The Taliban government in Afghanistan is often described as temporary, brittle, or destined to collapse under the weight of isolation and economic failure. Yet nearly four years after their return to power, the more uncomfortable reality is that the Taliban are not a passing phase. Barring an external military intervention—which no major power is willing to contemplate—the Taliban government is likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future.
This endurance is not a product of legitimacy in the modern sense, but of power, structure, and the absence of viable alternatives.
The Taliban returned to Kabul in 2021 not as a loose insurgency, but as a disciplined military-political organisation that had spent two decades learning how to govern in parallel. During the years of war, they developed shadow administrations, courts, taxation systems, and chains of command across rural Afghanistan. When the Western-backed Afghan state collapsed, it did so not because the Taliban were overwhelmingly popular, but because the state itself had hollowed out. Corruption, factionalism, and dependence on foreign support left it unable to survive once that support was withdrawn.
Crucially, the Taliban now control the instruments that matter most in Afghanistan: territory, weapons, borders, and coercive authority. There is no nationwide armed resistance capable of challenging them. Opposition figures are fragmented, exiled, or politically irrelevant inside the country. Unlike the 1990s, there is no Northern Alliance backed by foreign powers, no regional proxy war waiting to ignite. Afghanistan’s neighbours—Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, and the Central Asian states—may distrust the Taliban, but none see regime change as a realistic or desirable goal.
International isolation, often cited as the Taliban’s weakness, has paradoxically strengthened their grip. Sanctions and the withdrawal of aid have devastated the Afghan economy, but they have also removed alternative centres of power. NGOs, civil society groups, and Western-linked institutions that once provided employment and influence have shrunk or disappeared. What remains is a political vacuum filled almost entirely by the Taliban’s own networks. In such an environment, survival depends less on economic performance than on control and fear.
The Taliban also benefit from a regional and global context that has shifted decisively away from interventionist nation-building. The United States has no appetite to return. Europe is consumed by Ukraine and domestic pressures. China and Russia prioritise stability over values, engaging the Taliban pragmatically to secure borders, suppress extremist spillover, and protect economic interests. No major power is willing to bear the cost—financial, military, or political—of trying to dislodge the regime.
Recognition, too, is no longer the decisive currency it once was. The Taliban have learned to operate without formal diplomatic acceptance, relying instead on functional engagement: trade, humanitarian coordination, border management, and security dialogue. For many states, dealing with the Taliban has become a necessity rather than a choice. Over time, this de facto engagement normalises their rule, even in the absence of de jure recognition.
None of this implies that the Taliban govern well. Their policies—particularly the systematic exclusion of women from education and public life—are morally indefensible and economically self-defeating. But history offers little comfort in assuming that bad governance leads inevitably to regime collapse. Authoritarian systems often endure not by delivering prosperity, but by suppressing dissent and monopolising power. The Taliban’s ideological rigidity, rather than weakening them internally, has created unity within their ranks and eliminated the internal factionalism that plagued previous Afghan governments.
The most important reason the Taliban are here to stay, however, lies outside Afghanistan. The international community has quietly accepted a lower standard of outcomes. Stability, however repressive, is now valued over transformation. Preventing terrorism, managing refugees, and avoiding another prolonged war have become the primary goals. In that calculus, the Taliban—predictable, centralized, and brutal—are seen as a known quantity.
Afghanistan today is governed not by hope, but by exhaustion. The Taliban did not win the peace; they inherited a vacuum left by failure, fatigue, and retreat. That vacuum has not been filled by any competing vision, either domestic or international.
For as long as that remains true, the Taliban government will endure—not because it is legitimate, popular, or just, but because there is no force willing or able to replace it.
