Five Years of Taliban Rule: What Has Actually Happened to Afghanistan Since the West Left?
On August 15, 2021, Taliban fighters entered Kabul. The Afghan army, which the United States and its allies had spent tens of billions of dollars building and maintaining, effectively disintegrated, President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and the twenty-year attempt to build an entirely different Afghan state ended with images of desperate people clinging to departing American aircraft.
At the time, the country’s future seemed almost predetermined. International aid was sharply reduced, the Afghan central bank’s foreign assets were frozen, qualified specialists tried to leave, and the banking system stood on the brink of paralysis. Many expected an economic collapse, another civil war, and Afghanistan’s transformation into an almost completely isolated state.
Five years have passed.
Afghanistan has indeed become a very different country — but not quite the one many imagined in August 2021. The economy collapsed and then began to recover. The war largely ended, but terrorism did not disappear. The Taliban received almost no formal international recognition, yet foreign diplomats increasingly travel to Kabul. The state has learned to collect more of its own revenue, while millions of Afghans still depend on international assistance. Streets have become safer from large-scale warfare, but for millions of women the space available for education, employment, and public life has dramatically contracted.
The fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power therefore offers a rare opportunity to separate the expectations of 2021 from what actually happened.
Economy: The Collapse Happened — But Afghanistan Then Stabilized
The initial shock was enormous. After the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan lost much of the foreign assistance that had effectively sustained the previous state. International financial transfers were disrupted, the banking system was severely constrained, investment stalled, and economic activity contracted dramatically. During 2021–2022, the country suffered a severe economic downturn and millions of people lost income.
Then something happened that many observers had not expected: the free fall stopped.
The World Bank recorded a return to economic growth. It estimated that Afghanistan’s GDP expanded by around 2.5% in 2024, while growth for 2025 was later projected at roughly 4.3%. Agriculture, mining, construction, and services became important drivers of the recovery. At the same time, domestic revenue collection improved as customs duties, taxes, and other sources of state income became far more important than under the previous donor-dependent system.
This is one of the Taliban government’s most noticeable achievements. It inherited a country in which a huge share of public spending had been directly or indirectly financed by foreign donors and was suddenly forced to operate without the previous flow of Western money.
Another unexpected factor was price stability. After the initial crisis, the afghani proved relatively resilient, while Afghanistan even experienced periods of deflation. In 2024, the World Bank recorded consumer-price deflation of roughly 6.6%.
But describing this as an economic miracle would be a serious mistake.
Growth is taking place from an extremely low base. Afghanistan’s population is also expanding rapidly, meaning that improvements in headline GDP do not necessarily translate into higher living standards for individual Afghans. The World Bank continues to highlight stagnant per-capita income, unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, a weak banking system, limited credit, and a widening trade deficit.
There is also another major problem — one created by the Taliban themselves.
By excluding large numbers of women from education and employment, the government is voluntarily restricting the country’s human capital. Girls remain barred from secondary education, while women have lost access to universities and many professions. By August 2026, around 2.4 million Afghan girls remained outside secondary education.
The economic verdict after five years is therefore paradoxical: the Taliban managed to stabilize an economy many expected to collapse completely, but the social system they have created is itself becoming one of the biggest obstacles to further development.
Security: This Is Where the Most Visible Change Has Occurred
If an ordinary Afghan were asked what has changed most since 2021, the answer might surprise many outside observers.
The war ended.
Not terrorism. Not violence in general. Not armed clashes along Afghanistan’s borders.
But the war that had consumed the country for almost twenty years effectively came to an end.
Before August 2021, an Afghan village could find itself caught between government forces, the Taliban, American air power, and various local armed groups. Explosions, airstrikes, firefights, and checkpoints were part of everyday life across large areas of the country.
After the Taliban victory, one side of that war simply became the government.
As a result, the overall level of combat fell dramatically. By the fifth anniversary of the takeover, residents of Kabul were still describing an important change: many felt safer on the streets than during the previous decades of war.
