Afghanistan’s Three Paths to Change: War, Restoration, or Conditional Engagement

In recent months, and particularly in recent days, three distinct approaches to political change in Afghanistan have emerged. They represent three fundamentally different answers to the same question: how can Afghanistan move beyond the present Taliban system without condemning the country to another cycle of war?

The first approach is armed resistance. Former Afghan security officials, including General Sami Sadat and General Yasin Zia, have announced or supported armed fronts against the Taliban. These groups have continued to organize and conduct operations, but they have not demonstrated the capacity to seriously threaten Taliban control of Afghanistan. Earlier assessments of the anti-Taliban resistance similarly concluded that the groups remained scattered and lacked the capacity to challenge Taliban rule nationally.

There is also an important geopolitical question surrounding these armed fronts: who is supporting them?

Many observers have alleged that Pakistan has provided financial, logistical, intelligence, or other forms of support to elements of the anti-Taliban armed resistance. Pakistani media and Pakistan-linked commentators have also reported or suggested that Pakistan’s intelligence establishment has supported Afghan resistance groups, particularly as relations between Islamabad and the Taliban have deteriorated over the Taliban’s alleged support for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

Afghanistan has repeatedly suffered when its internal political conflicts become instruments of neighboring states. If armed resistance becomes externally dependent, the country risks reproducing precisely the kind of proxy conflict that has devastated Afghanistan for decades. The question, therefore, is not simply whether resistance to Taliban rule is justified. It is also who gains strategically if Afghanistan is once again pushed into an externally supported civil war.

Pakistan’s record makes that question unavoidable.

The second approach is associated with former President Ashraf Ghani. Ghani has spoken of returning to Afghanistan and establishing a broad-based political government that would address women’s rights, ethnic inclusion, economic stagnation, and Afghanistan’s international isolation. His uncle, Dr. Abdul Qayum Kochai, has stated that Taliban have approached him to contact Ghani to return, and incidentally, he was Ghani’s ambassador to Moscow when Taliban first came to Russia for peace talks in 2018. Kochai has argued that Ghani remains Afghanistan’s legitimate president and that a Loya Jirga should determine the country’s political future.

This proposal, however, is politically unworkable under present conditions.

The problem is not simply whether Ghani has a historical or constitutional argument for regarding himself as legitimate. The deeper problem is the contradiction between his claim and the political mechanism he proposes.

Ghani’s government collapsed in August 2021. The Taliban captured Kabul, the Afghan security forces disintegrated, and the political system over which Ghani presided ceased to exist. Whatever responsibility is assigned among Ghani, his political opponents, the Afghan security establishment, and the United States and NATO, the political order he led failed catastrophically.

Ghani now proposes returning to Afghanistan and participating in a broad political settlement while his political camp continues to invoke his legitimacy as president. That creates an obvious question: if the Taliban is sufficiently entrenched that armed resistance led by former Afghan military commanders cannot remove it, how rational is it to expect the Taliban voluntarily to convene a Loya Jirga in which the starting premise is that the president whose government it defeated remains the legitimate president of Afghanistan?

This is the fundamental contradiction in the Ghani approach.

A Loya Jirga could potentially serve as an instrument of reconciliation, but only if the principal political actors accept that its purpose is to negotiate a new political settlement. It becomes far less plausible when one side enters the process asserting that its former president remains the legitimate head of state.

Asking the Taliban to convene such a gathering while simultaneously asserting Ghani’s continuing legitimacy would amount to asking the Taliban to organize the mechanism through which its own political legitimacy could be challenged and potentially replaced by the leader it defeated. In reality, even if Ghani comes as an Afghan citizen, chances of such a Loya Jirga low to none existent.

The question for any proposed Afghan political order is therefore not simply how to bring Afghans together. It is how to establish a government capable of defending Afghan sovereignty against external pressure.

The third approach is increasingly being articulated by Afghan nationalist intellectuals, including Dr. Osman Taraki. It does not mean accepting every Taliban policy, nor does it mean abandoning demands for women’s education, political inclusion, economic reform, or better governance. It means recognizing the government that actually controls Afghanistan and using engagement, rather than another war, as the instrument through which change is pursued.

This approach begins with a simple but essential distinction: political legitimacy and political reality are not always identical.

The Taliban controls Afghanistan. It controls the security apparatus, the overwhelming majority of the country’s territory, and the principal institutions of government. Whatever one thinks of its ideology or domestic policies, it cannot simply be wished away.

This does not mean that Taliban rule is necessarily legitimate, desirable, or permanent. It means that any serious political strategy must begin with the Afghanistan that actually exists rather than the Afghanistan that existed before August 2021.

The regional environment reinforces this reality.

Russia has moved toward formal recognition and deeper security cooperation with Kabul. India has significantly expanded its engagement with the Taliban. China maintains pragmatic relations with the authorities in Kabul. These countries are not necessarily endorsing every Taliban domestic policy. They are recognizing that their strategic interests require dealing with the government that actually controls Afghanistan.

