PUBLISHED on November 9, 2025
Afghanistan’s story of political deception began not on the battlefield but at the negotiating table in Doha, where the world placed its trust in diplomacy and the Taliban mastered the art of deception. When the Doha Accord was signed in February 2020 between the United States and the Taliban, it was hailed as a framework for peace, promising an end to America’s longest war and the start of Afghan reconciliation. Yet five years later, the world finds itself faced with a broken agreement, a destabilized region and a regime that thrives on repression, radicalism and lies. The Taliban exploited peace to prepare for war, used diplomacy to consolidate terror, and transformed Afghanistan into a rogue state supported by drugs, fear, and militancy.
The Doha Agreement was based on four main pillars. The first and most fundamental pillar of the Doha Accord required that Afghan soil not be used to threaten the security of the United States or its allies. This clause required a clear separation from terrorist organizations, including Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. However, empirical evidence from the 35th report of the UN Sanctions Analytical Support and Monitoring Team (S/2025/71) reveals otherwise. The Taliban not only retained but deepened its operational and ideological collaboration with terrorist networks, including the TTP, ISKP, and al-Qaeda.
The report explicitly names Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) as “the largest terrorist group in Afghanistan”, sustained through financial and logistical support from the Kabul regime. It confirms that the Taliban makes monthly payments of 3 million Afghanis (US$43,000) to the family of TTP leader Noor Wali Mehsud, while the TTP runs training centers in Kunar, Nangarhar, Khost and Paktika.
These camps, once a breeding ground for Taliban fighters, have become regional centers of militancy where suicide operations and ideological indoctrination are managed jointly by members of the TTP and Al-Qaeda. The data paints a grim picture: Afghanistan has once again become the epicenter of terrorism that the Doha framework sought to dismantle.
The second commitment of the agreement was to foster intra-Afghan negotiations and establish an inclusive political structure representing all ethnic and political groups. The Taliban publicly accepted this principle, but in practice they destroyed it. The collapse of intra-Afghan dialogue in 2021 was followed by a military takeover that imposed authoritarian rule lacking diversity or democracy. Governance today remains the monopoly of Kandahari hardliners, with no representation of women, minorities or opposition groups. The Taliban’s so-called “Islamic Emirate” is sustained not by consent but by coercion. Their repression was particularly brutal towards women, the first victims of their ideological regression. A 2025 UN Women report, developed with EU support, ranks Afghanistan second in the world in terms of gender gap, with a 76% disparity in health, education and employment between men and women. The Afghanistan Gender Index reveals that women realize only 17 percent of their potential, compared to a global average of 60.7 percent. Seventy-eight percent of young Afghan women are now excluded from education, employment or training, and the secondary school completion rate for girls is plummeting to zero due to education bans. The Taliban Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice reintroduced gender apartheid, criminalizing women’s visibility in public life. These facts empirically refute the Taliban’s claim to inclusive governance and confirm their systematic violation of the second pillar of Doha.
The third pillar, the prisoner release clause, has proven to be the most catastrophic for regional security. The agreement mandated the release of thousands of Taliban detainees as a “confidence-building measure.” Yet this mass liberation became the resurrection of activism. Among those released were several hardened TTP commanders who quickly rejoined the battlefield, reviving networks that Pakistan’s counterterrorism campaigns had dismantled at immense cost. The results are quantifiable. In 2025 alone, Pakistan conducted 62,113 intelligence-based operations (IBOs), an average of 208 operations per day, against terrorist threats emanating from Afghan sanctuaries. These operations resulted in the death of 1,667 terrorists and the neutralization of 4,373 incidents, but at a high human cost: 1,073 martyrs, including 584 soldiers, 133 members of the security forces and 356 civilians. In Khyber district, which remains the frontline of this asymmetric war, 514 incidents occurred in 2025, resulting in 198 casualties, with 36 military and military personnel martyred and 138 injured. These figures reveal the direct consequences of the Taliban’s duplicity. Their promise of counterterrorism cooperation has been replaced by the facilitation of terrorism. The Taliban’s unfulfilled obligations have forced Pakistan into a perpetual defensive posture, spending lives and resources to contain a threat that should have been neutralized under the first and third Doha clauses.
The fourth and final commitment of the Doha agreement required the Taliban to normalize relations with the international community and demonstrate responsible governance. Instead, Afghanistan finds itself isolated, unrecognized by any major power, economically crippled and morally bankrupt. The regime thrives on narcotics and illicit trade, transforming the country into the world’s largest producer of opium.
Recent counter-narcotics operations in Pakistan’s Tirah Valley have revealed a worrying link: local poppy crops, grown on over 12,000 acres in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with profits of Rs 1.8-3.2 million per acre, are being transported to Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban, where they are refined into heroin and methamphetamine (ice). Even local politicians and tribal middlemen are complicit in this network, revealing the extent to which the Afghan economy has merged with the criminal world. This is not about governance; it is state capture by crime.
The behavior of the Taliban during the third Doha meeting, organized under the auspices of the UN in October 2025, further highlighted their hostility towards global norms. During the session, which brought together key international stakeholders to examine compliance with humanitarian aid and the fight against terrorism, the Taliban delegation refused to engage with Afghan civil society, women’s representatives or human rights defenders. Their delegates walked out of sessions that raised questions about inclusion and the ban on education, rejecting calls from UN and Qatari facilitators. This pattern was repeated during the Istanbul consultations, where Turkish mediators reported the same attitude of discontent and the same arrogance. Their refusal to cooperate, even with traditional allies, highlighted dangerous isolationism and an unwillingness to reform. Together, these two meetings demonstrated that the Taliban regime is not only flouting its previous commitments, but also rejecting any attempts to return it to a rules-based order.
Afghanistan exists today as a rogue, unaccountable, unrepentant and unreformed state. His regime violates international agreements, supports terrorism and tramples on the rights of its own citizens, all the while pleading its legitimacy to the world it deceives. The Doha experiment failed, not because diplomacy failed, but because the Taliban never intended to honor diplomacy. Their governance is not born of faith but of fear; their laws are not Islamic but despotic. Even as Pakistan continues to pay the price, with more than a thousand martyrs in 2025 alone, the international community must face the reality that the policy of appeasement has emboldened an extremist state in the heart of Asia. The Istanbul Dialogue, like the Doha negotiations that preceded it, revealed the futility of negotiating with actors who exploit diplomacy as a cover for aggression. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan today constitutes a case study of how peace without accountability breeds perpetual conflict. The world can no longer afford to have illusions; she must choose between confinement and complicity. And for Pakistan, the message is even clearer: stability cannot be entrusted to a neighbor who thrives on chaos, nor can peace be negotiated with those who sanctify deception as an art of governing.
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author
The author is an independent researcher with a background in political science, specializing in national and regional security, with a focus on critical strategic affairs. She can be contacted at [email protected] and followed on X @OmayAimen