For the Taliban, this is probably their strongest domestic achievement. The central government controls virtually the entire country, while armed opposition groups have so far failed to create a threat comparable to the insurgency the Taliban themselves once posed to the former government.
But there are two major qualifications.
The first is ISIS-K — Islamic State Khorasan Province. The organization continues to carry out terrorist attacks and considers the Taliban its enemy. Taliban security forces are conducting a genuine counterterrorism campaign against it, but the organization has not been eliminated.
The second problem lies along Afghanistan’s eastern border.
Relations with Pakistan, which for decades was widely regarded as the Taliban’s most important external patron, have deteriorated into one of the region’s most dangerous disputes. Islamabad accuses Kabul of allowing Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan militants to operate from Afghan territory. The Taliban deny the allegations.
By 2025–2026, tensions had escalated into direct border clashes and strikes. Between February 26 and March 5, 2026 alone, UNAMA recorded 185 civilian casualties in Afghanistan, including 56 deaths, resulting from cross-border hostilities.
So the statement that “Afghanistan has become safer under the Taliban” is simultaneously true and misleading.
The large-scale internal civil war has largely ended.
But other security threats have taken its place.
Healthcare: The System Still Works — But Largely Because the Outside World Keeps Paying for It
This may be the greatest paradox of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
After 2021, the international community stopped financing the new government in the way it had supported the previous administration. But completely abandoning the Afghan population was politically and morally impossible.
The result was an unusual arrangement: the Taliban govern the country, while the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and international humanitarian organizations continue to support a significant share of essential social services.
For several years, this model helped keep the healthcare system functioning.
Then the money began to run short.
And the consequences appeared almost immediately.
In March 2025, the World Health Organization warned that as many as 80% of the healthcare facilities it supported were at risk of closure because of funding shortages. By March 4, 167 medical facilities in 25 provinces had already shut down, depriving approximately 1.6 million people of access to healthcare. More than 220 additional facilities were at risk of closing in the following months.
By May, more than 400 clinics had reportedly closed, affecting over three million people. The impact was especially severe in rural areas, where the nearest medical facility may already be dozens of kilometers away.
But once again, money is only part of the problem.
Taliban policies are beginning to directly affect the healthcare system’s ability to produce its own future workforce. Restrictions on women’s education undermine the training of female healthcare professionals, while in conservative Afghan society a male doctor cannot always fully substitute for a female physician, nurse, or midwife when treating women.
This creates an almost closed loop. The authorities demand strict separation between men and women while simultaneously restricting the education of the women who are supposed to become doctors, nurses, and midwives.
Healthcare therefore exposes one of the fundamental limits of Afghanistan’s current model: the state operates independently, but some of its most basic functions still rely heavily on an external humanitarian system.
Diplomacy: This May Be the Taliban’s Most Unexpected Success
In August 2021, it seemed entirely possible that the new Afghanistan would become an international pariah.
That happened — but only partially.
For almost four years, no country formally recognized the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations was not transferred to the Taliban government either.
Then the first breach appeared.
In July 2025, Russia became the first country to formally recognize the Taliban government. By the fifth anniversary of their return to power, it remained the only state to have done so.
But focusing only on formal recognition creates a misleading picture.
China maintains relations with Kabul and accepts Taliban diplomats. Central Asian states, Iran, Türkiye, India, and Gulf countries have expanded contacts. Even European governments that do not recognize the regime are increasingly forced to engage with it over migration, security, deportations, and humanitarian issues.
A distinctive diplomatic model has emerged.
Almost no one wants to say: “We recognize the Taliban government.”
But more and more countries are saying: “We have to talk to it.”
The reason is straightforward. Five years have passed, and the regime has not collapsed. It controls the territory, controls the borders, issues documents, manages customs, negotiates trade agreements, fights ISIS-K, and occupies an exceptionally important geographical position between Central and South Asia, China, Iran, and Pakistan.
International diplomacy has gradually confronted an uncomfortable reality: governments may refuse to consider the Taliban legitimate, but they cannot indefinitely pretend that there is no functioning authority in Kabul.
Yet the Taliban’s Diplomatic Success Has a Hard Ceiling
The central obstacle remains the status of women.
