In Kabul, the fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power is being celebrated as a victory. Black-and-white flags hang over the streets, posters glorify fallen fighters, and the official message speaks of independence and the end of an era in which foreign armies shaped Afghanistan’s future.
That image is not entirely artificial. After two decades of war, many Afghans did receive something they had long been denied: a measure of predictability. Checkpoints are no longer controlled by rival armies, the Taliban no longer bomb the government institutions they now run, and nationwide fighting has receded dramatically from its former scale.
Security is the achievement the Taliban cite most often. But five years into their rule, that claim is facing its first serious test. Armed opponents are becoming more active in northern provinces, relations with Pakistan are approaching open conflict in the east, and economic desperation and social resentment are accumulating at home.
As Daycom has previously assessed, Afghanistan is entering a dangerous phase in which authoritarian stability risks losing its central bargain: the idea that society may be stripped of freedom but will at least receive order in return. If order itself becomes fragile, the foundation of Taliban legitimacy begins to weaken.
The Taliban exercise power with little political competition and almost no institutional restraint.
Girls are barred from secondary and university education. Restrictions on women remain among the harshest anywhere in the world. Religious minorities face closures of places of worship, critics are repressed, and journalists and rights workers operate under the constant threat of arrest or disappearance.
This system does not seek consensus.
It seeks obedience.
The supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, reinforces control by placing trusted loyalists in key provincial positions whenever signs of dissent emerge. The center does not merely govern the country. It constantly checks whether an alternative base of influence is taking shape somewhere beyond its reach.
For several years, that system appeared durable because the broader war had ended.
Now cracks are appearing.
One of them is Badakhshan, the mountainous northeastern province bordering China, Pakistan and Tajikistan.
Attacks on Taliban officials, assassinations and local clashes have become more frequent there. In one district, a small anti-Taliban group briefly seized a police headquarters.
This is not yet a coordinated nationwide insurgency.
But for the Taliban, the danger is not only the size of the opposition.
It is the return of places where control has to be demonstrated with force.
Five years ago, the Taliban won in part because the previous Afghan state lost confidence in its own ability to hold the country. Districts collapsed faster than they were physically conquered.
For today’s rulers, preventing the reverse psychological process is essential.
Once people see that resistance is possible, their calculation of risk begins to change.
In Badakhshan, some residents are already willing to support anti-Taliban groups because of unemployment, the seizure of natural resources and the government’s suffocating control.
That is not a mass revolt.
But political erosion in apparently solid regimes often begins with local grievances that no longer remain private.
The second problem is much larger: Pakistan.
For decades, Islamabad was one of the external factors that helped the Taliban survive. Now relations between the former partners have moved dangerously close to direct military confrontation.
Pakistan has already carried out strikes inside Afghanistan, demanding that Kabul rein in militants attacking Pakistani territory.
The civilian death toll from those strikes has reached into the hundreds.
Underequipped Afghan forces now wait along the border as mutual suspicion deepens.
Islamabad accuses the Taliban of either refusing or failing to control armed groups operating against Pakistan.
The Taliban, in turn, suspect Pakistan of backing their own Afghan opponents.
Even if such support is limited or inconsistent, its possibility changes the strategic equation.
An armed underground becomes far more dangerous if it believes a neighboring state may have an interest in keeping it alive.
There is an almost historical irony in this for the Taliban.
A movement that spent decades exploiting cross-border geography as a strategic advantage is now confronting the same problem from the other side: its enemies may look beyond Afghanistan for sanctuary, money, weapons and political protection.
The third threat does not carry a rifle.
It is the economy.
Unemployment remains widespread. Cuts to international aid have deepened food insecurity, while extreme hunger is spreading through more provinces.
Millions of Afghans live under a government that can collect taxes and build roads, yet cannot generate enough jobs.
For a very young population, that combination is especially dangerous.
A huge pool of unemployed men in a country with decades of armed conflict is more than a social problem.
It is a recruitment pool for the next radical movement.