This creates an uncomfortable lesson for the Afghan opposition. If Russia, China, and India are increasingly prepared to engage Kabul, while the United States shows no apparent intention of repeating the 2001 military intervention, a political strategy based primarily on waiting for the Taliban to collapse is increasingly detached from the balance of power.

The same reality applies to armed resistance.

If the Taliban can defeat or contain armed resistance despite the experience, military backgrounds, and international contacts of former Afghan security commanders, the prospect of removing the Taliban through another nationwide war is extremely limited. If portions of that resistance are also receiving Pakistani assistance, the danger becomes greater still. Afghanistan could once again become the battlefield for a Pakistani strategic contest rather than the author of its own political future.

This is precisely why conditional engagement deserves serious consideration.

Conditional engagement does not mean surrendering principles. It means using the political reality that exists to pursue measurable changes.

The Taliban should be pressed to reopen secondary schools and universities to Afghan girls, expand women’s participation in economic and public life, create opportunities for educated young Afghans, improve economic governance, broaden political participation, and establish a more inclusive national administration.

These conditions should not be treated as cosmetic demands. They are central to Afghanistan’s survival as a functioning state. A country cannot build an educated workforce while excluding millions of girls from education. It cannot reverse economic stagnation while marginalizing a large portion of its educated population. And it cannot achieve lasting political stability while treating substantial segments of Afghan society as permanently outside the political order.

At the same time, Afghanistan must preserve an independent foreign policy. Engagement with the Taliban should not become acceptance of Pakistani strategic domination. Nor should Afghanistan exchange Pakistani dependence for dependence on India, Russia, Iran, China, or any other outside power.

The Taliban’s increasingly hostile relationship with Pakistan therefore represents one possible point of convergence between the Taliban and Afghan nationalist forces. Afghan national interests cannot be subordinated to Pakistan, just as Afghanistan cannot afford to become the proxy of any other regional power.

The objective should be an independent Afghan state capable of maintaining relations with all of its neighbors without becoming the proxy of any of them.

This is where the three approaches lead to fundamentally different strategic consequences.

The armed-resistance model risks another war and carries the additional danger of foreign sponsorship, particularly from Pakistan.

The Ghani model offers the language of inclusion but remains difficult to reconcile with the political reality created by the Taliban’s military victory and Ghani’s continuing claim to presidential legitimacy. A Loya Jirga cannot realistically be expected to emerge from a government that would be asked to convene it for the purpose of questioning its own legitimacy and potentially restoring the leader it defeated.

The third model begins from reality rather than aspiration.

It accepts that the Taliban is entrenched but rejects the idea that its present system must remain unchanged. It seeks to use political engagement, economic incentives, regional diplomacy, and Afghan nationalist pressure to force gradual transformation.

This does not mean that conditional engagement is guaranteed to succeed. The Taliban may reject reforms. It may resist political opening. It may continue policies that isolate Afghanistan. But the relevant comparison is not between conditional engagement and an ideal political alternative. The relevant comparison is between conditional engagement and the alternatives that are actually available.

An armed campaign has not demonstrated the capacity to overthrow the Taliban. A restoration-centered political project has no obvious mechanism for persuading the Taliban to surrender the power it won through war. A renewed American military intervention is not a realistic assumption. And Afghanistan’s regional environment is increasingly organized around engagement with Kabul rather than its overthrow.

Conditional engagement therefore offers something the other approaches currently lack: a pathway that begins with the existing balance of power while retaining the objective of changing that balance politically over time.

Afghanistan has already paid an extraordinary price for political absolutism.

The country does not need another struggle in which Afghans kill Afghans while outside powers pursue their own strategic interests. It needs a political process through which the existing government is gradually compelled to become more inclusive, more competent, and more responsive to the Afghan population.

That means reopening schools for girls. It means economic opportunity for young Afghans. It means meaningful participation for women. It means representation for Afghanistan’s diverse communities. It means competent governance and economic development. And it means an independent foreign policy that rejects Pakistani domination while maintaining balanced relations with the wider region and the international community.

The ultimate objective should therefore be neither “Taliban forever” nor “war until the Taliban disappears.”

It should be an Afghanistan in which the Taliban becomes part of a broader Afghan political order rather than remaining the exclusive owner of the state.

That distinction is crucial. Recognizing the Taliban as the government that actually controls Afghanistan does not require accepting its present political system as Afghanistan’s permanent constitutional order. Engagement is not endorsement. Political recognition of reality is not surrender of political principles.

The future of Afghanistan cannot be built by pretending that 2021 never happened. Nor can it be built by repeating the wars that preceded it.

The practical question is not which political vision sounds most satisfying from outside Afghanistan. It is which strategy has a realistic path from the Afghanistan that exists today to the Afghanistan that Afghans need tomorrow.

Under present circumstances, conditional engagement, combined with sustained pressure for internal reform and a firm defense of Afghan national independence, offers the most realistic available path.

It is not the easiest path, nor is it a guarantee of success. But politics must ultimately deal with power as it exists. Afghanistan’s challenge is therefore not to choose between accepting the Taliban unchanged and destroying the country in another war. It is to use the political, economic, and regional leverage available today to transform the existing order into a broader, more inclusive, more capable, and genuinely independent Afghan state.

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