More than three years after the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, it’s again becoming an active base for Islamist militants—who are behind increasing attacks both at home and abroad.

Since August 2021, the Taliban appear to have offered havens to militant groups from Central Asia and Pakistan, and they’re again allowing al-Qaeda to manage its global operations from inside Afghanistan. Taliban members have joined the main Pakistani Islamist militia, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has been warring with the country’s government for years. At home, Afghan militants have been seizing foreigners as hostages—and exchanging them for jailed fighters and drug traffickers.

And lately, these militants have staged attacks farther and farther afield. In January 2024, a group of Afghanistan-based militants, Islamic State–Khorasan Province, bombed a funeral in Iran, killing and wounding almost 400 people. That March, four gunmen from the same group shot more than 150 people at a rock concert near Moscow. Then in June, U.S. officials arrested eight alleged members of the group, who were apparently plotting an attack in the United States.

How did things get to this point?

Nilofar Sakhi is a lecturer in international affairs at The George Washington University and the former executive director of the American University of Afghanistan. Sakhi says the growing insecurity in Afghanistan, along with its risks for the region and the West, come from the nature of the Taliban itself: Whatever else they may end up doing, they’re fundamentally a militant group. They now run the government; they insist they don’t have any connections to the Islamist organizations operating in the country; but they’re still essentially a militant group.

They have years—in some cases, decades—of history working with the other Islamist forces in the country. They share resources; members move from group to group; and they trust each other. They also share an ideological commitment to bringing all the world’s Muslims under the rule of their strict mode of Islam. And, Sakhi says, they’re building institutions for the next generations of militants. The Taliban have opened hundreds of madrasas—schools to teach the principles of Islam—but there’s evidence that the preachers in many of them are increasingly and intentionally encouraging violence in the name of religion …

Michael Bluhm: What’s the security situation in Afghanistan now?

Farid Ershad

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