The World Tried to Freeze Out the Taliban. It’s Not Working

This August will mark five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. If they hold onto their totalitarian rule for that long, they could go on to surpass their initial reign, which lasted from 1996 until the United States–led invasion in 2001. This time around, in the absence of armed intervention, it’s become increasingly clear that the international community’s measures to push them out are failing.

Over the past half-decade, the Taliban have brought one form of shock and pain after another to the Afghan people: girls being denied most types of higher education, the teaching of extremist ideology in schools, heavy restrictions on social media activity, the silencing of women’s voices, arrests and torture of dissidents, and strict rules targeting freedom of speech and the press. In January, the Taliban announced a new criminal code that, among other provisions, allows domestic violence and the corporal punishment of children and appears to legitimize slavery through the use of the word “slave.”

Pakistan and Iran began mass deportations of Afghans in 2023 and 2025 respectively, further compounding the humanitarian pressures. For a country beset by natural disasters, such as earthquakes, one that’s among the most vulnerable to climate change, the future looks grim.

To some human rights activists, there’s increasingly another cause for concern: that the Taliban may eventually become accepted on the world stage. Most states have, so far, condemned the Taliban’s human rights violations and do not formally recognize the group as Afghanistan’s legitimate rulers. But over the past year, some governments have quietly begun engaging with Taliban authorities—what US-based human rights activist Metra Mehran describes as a “soft normalization” of Taliban rule.

Some of Afghanistan’s immediate and regional neighbours are increasing their business dealings with the Taliban. Though Russia is reportedly the only government so far to have formally recognized the Taliban as the country’s legitimate rulers, others may follow suit: this past fall, after a state visit by Taliban officials, India upgraded its diplomatic mission in Kabul to an embassy, and other countries, including China, have also traded diplomats with Afghanistan.

The Taliban want to see sanctions lifted and to be welcomed into international institutions, such as the United Nations, which would pave the way for more foreign investment. “The international community generally is holding back on those things” for leverage, says David Sproule, who served as Canada’s special representative for Afghanistan from 2021 until his retirement in 2025 and was also ambassador there in the mid-2000s. (Nell Stewart, currently Global Affairs Canada’s senior official for Afghanistan and executive director for Afghanistan and Pakistan, declined to be interviewed.)

Sproule points out that many countries, including Canada, recognize states rather than individual governments; for Russia and others set to follow, the step may be symbolic, suggesting an intention to normalize relations with the Taliban.

Canada contributes tens of millions a year in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, which it funnels through the United Nations and other non-governmental organizations, and has resettled more than 60,000 Afghans. Since August 2021, the government’s approach to the Taliban has been one of conditional engagement, later known as principled engagement, says Sproule. That means it would negotiate with the Taliban only if they meet certain requirements, including protecting the rights of women and girls, co-operating on counterterrorism campaigns, and not interfering with the resettlement of Afghans. Canada is also calling for inclusive governance in Afghanistan—which, Sproule points out, does not require the country to hold democratic elections but to ensure women, ethnic and linguistic minorities, and non-Taliban representatives be allowed to participate in government.

But such conditions and demands seem to have had little effect. Sproule acknowledges as much: “To be perfectly honest, the Taliban seemed to be inured to international pressure, if it interferes with their program at all.” The question is how much leverage the international community truly has left.

The countries engaging with the Taliban are doing so in pursuit of their own interests, says Ali Ahmad Jalali, who served as interior minister for Afghanistan in the early 2000s and was the country’s ambassador to Germany from 2017 to 2018. (He specified that the views he’s expressed are his own and not those of the institutions with which he’s affiliated, including the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at National Defense University in Washington, DC.)

Those interests are primarily tied to security, says Jalali. The Taliban’s reign is seen as potentially emboldening to certain regional insurgencies, including the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a militia with aims to displace the Pakistani government and establish an Islamic emirate; the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a militant group seeking to overthrow the Uzbek government and install an Islamic system; and the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, which seeks an independent state of “East Turkistan” within China. There’s also a risk of global jihadist groups, like al-Qaeda and ISIS, inspiring and recruiting extremists worldwide.

Fears of insurgency from Taliban-allied groups serve as a strategic advantage for the Taliban, says Jalali: “The countries who think they could be potentially threatened by these groups, they try to establish relations with the Taliban to secure their stability.” (A spokesperson for the Taliban’s foreign affairs ministry did not agree to an interview.)

