Afghanistan’s Humanitarian Catastrophe Under Taliban Rule: An Interview with Professor Timo Kivimäki
In this interview, Finnish author and International Relations Professor Timo Kivimäki reflects on Afghanistan’s current crisis, examining what went wrong during two decades of US involvement and the consequences of the Taliban’s return to power.
Since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, following a two-decade insurgency against the internationally backed Afghan government, the country has faced a severe humanitarian, political, and human rights crisis.
Shortly after returning to power, the Taliban dissolved the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and restored the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which has since enforced increasingly restrictive social policies. Under restrictions to study, work, and appear publicly, Afghan women and girls have faced sweeping limitations on education, employment, freedom of movement, and participation in public life. Human rights organisations have also documented cases of arbitrary detention, intimidation, and punishment linked to violations of Taliban-imposed regulations.
Afghanistan remains among the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis. The country ranks last in the 2026 World Population Review Happiness Index; it ranks 109th out of 123 countries in the 2025 Global Hunger Index; Afghanistan is among the lowest-ranked countries globally for women’s security and rights according to the 2025-2026 Women, Peace and Security research, and the world’s most dangerous country for women according to the 2026 World Population Review.
In this interview, Professor Timo Kivimäki reflects on the international community’s response to Taliban rule, including questions surrounding accountability, international law, and engagement with Afghanistan’s current authorities. He argues for maintaining international communication with the Taliban while also discussing the lack of US legitimacy in occupying Afghanistan since October 2001, exposing several contradictions in its unilateral militarisation of the South-Central Asian country.
Interview
Edu Montesanti: The Taliban is back in power, and perhaps even more violent compared to the first time the organisation was in power (1996 to 2001). What went wrong in Afghanistan regarding the US occupation?
Timo Kivimäki: This is a strong question, and one that has received limited attention in mainstream media for understandable reasons. The experience of an intervention that produced little beyond additional loss of life is deeply traumatic.
Yet if we want to learn from our mistakes and avoid repeating them, we need to examine what went wrong. My research group has done so, and we have identified at least four contributing factors.
First, the United States acted in Afghanistan without a UN mandate. The intervention and regime change occurred before the UN had endorsed them, and the US‑led coalition continued to control the country without allowing the UN to assume responsibility for peacekeeping.
Such unilateral action is structurally prone to failure. In our research on unilateral Western and Russian operations aimed at de‑escalating violence, only one of 14 post-Cold War cases reduced conflict fatalities both during and after the intervention compared to pre‑intervention levels. In two-thirds of the cases, fatalities increased during and after the operation, or the intervention evolved into a semi‑permanent occupation marked by high levels of violence. By contrast,
UN peacekeeping has produced this kind of failure only in Rwanda, despite operating in nearly forty countries since the Cold War. In four other cases, similar failures took place, but there, the contributing factor was the simultaneous unilateral intervention by one of the Western countries. The core problem is that Afghanistan is a UN member state and could more easily have accepted UN authority, to which it is formally committed. It has no such relationship to the United States, so US military control inevitably felt like an occupation, regardless of intent. Unilateral interventions without a UN mandate are illegal and illegitimate; they create resistance and offer opportunities for the intervening military power to promote its selfish interests in the name of a humanitarian cause.
So, on the one hand, no nation can tolerate the idea of another state coming to dictate domestic politics and select who can participate in elections, and thus, if there is such an intervention, it is understandable that such an intervention will be resisted militarily.
On the other hand, intervening powers tend to use their powerful role for their own benefit rather than using it for the declaratory motive of creating democracy, peace, and fighting terrorism. Because of these reasons, half of the US unilateral interventions after the Cold War have increased violence, if measured as an increase in the number of fatalities of organised violence, during and after the operation as compared with the situation before the US operation.
All US unilateral interventions have increased the number of fatalities during the operation. This we revealed in my book Failure to Protect.
In Afghanistan, the number of fatalities started increasing a few years after the initial US intervention in 2001, and the surge during Obama’s presidency initiated the steady rise in fatalities until the US agreement with the Taliban in 2020, and the withdrawal in 2021.
Conflict data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, merged with data on the approximate number of US troops, shows this rather clearly:
Graph by Dr. Kivimäki. Data on fatalities of conflict in US conflicts: Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP); data on US troops on the ground: US Department of Defence (DoD). DoD data compiled by Tim Kane; UCDP by Dr.Kivimäki, who merged the information in this graph.
Timo Kivimäki: Secondly, as Habib Wardak has shown, the US‑led operation was conducted with insufficient sensitivity to local habits, ways and identities. Instead of respecting Afghan ways of life, politics, and social organisation, the intervention pushed the country toward Western, secular, individualistic models.
This created a feeling that a domestic enemy of the US must be supported, regardless of who that domestic enemy was, making the Taliban’s appeal stronger, enabling them to reconquer the country with minimal resistance. For many Afghans, almost anything seemed preferable to foreign rule. This threat to Afghan identity was closely tied to the fact that the intervention was carried out by external actors in whose decisions Afghans had no representation. The problem was not only that foreigners were in charge, but that they were steering the country in a direction Afghans did not recognise as their own.
