A week ago tonight, Taliban fighters entered Kabul.
Afghanistan’s government disappeared with astonishing speed. President Ashraf Ghani fled. The Taliban occupied the presidential palace. Twenty years of American-backed government effectively ended.
This week, the images have changed.
The battlefield has been replaced by an airport.
Thousands of Afghans have crowded outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, desperate to leave the country. American soldiers now control the airport while the Taliban controls much of the city surrounding it.
On Monday, horrifying images showed Afghans clinging to an American military aircraft as it moved down the runway.
People were so frightened of what might happen under the new government that some apparently believed holding onto the outside of an aircraft was a better option than remaining behind.
That may be one of the most devastating political images I have ever seen.
But something else happened this week too.
The Taliban began governing.
Its leaders held a press conference.
They declared an amnesty for former opponents.
They said women would have rights within Islamic law.
They said they did not want revenge.
They attempted to present themselves not simply as the insurgency that defeated America, but as the government that will now rule Afghanistan.
That creates an entirely different test.
Winning a war requires making your enemy stop fighting.
Governing requires millions of people to continue living under you afterwards.
The Taliban has proved it can do the first.
We are about to discover whether it can do the second.
The airport tells us something important
The scenes at Kabul airport are not simply evidence of poor evacuation planning.
They are a measure of political confidence.
People reveal information through what they are willing to sacrifice.
Thousands of Afghans are willing to abandon homes, jobs, possessions and sometimes family members for the possibility of getting onto an aircraft.
That tells us something about how at least part of the population evaluates Taliban promises.
They don’t trust them.
Perhaps some fears will prove exaggerated.
Perhaps others will not.
But politically, trust matters even before we know which prediction is correct.
A government cannot simply announce:
Trust us. We have changed.
Trust is accumulated through behaviour.
The Taliban ruled Afghanistan before.
Afghans remember what that rule looked like.
Women faced extraordinary restrictions.
Girls were largely excluded from secondary education.
Political opposition was not tolerated.
Public punishments were severe.
The Taliban is therefore not beginning with a blank reputation.
It is asking Afghans to believe that an organisation they already experienced once will behave differently the second time.
That is a much harder task than issuing a press release.
The Taliban’s press conference was surprisingly calculated
On Tuesday, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid appeared before journalists in Kabul.
The presentation itself seemed designed to communicate something.
This was not simply a group of fighters celebrating victory.
The Taliban wanted to appear governmental.
Mujahid promised that there would be no revenge against people who had worked with the previous government or foreign forces.
He said women would be permitted to work and study within the framework of Islamic law.
He said private media could continue operating, although within limits.
Internationally, these statements attracted enormous attention because they sounded different from memories of Taliban rule between 1996 and 2001.
But there is an obvious problem.
“Within Islamic law” can mean very different things depending on who interprets Islamic law.
The meaningful question is therefore not what Taliban spokesmen say in Kabul.
It is what Taliban officials actually do across Afghanistan.
Can girls attend school?
Can women work?
Can journalists criticise the government?
Can former officials remain safely in their homes?
Can political opponents organise?
Statements create expectations.
Behaviour determines whether those expectations deserve to survive.
Why would the Taliban moderate at all?
It is tempting to assume that because the Taliban has won militarily, it has no reason to compromise.
I don’t think that is correct.
The Taliban has inherited a country.
That comes with costs.
Afghanistan is heavily dependent on foreign assistance.
Its economy needs access to the international financial system.
Government employees need salaries.
Imports need financing.
Hospitals need medicine.
Infrastructure needs maintenance.
The Taliban can seize the central bank building.
It cannot manufacture international confidence by occupying it.
That gives foreign governments leverage.
If the Taliban wants international recognition, access to money and normal diplomatic relationships, it has incentives to behave differently from the government it operated twenty years ago.
This does not mean it necessarily will.
Ideology matters too.
But incentives matter.
And the Taliban’s incentives changed dramatically the moment it captured Kabul.
An insurgency benefits when the government fails.
A government suffers when the government fails.
The Taliban has crossed from one side of that equation to the other.
Yesterday’s problems now belong to the Taliban
This is perhaps the strangest consequence of victory.
For twenty years, the Taliban could blame Afghanistan’s government for corruption, unemployment, insecurity and dependence on foreigners.
Now it owns the complaints department.
If electricity fails, it is the Taliban’s problem.
If government salaries are not paid, it is the Taliban’s problem.
If food prices rise, it is the Taliban’s problem.
If hospitals cannot function, it is the Taliban’s problem.
If another armed movement attacks civilians, protecting those civilians becomes the Taliban’s responsibility.
