required by a system far removed from the Taliban’s rudimentary justice system. Given the shortage of expertise, government departments are competing to attract the few ulema with relevant experience.

The new regime’s other priority is gaining international recognition. For the Taliban, it’s an obsession: as in the 1990s, they want all the trappings of modern sovereignty, including a seat at the United Nations and embassies across the world. They therefore focused on creating a responsible image, respecting international borders and human rights, and ready to cooperate on issues such as terrorism and migration. Initially, the Taliban’s repression of the Afghan population was restrained, compared with the purges after the many previous civil wars. They also backed active cooperation with the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, which has played a key role in preventing the famine from worsening.

This strategy of engagement has failed. The US, traumatised by its military defeat, has set about isolating Afghanistan, freezing Afghan central bank funds held at the New York Fed and imposing sanctions that have paralysed state development agencies and Western-backed NGOs alike.

Washington’s stance basically reflects domestic considerations. The Biden administration knows these measures will not bring down the Taliban and will mainly affect ordinary people – as with the sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. With the US presidential election in November and the importance given to international issues in his campaign, Biden needs to deny his likely opponent, Donald Trump, any opportunity to accuse him of taking a soft line.

With little prospect of international recognition, the Taliban have refocused on their base – young, diehard fighters who are calling for the implementation of the radical Islamist programme for which they went to war. Since 2022 repression has intensified, with media censorship and the arrest and murder of journalists and political opponents.

Women’s rights activists are a particular target; with their demonstrations brutally dispersed, many have disappeared. And the Taliban are imposing a growing number of restrictions on all women, especially on their access to education and jobs. They cannot leave home without a male guardian and are banned from some public spaces such as parks; and they can only receive healthcare treatment from the few female doctors and nurses still authorised to practice. The Taliban have also said they will reinstate sharia’s harshest penalties, though they have not yet applied these to a larger number of cases or broadcast punishments as they did in the 1990s.

Despite all this, the Taliban’s grip on the country is secure for now. While the West’s attention has been focused elsewhere, China, Russia and the Gulf states have restored diplomatic ties with Kabul, de facto recognising the Islamic emirate in the belief that after more than 40 years of conflict, regional stability demands dealing with whoever is in power. In November 2023 even India, a key supporter of the opposition to the Taliban, withdrew its support from the Ghani government’s embassy in New Delhi (which it was funding), possibly as a prelude to reopening its own embassy in Kabul.

Recognition from China

China and Russia’s overtures are also part of a growing challenge to the established world order against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Taiwan Strait. This January, in a formal ceremony, China’s president Xi Jinping accepted the credentials of a Taliban representative as ambassador to Beijing. It was Afghanistan’s first official recognition from a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Although Russia has not yet done anything of such symbolic importance, it regularly collaborates with the Taliban in the war on drugs and combating Central Asian militant groups.

Afghanistan’s present rulers hope that investment in mining will generate new tax revenues, and are relaunching plans to exploit the country’s potential mineral wealth never implemented by their predecessors. In January 2023 China’s Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Company (CAPEIC) said it would invest $540m over three years in oil extraction in the Amu Darya basin in the north of the country. Six months later the government announced gold and iron ore mining agreements worth over $6.5bn with Chinese, Iranian, Turkish and British companies.

Taliban try to enhance credibility

The real value of the deposits, which the press frequently estimate at over a trillion dollars, is uncertain. This huge figure, cited notably in the New York Times in 2010 (3), can be traced back to a 1970s Soviet geological survey of uncertain validity. Moreover, developing these resources would also require extensive investment in infrastructure, as well as political stability and security for several decades. CAPEIC has only managed to invest $50m of the $150m it promised for the first of the three years. In the short term, Kabul’s diplomatic efforts will not bring the desired influx of cash, but holding discussions and signing contracts will enhance the Taliban’s credibility and help to keep them in power.

Above all, the Taliban are benefiting from the absence of any organised opposition other than ISIS, which continues to mount sporadic attacks. Supporters of the Ghani regime, among the educated class in particular (some descended from 1980s communist cadres), have gone into exile, forming a diaspora that is ready to fight the Taliban regime from abroad. However, being outside the country and discredited, they are no longer a significant threat.

The Taliban’s victory has ended the 40-year armed conflict between graduates of regular universities and those of religious schools, who both aspired to influence Afghan society. However, civil war has been replaced by a no less complicated social struggle, played out on the diplomatic stage and in the media, between supporters of the previous government who regard the Taliban as barbarians, and supporters of the Taliban who see the former as traitors and collaborators with a foreign intervention that they call an occupation. As in Franco’s Spain or Iran under the mullahs, this standoff is likely to persist, resulting in continued sanctions, of which ordinary people will bear the brunt, and a still harder line from the Taliban, whose only way of staying in power is repression.