Why is it that nearly five years after the Taliban’s return to power, the question, Are the Taliban Afghan or foreign?, has only now become urgent among Afghans and intellectuals? The timing itself is meaningful. When a society grows tired of merely describing events and exhausted from enduring them, it moves toward a search for meaning.
But is this question simply about citizenship documents and place of birth? Or is it about something more fundamental, the nature of the power that has cast a shadow over a nation’s destiny?
If being Afghan is reduced to an administrative label, the answer is simple: many Taliban members were born on this soil. But if being Afghan is understood as an ethical and historical relationship to the land and its people, a loyalty to shared suffering, shared memory, shared rights, and a shared future, then the question changes form. Is it possible for someone to live on Afghan soil yet operate, in logic and structure, as a stranger to Afghanistan?
At that moment, a question about ethnicity or borders becomes a question of political philosophy: Where does power derive its legitimacy? From the people or from the gun? From ethical principles or from networks of patronage? From law or from decree?
From a philosophical perspective, the Taliban must be understood both as an ideology and as a structure. Their ideology is not merely a religious interpretation, but a worldview that sacralizes power and treats society as an object of obedience. The critical question is whether religion, in this worldview, is an end in itself or a tool. When religion becomes a mechanism of control, instead of deepening moral life, it legitimizes violence and criminalizes freedom.
If law ceases to protect individuals and instead becomes an instrument for coercively shaping them, is it still law, or simply another form of domination?
The Taliban describe themselves as followers of the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence. But labels alone prove nothing. The question is whether their behavior and legal system reflect the historically rational and civic spirit of that tradition. Some scholars argue that what the Taliban present is less jurisprudence than a performance of jurisprudence, religious language deployed to reinforce tribal order and political authority. When religion merges with tribal power and politics, even the religious tradition itself is distorted. Religion ceases to be a refuge of reason and becomes a tool of command.
When a system monopolizes truth and presents its interpretation as the sole path to salvation, are we dealing with faith or with ideology?
Beyond religion lies culture. Culture is not only music, clothing, or customs; it is a network of meanings that makes living together possible. Afghanistan has a long history of plurality, of languages, ethnicities, memories, and ways of life. Yet as a governing structure, the Talibanstrugglese with plurality, because plurality implies choice, and choice implies the possibility of saying no.
This goes beyond differences in taste. Can a society be made uniform by silencing voices and still be called culture?
When a system systematically excludes half its population, women and girls, from education and public life, is it building order, or producing slow destruction?
The Taliban are not only an ideology; they are also a structure. And structure matters, because it explains why the Taliban cannot be reformed simply by replacing individuals or through short-term negotiations. In practice, their structure moves toward command rule: decisions from above, obedience from below.
In such a system, modern law, general, transparent, predictable, and open to challenge, fades away and is replaced by decrees and discretionary interpretation. This returns us to the question of identity: Should a government’s identity be judged by its slogans, or by the way it governs?
In foreign policy, the Afghan-or-foreign question takes on an even sharper political meaning. If a group rules within Afghanistan’s borders but its origins, survival, and support networks are tied to actors outside the country, does it represent the territory, or does it serve broader regional dynamics?
The answer may not be entirely black or white. But this ambiguity is precisely why the question persists and why society continues to search for the right name for the problem.
The Taliban’s economic model also reveals something about identity and structure. An economy reflects political ethics; it shows whether power treats resources as a public trust or as spoils. When an economy drifts toward rent-seeking, monopoly, and opacity, the state begins to resemble a personal regime, one in which resources are distributed not as citizens’ rights, but as tools of loyalty.
If citizens are reduced to subjects, can we still speak of a state, or should we speak of domination?
When women are excluded from work and education, this is not only a matter of women’s rights. It is a deliberate shrinking of the country’s human capacity. Poverty becomes not merely an unfortunate outcome, but the product of policy.
If large-scale economic projects are concentrated in the hands of a single private actor, particularly one associated with past financial corruption, the issue is not simply infrastructure development. It is the concentration of economic power. When the production, transmission, and distribution of electricity are controlled by one actor, electricity shifts from being a public service to becoming leverage, an instrument for influence and loyalty-building. Without transparency and competition, development risks turning into a monopoly, and poverty into a structural consequence of rent-based governance.
In this sense, the answer to whether the Taliban are Afghan or foreign may be this: legally and administratively, many are Afghan. But in terms of political philosophy, they represent less a national civic identity and more an ideological project in which religion, culture, law, and the economy are subordinated to the consolidation of power.
That project may have grown on Afghan soil, but it has been nourished and sustained through external networks. The deeper question, then, is not whether the Taliban are Afghan or foreign, but whether they treat Afghanistan as a shared home of citizens, or as a field for command and accumulation.
Five years after their return, this question must move beyond social media debate. It must become a political reason. It may be late, but it is not meaningless.
A final ethical and political question must be directed at all opponents of the Taliban: Can fragmentation confront a structured, even if imperfectly coherent, authoritarian system? Recent experience suggests that fragmentation makes despotism cheaper and more durable. If the Taliban’s structure is command-driven and exclusionary, the response cannot consist merely of scattered emotions and short-term reactions.
The need now is not uniformity, but alignment: bringing together all opponents, across intellectual and political differences, around a few minimal and practical principles: citizenship rights, rule of law, participation, human dignity, and the full presence of women in society.
If hope arises from the possibility of collective action, then without organization and convergence, does hope not remain merely a wish? Resistance is necessary, not only to dismantle a political order, but to preserve the possibility of a future.
If resistance lives, hope lives. If not, this generation, both inside Afghanistan and in the diaspora, will remain suspended between longing and despair. And despair is precisely what authoritarianism requires to endure.