Opposition movements possess a political luxury governments do not.
They can define themselves by what they oppose.
Governments eventually have to define themselves by what they provide.
That transition destroys many revolutionary movements.
It is considerably easier to promise justice than to administer a national budget.
America has frozen Afghan reserves
The economic question is already becoming important.
Afghanistan’s central bank holds billions of dollars in reserves, much of which is held abroad.
The United States has moved to prevent the Taliban from accessing Afghan government reserves held in American institutions.
The International Monetary Fund has also suspended Afghanistan’s access to certain resources amid uncertainty over international recognition of the new government.
From an American perspective, this makes sense.
Why immediately hand billions of dollars to an organisation the United States fought for twenty years?
Financial access creates leverage.
But there is another side.
Afghanistan’s economy does not belong only to the Taliban.
It belongs to approximately 38 million Afghans who now happen to live under Taliban control.
If financial isolation contributes to an economic collapse, Taliban officials will not be the only people who suffer.
Ordinary Afghans will.
That creates a sanctions problem similar to the one I wrote about with Belarus and Cuba.
Punishing a government and punishing the population governed by it are extremely difficult to separate.
Recognition is going to become complicated
No major Western government appears eager to recognise a Taliban government.
That is understandable.
But what does recognition actually mean?
It does not necessarily mean approval.
Countries maintain diplomatic relations with governments they dislike all the time.
Recognition can simply mean acknowledging a political fact:
these are the people who control the state.
Yet recognition also gives legitimacy.
It allows diplomatic representation.
It can affect access to international institutions and assets.
It signals that a government has been accepted into the normal system of international relations.
Foreign governments therefore possess something the Taliban wants.
The question is how to use it.
Recognise immediately, and they surrender leverage.
Refuse recognition forever, and they may surrender influence.
Conditional engagement may be the uncomfortable middle.
Tell the Taliban exactly what behaviour would produce greater diplomatic and economic cooperation.
Then judge actions.
Not promises.
But how enforceable are conditions?
Suppose America says:
Girls must be allowed to attend school.
The Taliban refuses.
What happens next?
Sanctions?
No recognition?
Aid restrictions?
Those measures impose costs.
But would those costs actually persuade Taliban leaders to change an ideological position they fought for decades to defend?
This returns to the sanctions problem.
Leverage exists only when the thing you are offering matters more to the other actor than the behaviour you want them to change.
The Taliban clearly wants some degree of international acceptance.
We don’t yet know what it is willing to sacrifice to obtain it.
That is the calculation foreign governments now need to understand.
Biden is defending the decision, not the execution
President Biden addressed the country on Monday and defended his decision to withdraw.
His central argument was essentially the one I have been struggling with since April:
If Afghan forces would not defend the country themselves, how many more years should Americans continue fighting for them?
That argument remains powerful.
But it also risks combining two separate issues.
Ending the war.
And preparing for the end of the war.
The scenes at Kabul airport make the second increasingly difficult to defend.
The United States knew it was withdrawing.
It knew Afghan interpreters and other partners might need evacuation.
It knew the Taliban was advancing.
It apparently did not expect Kabul to fall this quickly.
That intelligence failure has operational consequences.
Visas that might have been processed months earlier now have to be processed while people are standing outside an airport controlled by American troops inside a city controlled by the Taliban.
Timing is not a minor administrative detail.
It can determine whether somebody escapes.
“They should have fought harder” is not enough
There has been considerable criticism of Afghan security forces for collapsing.
Some of it is justified.
Soldiers surrendered.
Commanders made deals.
Political leaders fled.
But I think outsiders should be cautious before turning this into a judgement about Afghan courage.
Afghan soldiers have been fighting and dying in enormous numbers for years.
The United States increasingly shifted combat responsibility onto them long before American withdrawal.
Many Afghan soldiers continued fighting while foreign casualties declined dramatically.
The collapse of an institution cannot simply be explained by saying its individual members lacked bravery.
People operate inside systems.
When logistics fail, leadership collapses, salaries disappear and political authority evaporates, individual courage may not be enough to preserve an army.
Again, institutional failure is different from personal failure.
There is already resistance
The Taliban may control Kabul, but it does not necessarily control every part of Afghanistan uncontested.
In the Panjshir Valley, figures opposed to Taliban rule are attempting to organise resistance.
Ahmad Massoud, son of the famous anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, is among those calling for opposition.
Former Vice-President Amrullah Saleh has also positioned himself against Taliban rule.
It is far too early to know whether this develops into a significant military challenge.
But it reminds us of something important.
