Elian Peltier
The black and white flags of the Taliban were flying high along the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, as the group celebrated five years in power on Saturday.
Shiny Mercedes drifted in front of graffiti praising the Taliban fighters’ “sacrifice,” the word painted in crimson, with depictions of drops of blood. Young Afghans chanted independence songs below posters hailing how “the carpet of democracy” had been removed for Islamic rule.
But the triumphant tone is only half the story. The Taliban may be boisterous in Kabul and have a tight grip on power, yet elsewhere they find themselves targeted and face crises both at home and abroad.
They face a conflict just short of open war with neighbouring Pakistan. They’re dealing with new waves of attacks from armed groups that want to topple them. Add to that mass unemployment, international isolation and growing domestic discontent, and the Taliban face their most serious threats since their return to power in 2021.
It is too early to tell whether all those challenges will escalate and threaten their survival as a governing force. And as the scenes of celebration on Saturday showed, the Taliban are popular among many.
Still, the threats they face have cracked the veneer of security and stability that the Taliban have heralded as their primary achievement — and their main selling point to the world.
As workers were preparing Kabul for celebrations, a resistance group claimed responsibility for the killing of the Taliban mayor of a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan. Two weeks earlier, another Taliban official had been assassinated in the same province.
A tight grip on power – and yet
The Taliban are holding Afghan society in a chokehold that spares no one. Girls and women face restrictions to a degree unseen anywhere else in the world. Religious minorities are witnessing the forced closure of their places of worship. Anyone who voices criticism is repressed. United Nations staff members face arrests; journalists and rights workers suffer forced disappearances.
The Taliban are collecting taxes and building roads, dams and canals. European countries have welcomed them in Brussels to facilitate the deportation of Afghan migrants and asylum seekers.
They have expanded trade ties with Central Asian states and want the Trump administration to come back to Afghanistan.
Whenever a sign of dissent emerges in a province, the country’s secretive and ultraconservative leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, places a key ally in a leadership position to keep things in check.
And yet, the signs of trouble that have appeared in recent months are impossible to ignore.
Troubles in the North
Sporadic sounds of gunfire reverberated across the remote mountains of northeastern Afghanistan on a recent evening. Weary Taliban fighters peppered drivers with questions at checkpoints dotting the main road snaking through the province of Badakhshan.
On the same road, two attackers had killed a senior provincial Talib official a week earlier. A small group of anti-Taliban fighters had briefly seized control of a police headquarters in a nearby district.
Now fighting between the Taliban and another group opposing their rule was continuing in another district of Badakhshan. The province, bordering China, Pakistan and Tajikistan, is emerging as a hot spot.
On a trip to the province this month, we talked to residents ready to support anti-Taliban groups because they said they were fed up with the Taliban’s iron grip, the lack of job opportunities and the government’s confiscation of natural resources.
We drove through dozens of checkpoints and witnessed the heavy presence of intelligence officers in the isolated village where anti-Taliban fighters had stormed police headquarters.
The clashes and the attacks have so far been scattered. The leader of one of the anti-Taliban groups described them as “opportunity targets” aimed at challenging the Taliban’s sense of control. But the leader, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the group’s strategy, said the number of attacks would only increase in coming months.
Tensions in the east
An underequipped Afghan army waits nervously at the border with Pakistan. Once a sponsor of the Taliban, Pakistan has launched dozens of airstrikes on Afghanistan, killing 500 civilians since October, according to the United Nations, and has threatened to use even more force if the Taliban don’t rein in militants who are staging attacks on Pakistani territory.
The mistrust goes both ways: The Taliban have accused Pakistan of supporting the armed groups that have attacked Taliban outposts in Badakhshan.
Whether, or to what extent, Pakistan is actively supporting anti-Taliban groups is not clear, but suspicions are running high.
“The Pakistanis are happy to be portrayed now as a potential patron for the armed opposition to the Taliban, because that increases their leverage over the group,” said Fabrizio Foschini, a researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network.
‘Work, education, freedom’
The picture on the domestic front is also grim. Extreme hunger has been spreading fast from one province to another after aid cuts last year plunged millions into deeper food insecurity. The Taliban’s ban on secondary and university education for women and girls is stifling development, experts say.
The Taliban have deprived 2.4 million Afghan girls of an education, according to UNESCO — the equivalent of all school-age girls in New York, Mexico City and Moscow combined — forced to stay home indefinitely.
Some scattered signs of discontent have popped up. At a rare protest in June, demonstrators chanted “Work, education, freedom,” similar to what their Iranian neighbours chanted in 2022. And the leader of a large religious minority warned the Taliban in May: Don’t squeeze Afghan society too much, or it will explode.
The potential to spiral?
The Taliban know the world wants a stable Afghanistan — one that isn’t a source of refugees, drugs or terrorism.
They assert that the country no longer poses a security threat to the region or the West. They say that they have cracked down on the Islamic State militant group, and that they want peaceful relations, based on trade and diplomacy, including with the US.
Since the Taliban no longer carry out suicide attacks, bomb schools or target the security forces they now represent, their main argument may hold.
“The greatest achievement we have had over the past five years is security,” Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, said in an interview with The New York Times in Kabul on Wednesday.
They don’t want their various crises to spiral either.
All the ingredients for things to get out of control in Afghanistan again are here, analysts say: A vast population of unemployed young Afghans are fertile ground for radicalisation, especially as economic opportunities are nearly nonexistent.
And with animosity growing between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is unclear who might come to the Taliban’s aid: Afghanistan is, once again, a pariah state, with barely any allies.
The past five years have brought some predictability and an end to almost two decades of fighting, which many Afghans have welcomed, despite the immense hardship and repression. But the country remains shattered, and the fragile peace is already at risk.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.