Raise the Price of Terror for Taliban

When armed zealots capture a state, they usually at least pretend to soften — a school reopened here, a woman back at work there — just enough to lure international praise. The Taliban hasn’t bothered. Since August 15, 2021, when it regained power in Afghanistan, it has whipped and stoned people for their thoughts and love lives, expanded its extremist creed, and provided sanctuary to multiple regional and international terrorist groups.

Still, some countries appear set to follow Russia’s lead in recognising the Taliban as legitimate, believing it the best way to manage a volatile and violent neighbour. It is not.

The Taliban shelters Al Qaeda and its affiliates, including Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is waging war on the Pakistani state and conducting regular cross-border attacks. Al Qaeda uses Afghanistan as a safe haven to continue its planning for attacks around the world. It runs terrorist training camps across the country.

The Taliban should be named a Foreign Terrorist Organization and listed under the United Nations’ Al Qaeda sanctions regime.

Four years after promising peace and “Islamic” rights, the Taliban has delivered suffocating absolutism. The economy is rotting under corruption, lawlessness, and inept rule. Yet money flows to expand the Supreme Leader’s personal army and to pack prisons with former soldiers and young women.

Girls are locked away at puberty or married off, sometimes to senior Taliban figures. Widows are barred from work, even in their own homes; international humanitarian organisations have bowed to pressure to dismiss women workers.

Representative politics has been replaced by arbitrary decree. Schools are dominated by madrassas, shrinking the futures of boys who are drilled in Islamist dogma, as well as denying girls any education at all.

There is no way to gauge what Afghanistan’s people truly want. Protest is throttled. Television, radio, YouTube, Facebook have been silenced or censored, and now feed a state narrative of pious leaders, unfairly punished by sanctions, bringing “true” Afghan values and security.

Despite the tight control on information and the collusion of media owners, however, the facts of Afghanistan’s horror are documented elsewhere. Two UN sanctions regimes — UNSC Resolution 1988 for the Taliban; 1989 for Al Qaeda and its affiliates — require annual reports by monitoring teams to the Security Council. The most recent report of the 1989 monitoring team, in July, again warned of the danger that the Taliban pose to global safety.

The report states that “the de facto authorities in Afghanistan continued to maintain a permissive environment for a range of terrorist groups, including Al-Qaida and its affiliates, posing a serious threat to the security of Central Asian and other countries”.

The message is unambiguous. Afghanistan under the Taliban is a haven for terrorist groups that threaten the stability of countries including China, Russia, and Pakistan, as well as the United States. The broader threat is to any country that does not bow to its warped, repressive, inhumane and criminal values.

The threat is measurable, both immediately and for the longer term. Mass Casualty TTP attacks in Pakistan have increased in 2025, as has retribution by the Pakistani military. Tajikistan has hardened its border with support of other Central Asian states. China and Pakistan met most recently in late July to focus on “immediate security concerns, particularly regarding Afghanistan”.

Meanwhile, inside Afghanistan, children are steeped in a culture of obedience, sacrifice, and misogyny, creating a generation primed for recruitment into violence against perceived enemies.

The strategic peril doesn’t stop at the region’s edge. From Gaza to China, from Syria to Libya, Lebanon, Mali, and Mozambique – and India — the Taliban’s success in seizing control of a state without law or consent is an example to others. Russia’s recognition risks dismantling the global consensus against terrorist groups, demonstrating that territory can be taken and held without legitimacy.

Believing the Taliban will fight ISIS to help the West, as successive U.S. Administrations have since 2021, is simply to embrace the myth of “good” versus “bad” terrorists. The international “over the horizon” policy is hollow, its only proof the 2022 drone strike that killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri who was living in Kabul under Taliban protection. Osama bin Laden’s sons live under Taliban protection today in Kandahar, with the Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada.

The opposite message is needed: until the Taliban ends its support for Al Qaeda, the TTP and the many other terrorist and jihadist groups under its purview, it must face additional consequences. It is not listed under the UN’s sanctions regime which applies to Al Qaeda and its affiliates, despite its clear hosting of those terror groups. It should be sanctioned under this regime. Taliban leaders travel freely. Travel bans must be honoured. Arms supplies must be shut off. Its rampant trade in illicit drugs must be stopped.

The cost of harbouring terrorists must rise until even the Taliban decides it is too high. To do otherwise is to accept the normalisation of terror, repression, misogyny, and violent jihad – everything that is anathema to our values and our safety.

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