The Taliban may have expected that after the initial international outrage, the outside world would gradually adapt to the new reality. To some extent, that is exactly what has happened: diplomatic contacts are expanding.
But formal recognition remains extremely limited.
Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls are officially barred from secondary and higher education. Women face major restrictions on employment, movement, and participation in public life. By 2026, the United Nations was describing the situation of Afghan women as the world’s most severe women’s-rights crisis.
This has created a diplomatic trap.
Other countries are willing to trade.
They are willing to discuss security.
They are willing to negotiate migration issues.
They are willing to receive Taliban representatives.
But most are still unwilling to transform these contacts into full international legitimacy.
In other words, the Taliban are gradually escaping international isolation without substantially changing their domestic system — yet that same refusal to change prevents them from escaping isolation completely.
There Is Another Problem Few Expected in 2021: Millions of Afghans Are Coming Back
After the Taliban takeover, the dominant migration story was the exodus of Afghans.
Now the direction has partly reversed.
Pakistan and Iran have begun returning large numbers of Afghan citizens. From the beginning of 2026 through July 18, more than one million people returned to Afghanistan: around 617,000 from Pakistan and more than 400,000 from Iran. These figures include deportees as well as other categories of returnees.
For the economy, this is a double-edged development.
An additional million people means additional demand. They need food, housing, clothing, and transportation. The World Bank has indeed identified returning migrants as one factor supporting domestic consumption.
But it also means another million people who need jobs.
Another million people who require schools, hospitals, water, and housing.
For an impoverished country with limited government resources, this represents an enormous burden. If mass returns continue, they may become one of the most serious tests of the Taliban government’s ability to manage Afghanistan over the next several years.
So What Have the Taliban Actually Achieved in Five Years?
If Afghanistan in 2026 is compared with the darkest predictions made in August 2021, the regime has proved considerably more resilient than many expected.
The state did not disintegrate. Another nationwide civil war did not engulf the country. The initial economic collapse stopped, and GDP returned to growth. Taxes and customs revenues are being collected. The national currency has remained relatively stable. Most of the country is under the control of the central authorities. International contacts are gradually expanding, and Russia has even granted formal recognition.
These are real results, and ignoring them simply because the government is the Taliban would produce a distorted picture of Afghanistan.
But there is another side to the balance sheet.
Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Millions require humanitarian assistance. The banking system is weak. There are too few jobs. Healthcare remains dangerously dependent on foreign funding. The return of huge numbers of migrants is increasing pressure on the economy. ISIS-K has not been eliminated. Relations with Pakistan have deteriorated from a quasi-alliance into an increasingly dangerous confrontation.
And above all of this hangs the Taliban’s own decision to exclude women from large parts of education, the economy, and public life.
This is no longer only a human-rights issue.
For a country with a population of tens of millions, refusing to fully utilize the education and labor of roughly half the population inevitably becomes an economic constraint as well.
Five Years Have Proved That the Taliban Can Hold Afghanistan. Now They Must Prove They Can Govern It
In August 2021, the central question was simple: could the Taliban actually remain in power?
Five years later, the answer is clear.
They could.
Armed opposition has failed to create a serious threat to the regime. The state apparatus continues to function. Revenues are collected. Borders are controlled. The economy survived its initial collapse. Afghanistan’s neighbors have gradually accepted the simple fact that the Islamic Emirate exists and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
But that is precisely why the next stage is much more difficult.
Winning a civil war and building a functioning state are two very different tasks.
Five years of Taliban rule have demonstrated that Afghanistan can exist without the American military and without the former government. They have even shown that the country can survive a dramatic reduction in Western funding without completely collapsing.
What they have not yet demonstrated is whether the system they created can deliver sustained economic growth, modern healthcare, mass education, and rising living standards without permanent dependence on external humanitarian assistance.
And that may be the most revealing conclusion of the Taliban’s first five years back in power.
Their greatest achievement is that Afghanistan did not collapse after 2021. Their greatest problem is that, five years later, simply surviving is no longer enough.