In Iraq, similar resistance to the foreignness of the US rule turned the popular opinion so entirely against the occupiers that a leaked UK Defence Department’s opinion poll suggested that over 90 percent of the population wanted all foreign troops out of the country, and a huge majority felt that killing foreign soldiers was justified.
In Afghanistan the very soldiers that the US trained to take greater power, prominence and prosperity of the country could not stop killing their trainers, despite the clear partisan benefits they had from the US-rule in the country. Thus, the fact that the US-led “democratic” administration did not feel Afghan, it felt foreign, and something that threatened the Afghan ownership and identity of the country, people resisted such rule.
Thirdly, and again linked to the foreign nature of the intervention, the US approach to security reflected Western priorities. Security was defined in military terms and framed as something that defended the country from a threat from external enemies. As a result, the focus was on building military hardware and capacity. Yet Afghanistan’s primary security threats were not external or military. People were insecure because of economic hardship, hunger, unemployment, ineffective and illegitimate governance, and the absence of a unifying national authority. As Sidiqullah Sahel’s research shows, the occupation failed to address the real security concerns of ordinary Afghans. Security was treated as a military matter, while what people needed was human security.
Finally, state‑building and economic development concentrated on urban areas, especially Kabul, while rural regions were left underdeveloped. US rule was also much focused on the build-up of capital city, Kabul, and its national elite, while discriminating against the countryside and disregarding rural development. This explains why resistance to the US-led Afghan government came mainly from the rural areas. Urban areas were seen as privileged and this gave rise to rural rebellion and support of the Taliban, a rural organisation. This deepened internal divisions and fuelled resistance to the US‑supported Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
Once American war fatigue set in, the Taliban faced little difficulty in retaking the country. Mohammad Mustafa Raheal’s work within our team highlighted the central role of this rural-urban divide in the eventual collapse.
Edu Montesanti: So, how do you understand the mainstream media’s reasons for disregarding Afghanistan, for a long time after the initial hysteria post-9/11 attacks, followed by the US occupation in 2001, Prof. Kivimäki?
Timo Kivimäki: International media is largely controlled by the power and financial resources of the West. Writing critically about Western wars and interventions has become very dangerous.
Being critical is not good for one’s career, while revealing the truth with evidence of wrongdoings in Western wars has become dangerous for investigative journalists. In Europe, you already have several journalists who have not been tried or convicted for anything, yet they are living in prison-like conditions with their assets and bank accounts frozen by decisions of the executive.
The decline of the division of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial sectors is eroding fast, and the media and academia are the first ones to experience this. So, this is why we hear about the horrors of the Taliban rule, but we do not hear why Afghans were willing to accept the replacement of the US-led rule with practically anything domestic.
Edu Montesanti: Local voices have told me for a long time that the fight between the US and the Taliban is deceptive: the trumpeted deep antagonism between the Taliban and the West, they say, is a pure lie and that both sides are allies who work together, including involvement in heroin trafficking. The US uses the Taliban as a puppet, those voices say, a justification to more interventions, for economic and regional interests in Afghanistan. What is your view on this?
Timo Kivimäki: This is not my view. Claiming that the Taliban is a puppet of the US is not my view at all.
Edu Montesanti: It’s been said that ISIS is about to replace the Taliban: how do you evaluate this?
Timo Kivimäki: ISIS and the Taliban have long been adversaries, and I do not expect ISIS to defeat or replace the Taliban. My concern is different: elements of Taliban governance appear to be moving closer to the ISIS model.
The Taliban has struggled to satisfy Western expectations, even in areas where it initially expressed more democratic intentions. For example, the movement publicly committed to providing girls’ education from primary through tertiary levels, yet this commitment was never implemented. One reason lies in the deep antagonism between the Taliban and the West, reflected most visibly in the freezing of Afghanistan’s foreign assets in the United States and Europe. The dynamic is understandable.
If we consider how individuals with pro‑Russian views are treated in Western societies, it becomes easier to see why more moderate voices within the Taliban government find it difficult to advance their positions. Just as pro‑Russian politicians or academics face marginalisation in the West due to geopolitical hostility, more reform‑minded members of the Taliban face marginalisation within their own administration. They are constantly confronted with the narrative that the West has “stolen” Afghanistan’s 13 billion dollars.
This dynamic, I believe, helps explain why the Taliban has shifted in a direction more commonly associated with ISIS than with its own earlier trajectory.
Edu Montesanti: The international community seems to have mostly forgotten Afghanistan. Has the international community’s declining attention toward Afghanistan contributed to the minimisation of Taliban abuses and the risk of normalising relations with the group?
