How To Lose A Country In Four Years: A Taliban Regime Guide – OpEd

Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Photo Credit: Mehr News Agency

April 22, 2026 
By Farwa Imtiaz


Four years after seizing control in 2021, the Taliban regime is not consolidating control, it is unraveling from within. Far from the “peace and stability” they promised, Afghanistan today is a pressure cooker of human rights abuses, economic despair, and simmering popular resistance. Recent reports from Human Rights Watch, the UN, and a bombshell BBC investigation paint a damning picture, a regime so paranoid and brittle that it responds to discontent not with reform, but with ever-harsher crackdowns. The result is exactly what the Taliban’s own leader feared, internal rot that is eroding their legitimacy and fueling the very opposition they claim to have defeated.

The cruel and misogynistic nature of the regime is no clearer than in its relentless efforts to subjugate women and girls through what the UN and other international experts have rightly termed gender apartheid. From 2021, the Taliban prohibited girls from attending secondary and higher education facilities, stopped women from engaging in most professions, required them to remain in their homes without being accompanied by men, and implemented an oppressive dress code regime meted out through public lashings and detentions. In the year 2025 alone, UN experts highlighted an uptick in these repressive measures, including sexual assault in detention centers and crackdowns on women who wear their hijabs incorrectly. The People’s Tribunal concluded in December 2025 that the Taliban committed crimes against humanity, including gender persecution and apartheid.

This apartheid along the lines of gender is not merely one outrage among others; rather, it is economic suicide. The economy of Afghanistan, even before this time, has been severely impacted by sanctions and the cutoff of aid from the international community, and it is now in a state of collapse. In late 2025, according to the United Nations Development Programme, nine out of ten Afghan families are going hungry or are selling off what little assets they have left in order to survive.

Adding to their woes, the paranoia of the Taliban leadership escalated to an all-time high in September 2025 when a blanket internet and mobile data ban was declared across the country; the first such ban since 2021. Under the pretext of curbing “immoral activities,” the ban (issued from Kandahar) effectively brought all aspects of life to a halt, be it financial transactions, education, trade, or the response to the devastating earthquakes that hit eastern Afghanistan.

Yet ordinary Afghans refuse to stay silent. In Balkh province, people are turning public walls into canvases of defiance, spray-painting graffiti demanding education, rights, and freedom. These acts of artistic resistance, risking arrest and worse, echo the courage of exiled artists like Shamsia Hassani and Fatima Wojohat, whose work continues to amplify the cry for justice. Such quiet rebellion signals a population no longer cowed.

Increasingly open resistance is emerging. Funeral processions for resistance martyrs have become symbols of defiance, attracting many participants who the Taliban find difficult to subdue. These funeral processions are more than just an expression of grief, but an act of remembering and mobilizing against a government that kills its opponents and then bars males from attending the funerals.

The Taliban’s response to all this? Not concessions, but intensified control. Instead of addressing grievances, they double down on repression, more bans, more arrests, more floggings. This is a textbook failure of governance, and it perfectly illustrates why their authority is collapsing.

Thomas Hobbes warned in Leviathan that the social contract between ruler and ruled rests on the state’s ability to deliver security and order in exchange for obedience. When a government fails to protect its people from poverty, arbitrary violence, and systemic exclusion, when it becomes the source of their misery, the contract dissolves. Afghans owe no loyalty to a regime that starves them, imprisons their daughters, and silences their voices. Legitimacy is not seized by force; it is earned by results. The Taliban regime have delivered neither.

Add to this the psychological factor of the frustration-aggression theory, where the systematic denial of basic rights, education, livelihood, work, self-respect, and economic opportunities can lead to aggression. It was none other than the Taliban leader himself, Hibatullah Akhundzada, who unwittingly validated this when his speech was leaked by the BBC from January 2025 in Kandahar. He mentioned that internal divisions in their ranks might “collapse and end” the emirate. As shown in its report, BBC uncovered this split wherein the hardline Taliban faction from Kandahar advocated for complete isolation, whereas the Kabul-based moderate Taliban defied the orders and brought back the internet connection after 2025.

The Taliban are architects of their own demise. By choosing gender apartheid over inclusion, economic sabotage over recovery, digital blackouts over connectivity, and crackdowns over dialogue, they have forfeited any claim to rule. Graffiti in Balkh, resistance in the hills, funerals that double as protests, these are the early tremors of a nation that has had enough.

It is time that the international community stops trying to engage with the Taliban regime in order to try to change its ways. The regime’s legitimacy has been lost even among its own population. All that is left to be seen is how much damage it will cause before being dragged down by the very social contract that it broke.


Farwa Imtiaz is an independent academic researcher with Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies from National Defence University, Pakistan. Her areas of interest include Conflict Analysis, Geopolitical Realities, Climate Change, and International Affairs. Her work is Published on The Friday times, Paradigm Shift, Policy Wire, South Asia Times, Voice of Germany, Global Connectivities, Stratheia, International Policy Journal, South Asia Journal, and Sri Lanka Guardian.