The Doha Agreement was born of a comforting illusion. It promised that the Taliban—once granted legitimacy and a path to power—would abandon the absolutism that defined their past and move toward political inclusion, counterterrorism cooperation and respect for basic human rights.
Instead, the world learned a familiar lesson: movements built on rigid ideology do not moderate simply because diplomats hope they will.
Four years after the deal, Afghanistan stands as a case study in how wishful statecraft collapses. Every major Taliban commitment has been violated. The inclusive political arrangement imagined by Doha never materialized.
In its place emerged an insular clerical order dominated by the Taliban’s own loyalists, a narrow caste of hardline decision-makers with little interest in national cohesion.
Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and other communities—who collectively form the country’s demographic majority—were sidelined systematically. Women, meanwhile, were erased from public life altogether, barred from schools, workplaces, and even basic civic spaces.
What diplomats described as “inclusion” was dismissed by the Taliban as Western interference, irrelevant to their vision of governance and antithetical to the ideological purity they seek to impose.
Their counterterrorism assurances proved equally hollow. Despite the language of the agreement, Afghanistan has again become a permissive environment for extremist networks that thrive on weak institutions and ideological alignment.
Elements of al-Qaeda have quietly reestablished footholds in parts of the country, exploiting the Taliban’s factionalism and the regime’s inability—or unwillingness—to enforce its own pledges.
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Regional militants, including groups operating along the Afghanistan–Pakistan frontier, move with relative ease across porous borders. The Taliban’s fight against the Islamic State-Khorasan Province has been noisy but insufficient; fractured command structures, internal rivalries, and doctrinaire governance have created precisely the kind of vacuum in which violent groups adapt and expand.
The humanitarian catastrophe consuming Afghanistan is often reduced to sanctions and the freezing of state assets, but this narrative obscures a deeper truth: a significant portion of the suffering is engineered by the Taliban themselves. They appointed loyalists with no administrative experience to crucial ministries, sidelined technocrats, and transformed governance into a spoils system.
They obstructed NGOs through arbitrary edicts and bureaucratic hostility, and they banned Afghan women—the backbone of community-level aid delivery—from working with humanitarian organizations.
The result was predictable: rising poverty, collapsing public services and an aid system forced to operate through increasingly narrow channels. The Taliban’s attempts to rule through fear rather than competence have hollowed out an already fragile state, turning a difficult situation into an acute catastrophe.
Doha never accounted for these outcomes. It rested on assumptions of mutual obligation, of a shared desire for legitimacy, of a basic respect for international norms.
The Taliban interpreted it instead as validation of their victory and a license to rule unrestrained. With foreign forces gone and Western leverage evaporated, they had little incentive to honor commitments that never aligned with their worldview in the first place.
Yet much of the international community continues to speak as if Doha can still be salvaged. It cannot. The agreement belongs to a geopolitical moment that no longer exists, and treating it as a viable roadmap only empowers the Taliban to invoke diplomacy while ignoring its substance.
The uncomfortable truth is that Afghanistan will not find stability through quiet engagement with a regime that has no interest in reform, pluralism, or adherence to the very principles it signed onto.
A new strategy must begin by shifting focus to the Afghan democratic opposition—those political leaders, civil society figures, women’s rights advocates and representatives of excluded ethnic communities who continue to articulate a vision grounded in the country’s diversity.
Recent efforts in Brussels to convene these voices are not symbolic gestures; they represent a more credible path forward, one that treats non-Taliban Afghans as legitimate interlocutors rather than historical footnotes.
The West must also rediscover coherence. Washington and Brussels have drifted into parallel, and at times contradictory, policies toward Afghanistan. Counterterrorism, humanitarian access, women’s rights and political representation have been handled as separate files rather than interconnected parts of the same crisis. A fragmented approach only strengthens the Taliban’s hand.
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The world did not simply misread the Taliban; it misread the stakes. The consequences of Doha’s failure are no longer confined to Afghanistan’s borders. Extremist networks are once again extending their reach. Migration pressures are straining European systems.
Regional tensions are sharpening as neighboring states confront cross-border militancy and economic instability spilling outward. A failing Afghan state is not a distant tragedy—it is a direct global challenge, one growing more acute with each passing year.
The belief that the Taliban would evolve was not just naive—it was a strategic error that allowed an extremist movement to consolidate power under the cover of international legitimacy. The task now is to confront that mistake with clarity, not nostalgia.
Afghanistan needs a new international framework rooted in realism, grounded in accountability and anchored in the democratic aspirations of Afghans who refuse to surrender their country to the darkest version of its past.
The world bet and lost on Taliban moderation. The cost of repeating that mistake would be far greater.
Advocate Mazhar Siddique Khan is a Lahore-based High Court Lawyer. He can be contacted at [email protected].
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