Taliban

• 1. Introduction

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  In August 2021, the Taliban occupied the Presidential Palace in Kabul after incumbent President Ashraf Ghani fled to the United Arab Emirates. Within days, a movement that had started in the religious schools of Kandahar in 1994 had retaken control of an entire country. The questions that follow from this moment are not simple ones. How did a student movement rooted in Pashtun nationalism and Deobandi Islam manage to outlast a twenty-year military campaign by some of the world's most advanced armed forces? What did their rule actually look like for the Afghans who lived under it? And what does the world make of a government that, as of 2026, has received diplomatic recognition from only one country on earth?

• 2. From Students to Soldiers

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  The word Taliban comes from the Pashto ṭālibān, meaning students, borrowed from the Arabic ṭālib. That origin is not incidental. The movement emerged in the early 1990s from a generation of young Afghans shaped almost entirely by war and exile. Author Ahmed Rashid describes the refugee students who formed the early Taliban as men raised in a totally male society with no education in mathematics, science, history, or geography, and no traditional skills of farming, herding, or handicraft-making. For many of them, war meant employment and peace meant unemployment.

  About 90,000 Afghans, including Mullah Omar, were trained by Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence Agency during the 1980s while fighting Soviet forces. Nearly all of the Taliban's original leaders had fought for either the Hezb-i Islami Khalis or the Harakat-i Inqilab-e Islami factions of the Mujahideen. Pakistan was heavily involved in creating the Taliban in 1994, and the movement's roots lay in the religious schools of Kandahar, shaped by support from both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

  The Afghanistan the Taliban entered was already shattered. After the Soviet-backed government fell in April 1992, rival militia factions tore Kabul apart. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's forces, receiving operational and financial support from Pakistan's ISI, destroyed half of Kabul in fighting against the interim government. Ceasefires negotiated by Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud or officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross commonly collapsed within days. Into this disorder, the Taliban offered something rare: a claim to end it.

• 3. The First Emirate

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  Mullah Omar founded the Taliban in Kandahar and seized Kabul in 1996, establishing the First Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. By 2001, the Taliban controlled approximately 85 percent of Afghanistan's territory. The Northern Alliance, which maintained international recognition as a continuation of the Islamic State, remained the principal opposition.

  The regime that governed from 1996 to 2001 left a record that is hard to condense. A 55-page United Nations report documented fifteen systematic massacres between 1996 and 2001, with UN officials stating that they all led back to the Taliban Ministry of Defense or to Mullah Omar himself. On the 8th of August 1998, Taliban forces attacked Mazar-i-Sharif; of 1,500 defenders, only 100 survived the initial engagement. Once in control, Taliban forces killed people indiscriminately, targeting Hazaras in particular. Women were raped, thousands of people were locked in containers and left to suffocate, and the death toll reached an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people. Ten Iranian diplomats and a journalist were also killed during the attack, prompting Iran to deploy some 250,000 personnel along the Afghan border by mid-September.

  In 1998, the United Nations accused the Taliban of denying emergency food from the UN's World Food Programme to 160,000 hungry and starving people for political and military reasons. The UN stated the Taliban were using humanitarian assistance as a weapon of war. In the town of Istalif, home to more than 45,000 people and known for its handmade pottery, the Taliban gave residents 24 hours to leave and then completely razed it.

• 4. Ideology and Control

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  Taliban spokesmen described their system plainly: decisions were based on the advice of Amir-ul Momineen, and consultation was not considered necessary. Mullah Omar visited Kabul only twice while in power. Scholarship places the Taliban's ideology on the far-right of the left-right political spectrum, describing it as an innovative combination of Pashtun tribal codes with radical Deobandi interpretations of Islam.

  The prohibitions that defined daily life under the first regime were extensive. The Taliban forbade music with instrumental accompaniments, television, filming, and the internet. Recreational activities including football, chess, kite-flying, and the keeping of pigeons were banned. Photographs and portraits were forbidden as forms of idolatry, extending even to blacking out illustrations on packages of baby soap and painting over road-crossing signs for livestock. Movie theatres were closed and repurposed as mosques.