A person with no job, no political voice and no expectation of improvement is far more vulnerable to the promise that a gun can provide income, status or purpose.
The Taliban understand that mechanism better than most.
It helped sustain them through two decades of American-backed government.
Now the same mechanism can be turned against them.
The ban on girls’ education is particularly destructive in the long term.
Around 2.4 million Afghan girls have effectively been excluded from education beyond primary school.
This is not only a human-rights issue.
It is an economic policy with an enormous delayed cost.
Afghanistan is voluntarily eliminating a large share of its future doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs, civil servants and skilled workers.
Every year the prohibition remains in place deepens the damage.
A girl who loses five years of education cannot simply return to a normal trajectory the day the rules change.
An entire generation of human capital would take years to rebuild.
In that sense, the Taliban are not merely freezing Afghanistan in the present.
They are already constructing its weakness in the 2030s.
The government is trying to offset isolation through external pragmatism.
The Taliban have expanded trade with Central Asian states, built roads, dams and canals, engaged European governments over the return of Afghan migrants and signaled that they want renewed contact with the United States.
The logic is clear.
The outside world may dislike the Taliban, but it fears an unstable Afghanistan even more.
No government wants another mass refugee wave.
No government wants another international terrorism hub.
No one wants a surge in narcotics trafficking or another civil war.
That is the fatigue on which Kabul is betting.
The Taliban’s implicit offer to foreign governments is simple: do not demand political transformation from us, and we will give you a predictable Afghanistan.
For five years, that formula worked to some extent.
Now the question is whether it can continue to work.
The security the regime advertises is no longer absolute.
Armed opponents are active in the north.
Pakistan is striking in the east.
Islamic State remains a threat, even if its capabilities have been constrained.
Rare but telling protests are appearing in cities.
In June, demonstrators chanted: “Work, education, freedom.”
For the Taliban, the combination of those three words is particularly dangerous.
It connects economic, social and political dissatisfaction.
People may tolerate repression if life becomes more stable.
They may tolerate poverty if they can see a future.
They may accept harsh government if it guarantees order.
It becomes much harder to accept unemployment, hunger, no education, political silence and a return of insecurity all at once.
That is where separate crises begin to reinforce one another.
None of them, by itself, currently looks fatal to Taliban rule.
The armed opposition remains weak.
Pakistan is unlikely to want the complete collapse of its neighbor.
Economic hardship has lasted for years.
Mass protests remain rare.
But authoritarian systems often do not fail because of a single crisis.
They become unstable when several pressures begin feeding each other.
Unemployment makes armed recruitment easier.
Pakistani pressure weakens border regions.
Repression pushes dissatisfied citizens underground.
International isolation restricts investment.
The ban on female education erodes development.
Every crack makes the others more dangerous.
The Taliban still possess one crucial advantage: there is no strong nationwide rival.
There is no alternative government ready to take Kabul tomorrow.
There is no large army preparing to overthrow the regime.
There is no foreign coalition seeking to repeat 2001.
That is why predictions of imminent collapse would be premature.
But the fifth anniversary of Taliban rule reveals something else.
The movement has completed the phase of conquest.
Now comes the harder test: governing a country whose failures can no longer be blamed indefinitely on the previous government or foreign occupation.
After five years, every problem increasingly belongs to the Taliban.
Unemployment is theirs.
Hunger is theirs.
Education is theirs.
The conflict with Pakistan is theirs.
The repression is theirs as well.
In 2021, the movement could credibly tell Afghans: we ended the war.
In 2026, that is no longer enough.
Now it must answer a harder question: what did it build after victory?
The flags in Kabul offer one answer.
Closed schools for girls, checkpoints in Badakhshan, unemployed young men and Afghan troops facing Pakistan offer another.
Five years ago, the Taliban captured the state.
Now they have to prove they can hold the country through more than fear.
And if security was their greatest achievement, its gradual erosion may become the most dangerous challenge facing a regime that is celebrating its permanence.
