Afghanistan's Fragmentation Invites Foreign Interference. Only the Taliban Can Close the Door.

 Afghanistan's Fragmentation Invites Foreign Interference. Only the Taliban Can Close the Door.

An international conference on Afghanistan opened this week in Islamabad under the title "Afghan Predicament and the Trajectory to Peace: Domestic Collapse and Government Without Legitimacy." The two-day gathering brought together Afghan political figures opposed to the Taliban and officials from several regional countries. Its critics see it as one more instance of Pakistani meddling. Its defenders see a rare forum for Afghan voices shut out of Kabul. Both are partly right, and neither is asking the most important question.

The timing is fraught. Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, relations between Kabul and Islamabad have steadily deteriorated. Pakistan accuses the Taliban of allowing the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to operate from Afghan territory. The Taliban deny it and accuse Pakistan of using military pressure to impose its will, including over the disputed Durand Line and the demand that TTP leaders be handed over. Pakistan has recently carried out airstrikes inside Afghanistan, which Islamabad says targeted militants and Kabul says caused civilian casualties.

So who is right? The answer is uncomfortable for both sides, and it starts with Pakistan.

Pakistan's security concerns over the TTP are real, and its officials argue that militants operating from Afghan soil threaten the wider region. At the conference, Pakistan's special representative for Afghanistan, Mohammad Sadiq, argued that Afghanistan needs a broad-based political arrangement and that its problems cannot be treated as a bilateral matter between Islamabad and Kabul. But legitimate security concerns do not give Pakistan the right to determine Afghanistan's political future. Nor is its role as innocent as its officials suggest. Islamabad supported the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war, later backed the Taliban movement, and sheltered its leadership during the two decades it fought the internationally backed Afghan government. By favoring some factions and undermining others, Pakistan helped entrench the very fragmentation that now serves as its entry point.

Yet the critics of Islamabad's role should be just as uncomfortable, because the conference participants' complaints about the Taliban are hard to dismiss. The Taliban took power by force and have built no inclusive political system. Women are excluded from much of public life, and political groups outside the Taliban's ruling structure have little meaningful role in governing. The Doha agreement of February 2020, signed by the United States and the Taliban, envisioned intra-Afghan negotiations and a political roadmap. Western governments repeatedly stressed that lasting peace required an inclusive settlement that respected the rights of all Afghans, including women and minorities. None of that was implemented. The precipitous U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban's military takeover in August 2021 rendered the roadmap moot before it could be tested.

That leaves a larger question: why does Afghanistan so repeatedly become vulnerable to outside interference? The answer lies deeper than Pakistan.

Afghanistan's modern history has oscillated between authoritarian rule and political disorder, and stable institutions have rarely taken root. Even the relatively peaceful reign of King Zahir Shah eventually collapsed under internal pressure. What followed was a succession of coups, communist rule, civil war, Taliban rule and foreign occupation. Through much of this time the state has depended heavily on outside money and military support, and has struggled to sustain itself when that support disappeared.

The most consequential weakness, however, is the competition among Afghanistan's ethnic and regional groups. When a group concludes that it has been shut out of power, it looks abroad. The mechanism is concrete: a marginalized faction, denied a seat at the table in Kabul, offers a neighboring state access, intelligence or armed manpower in exchange for backing. The foreign patron gains a proxy, the faction gains a sponsor, and the country as a whole loses.

History bears this out. During the Soviet war, Afghan factions relied on foreign sponsors. During the civil war of the 1990s, neighboring countries backed competing Afghan groups, with Pakistan supporting the Taliban while other regional powers supported their opponents. After 2001, the internationally backed government leaned heavily on Western military and financial assistance, and it collapsed within days once that support was withdrawn. Aid dependence was not the only cause of that collapse, since corruption, a shrinking base of legitimacy and the demoralizing effect of the Doha deal all played their part, but a state that cannot stand on its own domestic support is always vulnerable.

The pattern is likely to continue. Groups that feel excluded by the Taliban may seek help from Pakistan or another foreign power. The Taliban themselves once depended on Pakistan while fighting the previous government. That history carries a caution: inclusion alone will not end foreign meddling, because outside powers also act on their own interests, from the unresolved Durand Line to regional rivalries, and Pakistan will have stakes in Afghanistan under any government. But inclusion can shrink the demand for patrons, and it is the only part of the problem that Afghans control. Fragmentation creates the opening, and foreign powers step through it.

This is why blaming Pakistan alone misses the point, and why the solution cannot come from Islamabad or from any other foreign capital. Pakistan and Afghanistan have every reason to cooperate. They share a long border, millions of family and cultural ties, and large economic interests, and Central Asian countries want a stable Afghanistan that can link them to Pakistani ports and wider markets. Pakistani officials at the conference stressed this potential for trade and development. But cooperation cannot be built on domination, just as the Taliban cannot solve Afghanistan's security problem by ruling through force from Kandahar.

That brings the responsibility back to the Taliban. If their leadership accepts that Afghanistan belongs to all Afghans, not only to those who fought for it, and gives other ethnic and political groups a real place in government, it would remove much of the reason for opposition groups to seek foreign sponsors. A government with broader participation would also have more legitimacy in dealing with its neighbors and more resilience against outside pressure.

The obvious objection is that the Taliban have little reason to change. Their leadership is deeply suspicious of power-sharing, and many of its fighters spent twenty years believing that they would one day rule alone. But the Taliban do want things that only others can give them: diplomatic recognition, relief from sanctions, access to frozen assets and the trade routes that could make Afghanistan an economic bridge. That is leverage, and it works only if it is used carefully. Foreign governments could tie recognition and development assistance to verifiable steps, such as appointing non-Taliban technocrats to key ministries, creating a consultative assembly that includes women and minority representatives, and allowing political parties to operate openly. Sanctions relief could be sequenced to match, so that each concession by the Taliban is met with a concrete reward. The lesson of Doha is that promises made before benchmarks are met, and without any means of checking them, do not hold. Incentives must follow performance rather than precede it.

None of this will be easy, and it will not happen quickly. But the alternative is what Afghanistan has already experienced: isolation, economic collapse, and the steady advance of foreign powers eager to fill the void. Legitimacy matters on the other side as well. Those who gather in foreign capitals to speak for Afghanistan's future will be persuasive at home only to the extent that they can show a real constituency there, rather than depending on the hospitality of a neighboring state.

Force can win a war, but only consent can hold a country together. Afghans should not have to leave home and travel to Islamabad or any other capital to ask foreigners to solve their political problems. For that to change, Afghanistan's rulers must build a political system in which Afghans have a reason to stay and settle those problems themselves.