Five years after seizing Kabul, the Taliban’s strongest argument for international acceptance rests on control.
The Taliban governs every provincial capital and faces no conventional army capable of marching on Kabul. It repeatedly cites improved security as proof that Afghanistan’s post-2021 order is settled.
But armed resistance is becoming more geographically dispersed, more organizationally diverse and harder to dismiss as a residual and largely spent northern rebellion. The Taliban may have won Afghanistan’s last war while creating the conditions for its next one.
Resistance is spreading
In the first years after the takeover, the National Resistance Front and the Afghanistan Freedom Front dominated anti-Taliban armed activity, concentrating their operations in Panjshir, Badakhshan, Takhar, Baghlan and other northern and northeastern provinces.
That geography let the Taliban portray the resistance as a narrow remnant of the former republic, rooted mainly among ethnic Tajiks. By 2026, however, the argument has weakened.
The UN secretary-general’s September report recorded 88 attacks claimed by armed opposition groups in 21 provinces between May 1 and July 31. UN investigators verified 55 of them and concluded that the resistance did not significantly threaten Taliban control of territory.
Data compiled for August and September point to a wider pattern. Resistance groups claimed 119 attacks in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, across the north, northeast, center, east, south and west. The figures come from the groups themselves, so their casualty claims warrant caution. The geographic spread of the attacks is the more telling indicator.
The Afghanistan United Front claimed 59 operations, the Afghanistan Freedom Front 29, the National Resistance Front 11, the National Independence Front nine and Afghan Green Trend seven. Two newer groups claimed two each. An insurgency can become strategically significant long before it reaches military parity with a state.
The most consequential shift is seemingly in the country’s south. Sami Sadat, a former lieutenant general in the Afghan National Army, leads the Afghanistan United Front, which began its armed campaign in August this year.
The organization claims operations in Helmand, Kandahar, Nimroz, Ghor, Badghis and Faryab. Unlike the predominantly Tajik National Resistance Front and Afghanistan Freedom Front, it has a substantial Pashtun profile and draws heavily on former Afghan security personnel.
This does not amount to an ethnic Pashtun uprising, nor does the Taliban appear close to losing Kandahar or Helmand. But a Pashtun-led force under a former general, claiming operations in the Taliban’s traditional heartland, undercuts the claim that armed opposition is an ethnically narrow northern phenomenon.
If anti-Taliban violence takes root in areas associated with Taliban political and military strength, the resistance begins to look less like a peripheral northern problem and more like a broader national security challenge.
To be sure, Afghanistan’s resistance is far from unified. Ahmad Massoud’s National Resistance Front, Yasin Zia’s Afghanistan Freedom Front, Sadat’s Afghanistan United Front, the Homeland Soldiers Front, the National Independence Front, the Afghanistan Republican Front, the New Horizon Organization and others differ sharply in leadership, ethnicity, objectives and military capacity.
That fragmentation may prevent them from forming a coherent alternative government, but it does not make them strategically irrelevant. Afghanistan could face a decentralized insurgency in which numerous armed networks attack Taliban personnel, installations and administrative institutions, with none strong enough to replace the regime.
Such a conflict would resemble less the country’s earlier nationwide civil wars than a persistent and grinding security burden spread across multiple provinces.
Broken amnesty
The Taliban may also be helping to build the resistance’s manpower. After returning to power in 2021, its leaders announced a general amnesty for former government officials and security personnel.
Later reports repeatedly undermined confidence in the pledge. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented hundreds of violations against former officials and security personnel, including extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment and enforced disappearances. Reports of killings and abuse continued in 2026.
From the Taliban’s perspective, this is more a counterinsurgency problem than a human rights one. Former soldiers, commandos, police officers and intelligence agents have exactly what emerging armed groups need: weapons training, battlefield experience, knowledge of local terrain, intelligence networks, command experience and familiarity with Taliban tactics.
A credible amnesty might have helped demobilize them. Continued persecution tells them that neutrality offers no protection, and some former security officers have already founded, joined or supported resistance groups. The Taliban thus faces a crucial paradox: repression meant to eliminate potential opponents is giving them stronger incentives to organize and fight.
None of this, of course, means the Taliban is on the brink of collapse. No rival government controls a major city, and no resistance group has the conventional strength to try to seize Kabul. The United Nations continues to assess that armed opposition does not significantly threaten Taliban territorial control.
But territorial control is not the only measure. International observers should watch whether attacks keep spreading, whether new armed groups emerge, whether opposition reaches areas once considered secure and whether trained former security personnel keep joining resistance networks.
The Taliban also faces a separate threat from the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISIS-K), a terrorist organization whose ideology and aims differ fundamentally from those of other anti-Taliban resistance groups. To understand the rising resistance phenomenon, the two should not be conflated.
But simultaneous pressure from transnational terrorists and politically motivated Afghan armed opposition groups is forcing the Taliban to confront two distinct security problems at once and is undermining its central claim that authoritarian control has delivered stability.
Control is not stability
This distinction matters for the United States, which must decide how far to engage the Taliban and whether the regime’s territorial control should lead American policymakers to treat the post-2021 order as permanent. This fast-changing and increasingly potent resistance landscape is cause for caution.
The Taliban conquered the state, dismantled the previous US-backed government’s army, monopolized national institutions and eliminated every conventional rival.
Yet political exclusion, repression of former security personnel, violations of the Taliban’s own amnesty and the lack of meaningful peaceful channels for dissent is generating the grievances and abuses from which insurgencies grow.
The evidence does not show yet that Afghanistan is heading toward another nationwide civil war. It does show, however, that the geography of resistance is widening, new armed groups are emerging and former security officers are returning to action as anti-Taliban commanders and fighters.
Opposition activity is reaching beyond the nation’s north, where the Taliban once could claim to contain both the military challenge and the political narrative fueling it.
The Taliban’s vulnerability may therefore lie less in whether it can control Afghanistan today than in how it has exercised that control to date. The Taliban won the last war, but the way it is governing the peace is arguably preparing the ground for the next one.
Saima Afzal is a researcher specializing in South Asian security, counterterrorism and geopolitical dynamics across the Middle East, Afghanistan and the Indo-Pacific. She is a research scholar at Justus Liebig University in Germany.
