By Mohammad Reha
Nearly five years have passed since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, yet the question of its legitimacy remains unresolved — neither domestically nor externally. The Taliban’s only claim to achievement has been the provision of security. Yet evidence on the ground shows that neither do people feel particularly secure, nor are the Taliban themselves safe from opposition forces. News sources report today that, for the first time, anti-Taliban forces briefly drove the Taliban out of control of the district administration building in Yaftal-e-Payan district, Badakhshan province, for several hours. Last month, people protested after the Taliban Taliban’s vice and virtue enforcers detained a few women in the street, allegedly for not wearing their hijab properly, which led to one protester being killed and several others injured due to the Taliban shooting at the crowd. In recent months, anti-Taliban resistance groups have claimed attacks in both Panjshir and Badakhshan provinces, and such attacks are increasing. Opposition movements claim to have carried out numerous attacks against Taliban forces since 2021, killing and wounding hundreds of Taliban fighters.
The worsening security situation — alongside the poor economy, unemployment, and the systematic denial of individual freedoms and human rights, especially women’s rights and diverse communities, which are all fundamental issues that have often received less attention than they deserve — has challenged the myth of Taliban control and nationwide security. This sparks speculation about whether Afghanistan is once again on the brink of another political transformation or collapse.
Many governments in Afghanistan have fallen throughout its modern history, and the early signs of these collapses are usually the same. The question that should come to mind is: why are there so many collapses in Afghanistan? Answering this can both clarify part of the puzzle of repeated ruptures throughout the country’s political history and shed light on the current situation, so that we may assess whether a similar future awaits the Taliban regime.
These recurring collapses are usually attributed to geopolitical factors, foreign interventions, intelligence games, structural inefficiency, or ethnic politics. Yet one important cause is rarely addressed as it should be: legitimacy. By political legitimacy, I mean the acceptance of a government’s authority as justified — the belief that its rule is rightful and its commands deserving of obedience. The other factors explain parts of the story, but they fail to account for a more fundamental internal problem: the basis of political legitimacy in Afghan history.
The modern Afghan state — with its central government, defined territorial sovereignty, administrative divisions, and regular army — developed during Abdul Rahman Khan’s reign in the late nineteenth century, though at the expense of severe repression of opponents, including the Hazaras. But while the institutional form modernised, the foundations of political legitimacy remained old-fashioned. These can be summarised in four elements: gender, blood, religion, and conquest.
Gender means the ruler must undoubtedly be a man — an assumption so widely accepted it is usually taken for granted, manifesting across Afghan political history in extreme forms of misogyny. Blood means the ruler must come from a specific lineage. While nearly all Afghan rulers have been Pashtun, not all Pashtuns qualified — traditional legitimacy recognised only certain families and bloodlines, not the entire ethnic group. In practice, however, this reads as ethnicity, and that is how most Afghans have understood it. The repeated reality that all ruling families are Pashtun has led both Pashtuns and other groups to frame the phenomenon in ethnic terms, even if the traditional criterion was always more specific than that. Religion means the ruler must carry Islamic justification. It is no coincidence that even Abdul Rahman Khan, who oversaw the greatest modernisation of the Afghan state, called his government an Emirate — a title with religious roots that made obedience to the Amir, as leader of Muslims, obligatory. The Taliban have done the same. Conquest means power must be seized through victory; the winning side automatically claims the right to rule and exercise authority.
Any regime that deviated from these foundations paid a price. Amanullah Khan’s downfall was partly triggered by his policies on women’s freedoms, which opponents labelled the “promotion of immodesty.” The issue of women remained a significant component of Islamist slogans throughout the resistance movements that followed. The surviving speeches of Abdul Ali Mazari, the leader of Hezb-e Wahdat, on equal rights for women within his party’s structure stand as a rare exception in the jihadist environment of that era. The other factions generally did not include women in their regulations or organisational structures — and justified jihad against the communist government precisely on the grounds that it had granted women rights and freedoms.
