Bit By Bit, The Taliban Is Losing Control Of Afghanistan

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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.