The United Nations efforts to mobilize regional and global support for a concerted international approach to the crisis in Afghanistan face significant challenges. A constellation of factors situated at the domestic, regional and global levels of analysis severely shrink the prospects for effective joint action to break the current impasse in Afghanistan.
In March 2023, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) requested the Secretary General to assess the situation in Afghanistan and to provide recommendations for “an integrated and coherent approach” among relevant actors to address the crisis in the country. The assessment report warned that the situation in Afghanistan had reached an impasse and that ad hoc and reactive engagement by individual states with the Taliban would have “dire consequences for the Afghan people and the entire region.” The assessment claimed that international stakeholders supported “coherent, coordinated and structured” engagement with Afghanistan and the “development of a common international approach.”
However, the development of a united approach to the crisis in Afghanistan faces formidable obstacles. At the domestic level, the Taliban’s unyielding stance on governance and basic rights and their continued affinity with foreign extremist groups will hamper positive international engagement with the group toward normalization. The Taliban are unlikely to compromise on these issues: their mode of rule and their associations with foreign extremist groups are rooted in their ideological commitments and serve to preserve the group’s internal cohesion; also, the Taliban can use such associations instrumentally as bargaining chips in their dealings with regional and global powers. Moreover, the presence, inside Afghanistan, of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant-Khorasan (ISIL-K), whom the Taliban are fighting, is an important element in shaping the policies of regional and global powers toward the group.
Regional countries have competing interests in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s return to power is in accord with the strategic interests of Pakistan and China, but goes against those of Iran, Russia and India. Pakistan views the Taliban’s seizure of power as the fruition of its decades-long policy of steering religious fundamentalist groups to power in Kabul to counter India’s influence there and to stifle the growth of Pashtun nationalism. It is, therefore, unlikely to put real pressure on the Taliban on issues such as human rights and the formation of a truly inclusive government, as this would undermine its maximalist Afghan policy.
Happy to see its global and regional rivals–that is, the US and India–lose ground in Afghanistan, China has decided to engage closely with the Taliban to get the latter’s cooperation in suppressing the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and in protecting its regional economic interests. China, too, is unlikely to put any pressure on the Taliban regarding basic rights and governance. Despite voicing support for “moderate and prudent governance” in Afghanistan, China has declared that it “respects the religious beliefs and national customs” of Afghans and that it will never interfere in its “internal affairs”–language that has stark resemblance to that employed by the Taliban to reject international demands on basic rights and governance.
The Taliban’s monopoly of power in Afghanistan runs counter to the strategic interests of Iran, Russia and India–the three states which supported anti-Taliban forces in the 1990s. Although more vocal about the formation of an inclusive government in Afghanistan, Russia and Iran have decided to engage closely with the Taliban, in part to counter what they consider the real threat emanating from Afghanistan– ISIL-K. They also have more pressing issues to deal with at present. India, too, has adopted a policy of limited engagement with the Taliban, hoping that it could get the latter’s cooperation in curbing the activities of extremist groups threatening India.
Lastly, the crisis in Afghanistan is not solely a regional issue, but an international one requiring international cooperation for its resolution. The prospects for such cooperation are dim at the current geopolitical climate. The US, which despite its sanctions on the Taliban remains the leading contributor to the humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan, has declared that normalization with the Taliban hinges on the latter’s meaningful cooperation on two fronts: counterterrorism and basic rights–including the formation of an inclusive government.
However, major powers in the region, in particular Russia, Iran and China, are suspicious of US intentions and seek to minimize American leverage in Afghanistan. They have opposed the US sanctions on the Taliban and its freezing of Afghanistan’s central bank funds, calling these measures “unilateral” and “illegal.” They have also raised doubts about the American counterterrorism policy and its real intentions in Afghanistan. Both Russia and China fear that the US might seek to use the situation in Afghanistan as a pretext for deploying military forces in Central Asia.
In 2022–shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine– the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, accused western powers of trying to use the UN “for creating artificial competition in international and regional efforts as regards Afghanistan.” More recently, at a meeting of the Moscow Format in 2024, Lavrov claimed that “the cynical policy of the collective West is pushing the situation in Afghanistan into a dead-end” and that the US and its allies were “hindering the revival of the Afghan state.” The distrust, hostility and acrimony evident in such statements does not bode well for UN efforts to effectuate international cooperation on the crisis in Afghanistan.
To conclude, the emergence of a common international approach to the crisis is highly unlikely–if not impossible altogether. Pursuing a security-dominant agenda in Afghanistan, regional powers effectively shield the Taliban from western pressure on issues such as human rights and the formation of a representative government. Assured of the absence of a united international front against them, the Taliban will likely seek to exploit such rivalries. The end result will be not the development of a common international approach, but the continuation of the current precarious situation marked by ad hoc engagement amid geopolitical competition.
