The countries that support the Taliban

When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August, the group called on the international community to recognise its government’s legitimacy.

No country has yet done so and though Russia, Pakistan and China had “all signalled a readiness to transition smoothly into engaging with Taliban authorities” in August, said The Guardian, this has not yet transpired.

A month before the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, met Taliban representatives in Tianjin. At the time, the extremist group was seeking international recognition, and the meeting was “widely seen as a gift from Beijing towards that legitimacy”, said Al Jazeera.

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Hu Shisheng, a South Asian expert at the official think-tank of China’s national security apparatus, told Reuters at a forum in Beijing that “things will be different when the four countries of China, Pakistan, Russia and Iran arrive at a consensus on this. We will not be the first.”

During the Taliban’s reign in the 1990s, only three nations recognised its government: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And though no country has formally recognised the group’s leadership in Afghanistan since they again took power this year, some have expressed their vocal support for its rule.

In mid-August, as US and UK troops began evacuating civilians from Kabul, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan said that the “Taliban has freed their country from superpowers”, and “broken the chains of mental slavery in Afghanistan”.

Pakistan, which neighbours Afghanistan and is a key trading partner, has “long been accused by many in the United States and elsewhere of providing support for the Taliban”, said the BBC. The Pakistani government has continually denied this.

Iran and Russia have also been accused by some Afghan and US officials of providing the Taliban with financial aid, a practice “they frequently deny”, said the BBC.

And while Iran was “careful” in welcoming the Taliban’s ascent to power in August, “Russian authorities were initially much more positive”, said conflict and security expert Professor Dr Antonio Giustozzi.

Writing for the defence and security think-tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), he said: “Both the Russians and Iranians helped the Taliban advance at a breakneck pace in May-August 2021.”

The two countries supplied funding and equipment, “but perhaps even more importantly they helped them by brokering deals with parties, groups and personalities close to either country, or even both”.

These “allies and clients” of Iran and Russia were “promised that they would be incorporated into a future coalition government”, he added, which was what both countries and “most actors on the Afghan scene believed” would be the outcome of the Taliban’s advances on Kabul.

However, Iran “began to seriously worry” when the Haqqani network, a sub-group of the Taliban with a “record of hostility towards Shi’a Muslims”, began taking control of Afghanistan’s capital city, Giustozzi continued. Like the coalition government many envisaged, the Taliban’s promises of government roles have not materialised.

During the Taliban’s reign in the 1990s, “Iran was among the group’s key adversaries”, and Tehran “actively supported” the group’s “ousting by the US in 2001”, said London School of Economics’ Global Risk Insights (GRI).

But more recently, “Iran has been cosying up to the group, with a significantly different orientation”. Iran remains a key trading partner of Afghanistan, and has continued its fuel exports since the Taliban took power.

The country’s leadership welcomed the departure of US forces “in its own geopolitical backyard” and its ideological conflict with the group has been “partially lifted thanks to an apparent shift of the Taliban’s treatment towards Hazara people”, the GRI continued.

The Taliban “will welcome Tehran’s change of heart”, in part because it needs new backers “as a remedy for its over reliance on Pakistan”, though “Iran will have to maintain a careful rhetoric towards the new Afghan leadership” given public feeling towards the Taliban remains negative among Iranians.

Russia wasn’t “racing to recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan’s new rulers” in August, said the BBC, but that stance is softening and in October, Moscow held “the most high-profile international talks on Afghanistan since the Taliban took power”, said The Guardian. Members of the interim government in Kabul were in attendance, as well as representatives from China, Iran, Pakistan and central Asian republics.

Vladimir Putin’s representative on Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, told reporters that “a big political bargaining is going on”.

“Not everyone likes the new government in Afghanistan, but by punishing the government, we punish the whole people,” he said. Though Russia has long recognised the Taliban as a terrorist group, its embassy is still open in Kabul and “is in regular contact with Afghanistan’s new rulers”.

The Taliban also receives some financial support from individuals in several countries.

“Private citizens from Pakistan and several Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are considered to be the largest individual contributors”, said the BBC.

“Although impossible to measure exactly”, it’s thought that these funding streams could provide as much as $500m (£376m) a year.