The end of year special offers a stock-taking on the Taliban’s progress in building their Islamic Emirate and Afghan responses to it, based on a lecture at Queen’s University Belfast in December 2023. This is the final episode in series two.

One of the most remarkable developments since the Taliban returned to power in 2021 has been the development of Amir Haibatollah’s role as Amir. He has consolidated his hold over the Taliban administration, thus transforming a theory of absolute authority (the doctrine of obligatory obedience to the Amir) into a political reality. What the Taliban administration is now doing in Afghanistan is immensely consequential, firstly for Afghans but also for the wider world. In strengthening their control of revenue to fund the state, in reshaping the education system, in empowering Vice and Virtue to enforce a moral code, in building security forces supposedly comprised only of men who have waged jihad and are dedicated to attainment of martyrdom, in re-engineering Afghanistan’s ethnic balance of power and, fundamentally, in constructing the institution of an absolute Amir, unrestrained by law or constitution, the Taliban have progressed beyond their initial phase of state capture into state transformation. This whole process is of course immensely political. Taliban are re-imagining culture and power within their own movement, within broader Afghan society and, perhaps at the level of South and Central Asia. Although geo-politics have moved on from the immediate post 9/11 era, the profound nature of the changes underway in Afghanistan justifies continued study of the Taliban.

What can loosely be described as Afghanistan’s democratic and nationalist forces were shaken and scattered by the collapse of the Republic. Most of those who have tried to work with the Taliban’s Emirate have been frustrated, excluded from authority, responsibility and status. The different parts of civil society which have tried to organise within the country have been met with a harsh clampdown. Most officers and men from the old security forces fled to the neighbouring countries or the west, where they have organised in networks. But those remaining in or returning to the country have faced persecution, suspected by the Taliban of supporting the multiple resistance fronts’ guerrilla campaigns. Although opposition to the Taliban remains inchoate, the series of pro-resistance conferences held in late 2023 signalled an emerging Afghan consensus on the need for an effective political alternative to the Emirate.

Podcast produced by Colm Heatley.