The communist government (1978–1992) broke from all three criteria of gender, blood, and religion simultaneously. They introduced mixed education, allowed women to leave their hair uncovered, and elevated figures like Sultan Ali Kishtmand — a Hazara from one of the most historically oppressed ethnic groups in the country — to Prime Minister for nearly eight years. It is even said that Babrak Karmal, one of the presidents from the Parcham faction, was originally of Tajik descent. These departures from traditional legitimacy, alongside external pressures and the brutality of the intelligence apparatus, which took the lives of thousands of intellectuals and innocent people, created the internal conditions for their collapse.
The Mujahideen, who emerged as the forces that defeated the communist government, drew from all ethnic groups and thus broke from blood-based legitimacy — despite their strong religious credentials. Both the communist and mujahideen movements represented, in different ways, a departure from the traditional social contract. By social contract, I do not necessarily mean the Rousseauian concept, but rather an informal political understanding — an unwritten set of expectations and beliefs about who has the right to rule and why the public should accept that authority. The communists diverged from all three criteria of gender, blood, and religion. The mujahideen departed primarily from the blood criterion. However, neither was able to establish a stable political order, because neither simultaneously held all the conditions that traditional legitimacy required, altogether.
The Taliban, by contrast, embodied all four criteria — especially blood and religion. This is why, in their first period of rule, no internal force was able to seriously challenge them. It took a direct American military intervention, following the September 11 2001 attacks, to remove them from power. The Taliban who held traditional legitimacy were not forced out by their own people — though it remains unclear how long they could have lasted regardless, given that the traditional social contract had already been fracturing for decades, and a new one had yet to take its place.
But here lies the core problem facing the Taliban today: the contract on which their legitimacy rests has lost its validity for a large part of the population. The fact that various ethnic groups specifically complain about the concentration of power among Pashtuns, or that the population has grown tired of strict religious law as a governing principle, shows that traditional legitimacy can no longer foster the social cohesion it once claimed to provide. Movements like Habibullah Kalakani’s nine-month rule in 1929, the communist period, and the mujahideen era each posed serious challenges to traditional legitimacy. None succeeded in replacing it with a new, stable framework. Afghanistan has never managed to build consensus around a new social contract — and so the cycle continues.
The Taliban’s four criteria — once the sources of authority — have now translated, for much of the population, into blatant ethnic discrimination, political Islam and ideology, gender apartheid, and coercion. These are no longer experienced as legitimating; they are experienced as oppression. The patience of the people will eventually run out, and when this human rights crisis is combined with hunger, unemployment, and insecurity, people might prefer dying once under a Taliban gun rather than enduring daily humiliation and hunger. When no avenue for protest remains but confrontation, people will seek their own sources of support — regardless of the consequences.
The Taliban show no signs of wanting to address this. They have rigidly and uncompromisingly anchored their authority in assumptions that history has already tested and found insufficient. Unless they — or some successor force — reconstruct the foundations of legitimacy on terms acceptable to Afghanistan’s diverse population, another collapse is not a matter of if, but when. The early signs are already visible: armed attacks in multiple provinces, growing public dissatisfaction, and a regime that has closed every avenue for legitimate protest or dissent.
The repeated collapses of the past, and this potential collapse once again, highlight an important and consistent lesson: conflicts that appear on the surface to be ethnic, partisan, ideological, or intelligence-related are, at a deeper level, conflicts between two versions of the social contract and two forms of political legitimacy. The old contract is worn out. The new one has never been agreed upon. Until that foundational dispute is resolved, Afghanistan’s ongoing political dilemma will persist.
The question then becomes whether, for once, Afghan history might demonstrate a degree of maturity — discarding the old criteria before falling back into the vicious cycle of war, and achieving instead a new social contract through dialogue, one where political power derives its legitimacy from universal human principles and where the standards of politics are equality, freedom, and citizenship. This is a change Afghanistan needs even outside the context of war. When considering the Taliban and the current situation, such an outcome seems almost miraculous. But only time will tell.
