Sovereignty without consent: Afghanistan’s Taliban and the limits of control

Five years after storming back to power, Afghanistan’s Taliban government wants the world to see a settled fact: a state that has outlasted predictions of collapse, kept its currency stronger than most of the region’s, and sat across the table, however unhappily, from neighbors who once swore they’d never deal with it. But sovereignty isn’t just the absence of civil war. It’s the ability to govern your own population, run an economy, and command the loyalty of your own clergy and security forces. Judged by that standard, the anniversary looks a lot less settled than Kabul would like anyone to believe.

A Health System Collapsing by Decree

The starkest failure here isn’t military — it’s medical. In December 2024, the Taliban banned Afghan women from studying medicine, nursing, and midwifery, shutting the last door women had into higher education and, with it, the pipeline meant to replace an aging female health workforce.

Under Taliban rules, male doctors can’t treat women without a male relative present, and in many cases can’t even examine them. Cut off the supply of new female doctors and midwives, and a growing share of Afghan women simply have no legal way to get care.

The projected cost is now measured in numbers, not just outrage. UNICEF estimates Afghanistan could lose 20,000 to 25,000 female teachers and health workers by 2030 if the bans hold, at a cost of roughly $84 million a year in lost economic output. A UN human rights expert went further in February, warning that the ban on medical education “puts the entire health system in jeopardy” and, left in place, “could amount to femicide.” That’s not the language of diplomatic hedging. It’s a warning that a government’s policy is now, by design or not, killing people.

Education tells much the same story, just at a larger scale. UNESCO reported this August that 2.4 million Afghan girls are shut out of secondary school — 200,000 more than a year ago — with the figure projected to climb toward 4 million by 2030. Afghanistan is still the only country on earth to formally bar girls and women from secondary and higher education. Two decades of progress, which had pushed girls’ enrollment toward a million by 2021, has been wiped out by decree.

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What makes this more than a grim statistic is that the Taliban’s own senior officials don’t buy the religious justification. Sher Abbas Stanikzai, the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister and a man who once led its negotiating team in Doha, has twice said publicly that the education ban is “personal choice,” not Sharia, and has urged the leadership to reverse it. Afghan clerics have echoed him since 2022, insisting Islam guarantees women’s right to an education. Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada hasn’t responded to any of it. Four years of internal religious objection, and the answer has been silence — which tells you more about where power actually sits in this system than any map of front lines would.

That silence is worth noticing precisely because the Taliban is perfectly willing to put its clergy to work when the cause is diplomatic rather than domestic. In December 2025, after border clashes with Pakistan, the Taliban gathered roughly a thousand clerics in Kabul — with the prime minister and senior ministers in the room — who issued a fatwa declaring Afghan soil must never be used to attack another country, plainly aimed at reassuring Islamabad. The clergy speaks up when Kabul needs a signal sent abroad. It goes quiet when the subject is half the population’s right to learn or be treated by a doctor. That contrast says something on its own about what this government actually considers negotiable.

An Economy Kept Alive, Not Growing

Afghanistan’s economic story usually gets flattened into two competing headlines — Taliban claims of resilience versus predictions of collapse that never quite landed. The truth sits somewhere less comfortable than either.

About $9 billion in Afghan central bank reserves remain frozen abroad — $7 billion in the US, the rest scattered across Europe — locking Kabul out of the international banking system entirely.

The World Bank does credit the economy with around 4.8% growth in fiscal year 2025 despite regional tension and closed borders with Pakistan, and the Taliban’s own Ministry of Economy points to a firmer currency and tamer inflation as proof it’s managing things well.

But growth from close to zero, propped up mainly by aid, remittances, and a trickle of cross-border trade, isn’t the same thing as a functioning economy. One recent analysis called it “a crisis in slow motion” — not a dramatic collapse but a slide into permanent dysfunction, kept upright by subsistence rather than production. Bank credit is negligible. Foreign investment has all but vanished. And more than two million Afghan migrants, forced back from neighboring countries over the past year, have piled fresh strain onto a labor market that has nowhere to put them.

Sovereignty Contested on Every Border

If frozen assets compromise the Taliban’s economic sovereignty, the militants it hosts — and admits it can’t fully rein in — compromise its territorial sovereignty just as clearly.