Some regional powers seek stability by forging economic ties with Afghanistan. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are working with the Taliban to develop railway corridors, strengthen Uzbek–Afghan energy deals, and construct a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to India that would cut through the country. In late November, Iranian and Taliban officials agreed to bolster bilateral trade.

Some analysts, says Jalali, believe that engaging further with the Taliban might “open the door” for foreign countries to exert a moderating influence on the Taliban’s extremist policies. “But it is not certain which should come first: Recognition in order to change the Taliban behaviour or policies? Or the Taliban [changing] their policies in order to make these countries [recognize them]? This has not been resolved.”

Mehran believes any engagement with the Taliban is unethical: “Emboldening a regime of terrorists who have been producing extremism and suicide bombers, [that’s not going to] serve anyone’s economic, political, or security interest, neither in the short term nor in the in the long run.” Interactions with Afghanistan, she says, “should be based on keeping the Taliban accountable, not empowering and strengthening them.”

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In 2024, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia began the process of taking the Taliban to court at the International Court of Justice over the group’s discriminatory laws against women. If they were to win the case, it might open the door to further sanctions against the Taliban. (In July 2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for two top Taliban officials on the grounds of persecution of women and girls.)

But Marilou McPhedran, an independent senator who has worked closely with Afghans in humanitarian situations for decades, and who was involved in efforts to resettle Afghans after the Taliban’s return, worries Canada’s principled stand may be gradually slipping.

This past fall, Prime Minister Mark Carney said, at the G20 summit in South Africa, that he would not describe his government’s foreign policy as being feminist, in contrast with the previous government under Justin Trudeau. The declaration is part of a broader change McPhedran finds worrying. She fears that planned cuts to the federal public service and the extension of a moratorium on processing applications for some types of private sponsorship of refugees will shrink the resources needed to help Afghans wishing to study, work, or resettle in Canada.

Afghan activists, including Mehran, have been lobbying for the UN to recognize gender apartheid as a crime against humanity under international law and to declare Afghanistan under the Taliban an apartheid state. While there are other mechanisms to hold Taliban members accountable for some transgressions, says Mehran, there is currently no way to prosecute the totality of what the Taliban have done to Afghans.

Codifying gender apartheid is a years-long effort, requiring a critical mass of UN member states to support the motion. This is something McPhedran believes should be a priority for Canada. Because Canada’s UN decisions come from the federal government, and the prime minister in particular, the codification needs to be a priority for both. But, she adds, “I haven’t seen much evidence at all which would make me feel optimistic about the prime minister considering this a sufficient priority to which he should give his attention.”

The UN has tried to advance talks with the Taliban, setting out conditions that might eventually grant the regime more international legitimacy and perhaps even formal UN membership. These ongoing negotiations, dubbed the Doha process, have been beset by controversy, with Taliban members refusing to meet with women or Afghan civil society members and proceedings of the meetings not made public.

The Taliban’s rigid stance has triggered pushback: this past October, their foreign minister sparked outrage after holding a press conference at the Afghan embassy in Delhi to which no women journalists were invited. He held a second conference within forty-eight hours, claiming the exclusion wasn’t intentional; a widely-circulated photo of the latter event shows mostly women journalists occupying the front row of seats.

In 2023, the UN Security Council passed a resolution recommending the appointment of a special envoy who would monitor steps taken by the Taliban to restore the rights of women and girls. But due to opposition from countries including Russia and China, that proposal has made little progress.

In the long term, things could look different. The Taliban are losing the support of Pakistan, formerly one of their biggest allies, in part because the group has allied with the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan. The Taliban’s warming relations with India, Pakistan’s rival, haven’t helped.

There are also fractures within the Taliban, whose ultraconservative leadership is based in Kandahar. Some suspect that more flexible officials in Kabul and elsewhere might be amenable to easing restrictions on girls’ education, for example. “They differ on policies, but not to the extent that they will undermine the survival of the regime,” says Jalali. “With the economic decline, with the population’s frustration, with international neighbouring countries’ concerns, that can change.”

When it comes to international intervention, Shukria Barakzai, a former member of Parliament for Afghanistan who has also previously served as ambassador to Norway, would like to see the Taliban replaced by an interim government, under the auspices of the UN, to help lead Afghanistan through democratic elections and support the country through a transitional justice process.

“The only legitimate, civilized front line today is women in Afghanistan,” says Barakzai. If there are future efforts to negotiate with the Taliban, to transition the country into a true democracy, any nation-wide talks need to be led by women, “because we are not anymore victims,” she says. “We are the survivors.”