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

Five years after seizing power, the extremist group is making trade and diplomatic inroads with other countries

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........

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