Afghanistan’s Taliban government spent millions to celebrate its “victory day” on Aug. 15, marking its triumphant return to power five years ago, when the pro-Western Afghan republic collapsed amid the United States’ final withdrawal from the longest war in its history.
This week, Taliban diplomatic missions across South Asia and the Middle East hosted crowded receptions to celebrate the occasion.
Yet its government, led exclusively by the Taliban’s clerical leaders, is formally recognized by only one country: Russia. Dozens of other nations have tried to maintain scaled-down diplomatic ties. They have accredited Taliban ambassadors and diplomats, kept diplomatic presences in Afghanistan, or allowed some form of Taliban diplomatic representation.
Afghan experts and diplomats say the Taliban has entrenched itself in power but failed to secure the international legitimacy it craves. With little formal recognition, Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers remain diplomatically isolated even as they pursue economic cooperation and political engagement with neighbors and regional and global powers.
The stalemate reflects a fundamental disconnect between the Taliban’s quest for recognition and the international community’s demands for changes to its governance, particularly its sweeping restrictions on women and girls.
Five years after resurrecting one of the world’s most fundamentalist theocratic regimes, the Taliban is still struggling to win international acceptance for its return to power and style of governance.
Taliban fighters celebrate the fifth anniversary of the group’s return to power in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 15. AFP
“Unless they make bigger compromises, explicit recognition doesn’t seem to be something that many regional states as well as non-regional states are willing to bestow upon them,” said Ibraheem Bahiss, a senior Afghanistan analyst with the International Crisis Group. “The question of recognition has always been quite central for the Taliban.”
The Taliban remained an international pariah during its first stint in power between 1996 and late 2001. Its government was toppled by the U.S.-led military invasion in December 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government.
After seizing Kabul in 1996, the Taliban imposed a blanket ban on women’s education and employment. Its notorious morality police tortured Afghan men for shaving their beards, neglecting strict gender segregation, or missing congregational prayers. It was the only government in modern history to ban photography and punish people for watching television.
During the past five years, the current Taliban government has implemented similar policies, but with less visible public ruthlessness. Girls in seventh grade and above are banned from education, while women cannot work in most sectors. The Taliban replaced the Ministry of Women’s Affairs with the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice to enforce its draconian morality laws.
“The international community initially was quite unanimous that if the Taliban returned to power by force and they imposed their restrictions, there would be no recognition or acceptance of their rule,” Bahiss said.
Divided Leaders
Taliban leaders and their policies are the foremost hurdles to gaining international recognition. Since returning to power, the hardline Islamist movement has monopolized power, appointing loyalists to significant posts at all tiers of government.
Hameed Hakimi, an Afghanistan expert at the Atlantic Council in Washington, sees Taliban leaders as divided between a pragmatic camp that eagerly seeks international legitimacy and a more conservative camp of hardline clerics who do not value diplomatic engagement with the world.
He says Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi and other senior figures in the Taliban administration in Kabul are seeking broader engagement with the international community and have even floated the idea of Kabul returning to a policy of nonalignment and neutrality in its external affairs. Afghanistan was a member of the Non-Aligned Movement for most of the Cold War. Hakimi says this pragmatism is undermined by Taliban Supreme Leader Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada and other like-minded senior figures for whom domestic legitimacy supersedes relations with other countries.
Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban’s foreign minister, attends a farewell ceremony for Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran on July 3. Reuters.
“For them, legitimacy stems from the government serving the people. But the notions of external relationships, embassies, human rights, or even citizenship don’t feature as much,” he told MBN.
In his most recent speech this week, Akhundzada questioned why his government is being denied legitimacy.
“Yesterday’s government, which didn’t fully control one district, was recognized internationally, but today our Islamic Emirate, which completely controls all of Afghanistan’s territory, is not formally recognized by any government,” he told supporters in a speech in the southern city of Kandahar.
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is the formal name the Taliban use for their government and organization.
Hakimi argues that Afghanistan’s neighbors in South and Central Asia, as well as regional and global powers such as India and China, are maintaining relations with its government to protect their security interests, including preventing the spillover of militants, narcotics or large numbers of migrants.
“The Taliban in Afghanistan, even for those countries that do not like them in the region, are a better geopolitical option than whatever is going to replace the Taliban,” he said.
He says regional states are engaging the Taliban as part of a pragmatic geopolitical calculation.
“For 20 years they had to contend with a very violent conflict in Afghanistan under the presence of a huge American military deployment supported by other NATO countries,” he said.
De Facto Recognition
Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban foreign minister, recently told the BBC that after establishing initial contacts with various countries, the Taliban sent diplomats and even appointed ambassadors to several countries. He said these diplomatic engagements are leading to deepening economic and political ties.
“Today we have representatives in some European nations,” he said. “Gradually we have made substantial progress as our representatives today operate in some 40 diplomatic missions abroad.”
Moscow formally recognized the Taliban government in July 2025. China, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Qatar, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Azerbaijan have either accepted a Taliban ambassador or chargé d’affaires or host other Taliban diplomats. The Taliban Foreign Ministry says it also has a diplomatic presence in Tajikistan, Oman, Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait. At least 18 foreign diplomatic missions are open in Kabul, according to Afghan diplomats in Europe.
The Taliban has appointed diplomatic representatives to Germany and Norway. Diplomats appointed by the defunct Afghan republic in the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Bulgaria continue to work with the Taliban Foreign Ministry on consular services. Afghan embassies and other diplomatic missions in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Australia have closed. At the same time, the Taliban has cut ties with diplomatic missions in several Western countries.
Afghan Suffering
Mushtaq Rahim, an Afghanistan expert in Virginia, argues that the Taliban’s reluctance to build an inclusive political system that could attract legitimacy from all Afghans will continue to prevent it from winning formal diplomatic recognition and international acceptance.
This, he says, will continue to weigh on ordinary Afghans more than on Taliban leaders and their loyalists. Afghans are already excluded from the international financial system and cannot travel to a growing number of Western countries that have denied visas to Afghans seeking education or medical treatment.
Rahim says the Taliban’s rigidity is depriving Afghans of international humanitarian aid even as their country remains a leading global humanitarian crisis.
“All these sufferings have not influenced the Taliban,” he said. “They have not budged even one step backward.”
But Obaidullah Baheer, a political science lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan, argues that the current Western-led approach of using recognition as leverage is not working and has instead pushed Afghanistan into isolation.
He argues that Afghanistan’s isolation under Taliban rule is pressuring its fragile economy and preventing Afghans from creating a sustainable public and political life that could push back against hardline Taliban policies.
“Ultimately, any pushback must come from within the country, and the current approach of lack of recognition is hindering it,” he said.