  In 2000, Mullah Omar officially banned opium cultivation and drug trafficking. By 2001, the Taliban had succeeded in nearly eradicating 99 percent of opium production. The same leader who banned opium had earlier allowed his forces to tax truckloads of it at 20 percent, calling it zakat. Critics pointed out that traditional Islamic zakat is limited to 2.5 percent of disposable income.

  In rural areas, the Taliban exercised less direct control than in cities like Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar, and promoted village jirgas to manage local affairs. Mullah Omar's own decision-making, however, had moved well beyond the jirga model. His spokesman explained: there will not be a head of state, there will be an Amir al-Mu'minin, and general elections are incompatible with sharia.

• 5. Women, Education, and Cultural Destruction

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  Physicians for Human Rights stated that no other regime had methodically and violently forced half of its population into virtual house arrest. Women were required to wear a burqa at all times in public, to be accompanied by a male relative, and were banned from most employment. Female employment was limited to the medical sector, where male medical personnel were prohibited from treating women and girls. This restriction had a cascading effect: because almost all teachers before the Taliban's rise had been women, the ban on female employment led to widespread closure of primary schools, cutting off education for boys as well as girls.

  A 1998 UNICEF report found that nine out of ten girls and two out of three boys did not enroll in schools. By 2000, fewer than 4-5 percent of all Afghan children were being educated at the primary school level. A young woman named Sohaila was publicly flogged with 100 lashes in Ghazi Stadium after being caught walking with a man who was not a relative.

  In March 2001, the Buddhas of Bamiyan were destroyed with dynamite on orders from Mullah Omar. The two monumental statues, carved into a cliff in the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan, dated to the 6th century. In October of the same year, Taliban fighters took sledgehammers and axes to thousands of years' worth of artifacts in the National Museum of Afghanistan, destroying at least 2,750 ancient works of art. The Puli Khumri Public Library, which contained over 55,000 books and manuscripts, had been destroyed on the 11th of August 1998. In the early 1990s, the National Museum had already lost 70 percent of its 100,000 artifacts to looting.

  Khaled Hosseini learned through a 1999 news report that the Taliban had banned kite-flying, a restriction he found particularly cruel. The news struck a personal chord, as he had grown up with the sport while living in Afghanistan. He was motivated to write a 25-page short story about two boys who fly kites in Kabul that he later developed into his first novel, The Kite Runner.

• 6. Return and Second Rule

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  In May 2021, under the leadership of Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban launched a military offensive that culminated in the fall of Kabul in August 2021. As of the 23rd of July 2021, they controlled over half of Afghanistan's 421 districts. By mid-August, they held every major city. The Islamic Republic was dissolved and the Islamic Emirate reestablished.

  Following their return to power, the Afghan government budget lost 80 percent of its funding. Approximately US$7 billion in Afghan assets held in American banks were blocked. According to the United Nations World Food Program country director Mary Ellen McGroarty, 22.8 million Afghans were already severely food insecure by late 2021, with seven million on the brink of famine.

  Journalist Jon Lee Anderson, who conducted interviews with senior Taliban leaders in 2021-2022, reported that they emphasized the relative moderation of their revolution and expressed a desire for constructive relations with the United States. Anderson noted that the Taliban's earlier campaign against images and iconography had largely been abandoned, a change he linked to the ubiquity of smartphones and social media. However, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid's claim that girls would be permitted to attend secondary school once frozen bank funds were released did not hold. In March 2022, the Taliban abruptly halted plans to allow girls to resume secondary school. On the 21st of December 2022, the Taliban revoked all plans for gender-inclusive education and instituted a ban on all education for girls and women around the country, alongside a ban on female staff in schools.

  In November 2021, a Human Rights Watch report stated that the Taliban killed or forcibly disappeared more than 100 former members of the Afghan security forces in the three months following their takeover, in the provinces of Ghazni, Helmand, Kandahar, and Kunduz. In December 2024, the Taliban's health ministry banned women from being trained in nursing and midwifery, reversing an earlier February 2024 decision permitting basic medical training. In July 2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Taliban leaders over their alleged persecution of women in Afghanistan. As of 2026, only Russia has granted the Taliban government diplomatic recognition.