Capturing Kabul did not magically resolve Afghanistan’s political divisions.
The Taliban spent twenty years demonstrating that an armed movement can survive against a government that controls the capital.
It should understand better than anyone that controlling Kabul does not necessarily mean controlling Afghanistan.
Victory may therefore contain the seeds of another insurgency.
The terrorism question has not disappeared either
The Taliban is not the only armed Islamist organisation in Afghanistan.
Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, ISIS-K, is hostile to the Taliban.
That creates an almost bizarre reversal.
The Taliban, which spent twenty years fighting the Afghan government and foreign forces, may now become responsible for preventing another insurgent group from attacking Afghanistan.
Again:
yesterday’s government problems become today’s Taliban problems.
If ISIS-K conducts attacks, the Taliban will have to provide security.
If it cannot, its claim to effective government weakens.
Winning a civil war does not eliminate political violence.
Sometimes it simply changes which organisation has to stop it.
What happens to women will become the clearest test
Foreign governments will watch many indicators.
Terrorism.
Diplomatic behaviour.
Humanitarian access.
Economic policy.
But nothing will shape international perceptions of the new Taliban government more than its treatment of women and girls.
That may seem unfair from a purely geopolitical perspective.
Afghanistan faces many other problems.
But Taliban restrictions on women became one of the defining characteristics of its previous government.
The organisation itself has now deliberately claimed that things will be different.
That makes the issue a test of credibility.
If girls continue attending school and women remain in public life, it would provide evidence that the Taliban has changed in at least some respects.
If restrictions return, the opposite becomes clear.
The world should therefore resist both premature conclusions.
The Taliban has completely changed.
We don’t know that.
The Taliban has not changed at all.
We don’t know that either.
We have evidence from its previous rule.
We have statements from its current leadership.
Now we need behaviour.
Evacuation is the immediate priority
Whatever happens politically afterwards, the immediate responsibility of foreign governments is much simpler.
Get vulnerable people out.
American citizens.
Other foreign nationals.
Afghans who worked directly with foreign governments.
Interpreters.
Journalists.
Human-rights activists.
Others facing specific threats.
The evacuation is extraordinarily difficult because the Taliban controls access around an airport operated by foreign troops.
That means the United States is currently depending, at least partly, on cooperation from the organisation it spent twenty years fighting.
There is something almost surreal about that.
But it is also diplomacy in its most basic form.
You cooperate with an adversary on one narrow objective because both sides currently benefit from cooperation.
The Taliban wants foreign troops to leave.
America wants people to reach the airport.
For the moment, those interests overlap.
Nobody needs to trust anybody.
Geneva with Putin taught the same lesson in a completely different context.
Diplomacy does not require friendship.
It requires overlapping interests.
The Taliban now has something to lose
This may ultimately be the biggest difference between the Taliban of last month and the Taliban of today.
Last month it was an insurgency.
Today it possesses cities.
Government buildings.
Infrastructure.
Borders.
An economy.
A population.
International attention.
Potential diplomatic relationships.
Those are sources of power.
They are also vulnerabilities.
An insurgent movement can hide.
A government has an address.
It has responsibilities.
It can be sanctioned.
Its failures can be measured.
Its promises can be compared with its behaviour.
That gives Afghans and foreign governments different forms of leverage than they possessed during the war.
Not necessarily enough leverage.
But some.
Winning may have been the easier part
The Taliban fought for twenty years to return to Kabul.
It took the city in a day.
Now comes something potentially much harder.
Monday morning.
Then Tuesday.
Then every ordinary day afterwards.
Governments rarely collapse because they lose one spectacular battle.
They weaken through thousands of mundane failures.
A salary isn’t paid.
A hospital runs out of medicine.
A teacher stops showing up.
A business cannot import supplies.
A police officer takes a bribe.
A minority community stops trusting the state.
A young person decides there is no future and leaves.
These are not dramatic enough to appear on television beside Taliban fighters inside a presidential palace.
They are what governing actually consists of.
The Taliban has demonstrated extraordinary organisational discipline as an insurgency.
We do not yet know whether that organisation can transform itself into an effective state.
And perhaps that is the paradox of revolutionary victory.
For twenty years, the Taliban’s objective was clear:
remove the foreign forces and defeat the government they supported.
It has accomplished both.
Now every problem in Afghanistan becomes harder to blame on somebody else.
Last week, the Taliban proved it could destroy a political order.
This week, it has begun asking the world to believe it can construct one.
Those are entirely different skills.
The war may have been the examination the Taliban spent twenty years preparing to pass.
Government begins tomorrow morning.