The relationship with Pakistan has gone from strained to openly violent. Between December 2024 and June 2026, Pakistani air and missile strikes across nine Afghan provinces killed or wounded more than 1,180 people, including women and children, and displaced upwards of 29,000 families, according to the Afghan rights group Rawadari.

Pakistan blames the Taliban for sheltering Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan fighters behind a wave of attacks at home, including February’s mosque bombing in Islamabad and the Bajaur assault days later. Round after round of Qatar- and Turkey-mediated talks in Doha and Istanbul fell apart in late 2025 over exactly this point — Pakistan wanted “clear, verifiable and irreversible action” against TTP; the Afghan side offered to detain and expel any TTP members found on its soil, but wouldn’t take responsibility for the group’s attacks inside Pakistan, insisting Kabul doesn’t control it.

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Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s interior minister and probably Pakistan’s best remaining line into the regime, has spent years trying to broker the very settlement Islamabad wants. He’s chaired jirgas, pushed ceasefires, and at points reportedly held TTP back at Pakistan’s request. He hasn’t managed to deliver a real crackdown, and the reason isn’t operational — it’s ideological. Reporting from the US Institute of Peace notes that Akhundzada himself agrees with the TTP’s view that the Pakistani state is “un-Islamic.” A mediator with real access but no authority to actually close the deal isn’t the same as a government moving toward resolution, and Pakistan’s military hasn’t waited around to find out — it’s kept striking into Nangarhar and Paktika even while the ceasefire nominally holds.

Even the countries willing to work with Kabul aren’t doing it out of confidence in how it governs. India is the clearest case. Since Pakistan-Afghanistan relations broke down, New Delhi has moved fast — reopening its Kabul embassy in October 2025, accepting a Taliban chargé d’affaires in Delhi that January, signing trade, mining, and pharmaceutical deals, and launching an air freight corridor between the two capitals, all while carefully avoiding formal recognition of the Taliban government.

Analysts tracking the relationship don’t dress up the motive: India is giving Kabul “an alternative to over-reliance on Pakistan” and making the most of the collapse in Kabul-Islamabad ties. It’s cooperation calibrated as much to Pakistan’s loss as to Afghanistan’s benefit.

Iran and the Central Asian states sit somewhere in between — pragmatic engagement layered over unease nobody’s resolved. Iran is pushing a proposed free-trade zone with Afghanistan and China even as its own Chabahar port, an India-backed corridor built specifically to route around Pakistan, was reportedly damaged in strikes during this year’s wider regional war. Uzbekistan has leaned hard into trade and connectivity, signing MoUs worth billions, despite carrying the same worries about cross-border militancy that its neighbors voice more loudly. Tellingly, when Iran, Pakistan, Russia, China, and the Central Asian states sat down together in Tehran, their joint statement called for lifting sanctions and unfreezing Afghan assets — a regional consensus that isolating Kabul isn’t working, even as those same governments keep pressing it, with little to show for it, to act against the TTP and groups like it.

What “Territory but Not Sovereignty” Actually Means

Put these threads together and they all point the same way. A government that can’t even grant its own senior minister’s request to reopen girls’ schools doesn’t fully control its own religious establishment. A government locked out of its own foreign reserves, surviving on remittances and aid, doesn’t control its own fiscal sovereignty. And a government whose interior minister can’t enforce a ceasefire against a group operating from its own soil doesn’t fully control its own security apparatus either.

That’s the more precise version of the claim that the Taliban holds territory without holding sovereignty. It isn’t just that TTP fighters slip across a colonial-era border nobody agrees on.

It’s that on every axis by which a state’s authority actually gets measured — its clergy, its economy, its security forces, and the basic rights of half its population — the Taliban’s grip turns out to be partial, contested, and, where women and girls are concerned, actively resisted from inside its own ranks and simply overruled by one man’s refusal to answer.

Five years is long enough to stop calling this a transition. This is the system working as intended — and the cost is being paid, predictably and disproportionately, by the Afghans the Taliban claims to govern in Islam’s name, by a state that still can’t police its own borders or touch its own money.

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