Timo Kivimäki: Isolation and the perception of unfair treatment—especially the refusal to negotiate reasonable terms for releasing Afghanistan’s frozen funds—are pushing both the country and the Taliban toward increasingly anti‑Western positions. This shift makes it harder for pro‑democratic figures within the government, who do exist, to maintain influence. Geopolitically, Afghanistan’s growing ties with China and Russia will amplify the long‑term negative consequences for the West. The pattern is familiar. During the Cold War, Western pressure drove many nationalist, anti‑imperialist movements first toward the Soviet sphere and eventually toward communism. We appear to be repeating that mistake.
Edu Montesanti: Do you fear that an international recognition of the Taliban could make it impossible for the group to be held accountable for its crimes? It has been widely argued all over the world that recognising the Taliban would normalise its crimes, strengthening the gender apartheid in Afghanistan. How do you evaluate such a view?
Timo Kivimäki: Isolation will not help address the Taliban’s past, or indeed present crimes. Without communication, we have no meaningful way to contribute to positive developments in Afghanistan or to the future of our relationship with the country.
The Taliban governs Afghanistan regardless of Western recognition, and that reality should not be overlooked. The way how the Taliban rule treats women is despicable, there is no doubt about that. However, unfairness by the West towards Afghanistan has made it very difficult for those inside the Taliban, who support greater gender equality, to have a voice inside the government.
The Taliban promised to allow girls to enter the Afghan education system and universities, but this promise was never kept. Those who made the promise and supported such opening, were silenced as supporters of the unfair Western enemy, despite the fact that I hear that they were in the majority in the Taliban government. There is no excuse for the Taliban discrimination against women, yet, if we think of how reasonable policies in the West become unacceptable if our own enemies, say Russians, prefer us to take such policies, we should understand why freezing Afghan funds in Western banks is not helping Afghan girls and women. Anybody promoting policies that Putin likes in the West will be considered unreliable and treacherous; thus, it should be understandable why people supporting of gender equality in the Taliban administration cannot get their voice heard.
Edu Montesanti: How do you evaluate the role of the International Criminal Court (ICC)?
Timo Kivimäki: The ICC has been very constructive, and its investigations have improved rather than endangered prospects of peace and non-violence. We investigated this only last year and published our results in an article in a journal called Global Society. However, the ICC is systematically less effective when its operation is based on deterrence rather than dialogue.
In Afghanistan the special problem with the ICC is that since 2007 the ICC has tried to investigate cases of US torture in the country, but this investigation has always been blocked by the strong political resistance from the West, especially from the US, even though there already was an acknowledgment by the ICC that there was a reasonable basis to believe U.S. forces and CIA members committed war crimes. So, merely to investigate the Taliban and fail to investigate the earlier war crimes would be resisted for understandable reasons.
Edu Montesanti: What measures could effectively deter Taliban abuses, and what pathways, if any, exist toward greater political inclusion and democratisation in Afghanistan?
Timo Kivimäki: I think that, in general, deterrence does not help promote democracy and better governance. Especially when the threat is often targeting the entire country, it promotes a mentality that justifies even more abuse and violence: we do know that security priorities that such deterrence would threaten, tend to justify violence rather than democracy. However, I do think the ICC could be helpful in Afghanistan.
On the one hand, this organisation does not focus on the entire Taliban or Afghanistan punishing everyone, guilty and innocent alike, like sanctions and war tend to do. The idea of dealing with the individuals who have participated in the most atrocious crimes could be acceptable for the Taliban government, and this could be constructive. However, this cannot take place as a discriminatory intervention. If the ICC is not allowed to investigate the existence of American torture facilities, and individuals that were involved in heinous crimes only because they were Americans, it would be difficult to imagine that the Afghan government would be happy to let the ICC investigate its own people.
To let the ICC do something constructive in Afghanistan would require compromises also from the US, compromises that would not threaten the country, but only those who were, as individuals, involved in atrocities. Such individuals were not, against all declarations, tried in the US, and thus the ICC should have jurisdiction over the crimes they committed in Afghanistan. If that was not possible, I do not think it would be possible either to investigate individuals of the Taliban government.
Edu Montesanti: In a 2016 interview with me, you observed “the importance of strengthening the UN, instead of imposing force focused on states’ interpretations of norms.” What has changed since then? Has the UN been strengthened?
Timo Kivimäki: I think the UN has weakened substantially, first because of the US internationalist moralism of Democrat presidents, and by then by the exceptionalism of Republican presidents.
Biden and Obama talked nice things about the UN, but they felt that the US has moral obligations, and some kind of natural leadership in the world and thus they initiated a lot of protection wars that should have required UN mandate to be legal, and which then ended up provoking a lot of violent resistance, and thus escalated violence. The problem with this line was that Obama and Biden felt that their interpretations of what is just was considered unilateral, whereas in reality people in different parts of the world do think differently about fairness, justice and morality.
Obama and Biden considered such deviations from their concept of morality as rogue-ness and criminality. While Trump and Bush did not have this perceived moral high ground, they emphasized US interests and disregarded US commitments to agreements and the international law let alone the primacy in international relations of the United States. This meant that the US did not impose its own understanding of democracy on other nations during Republican presidents, but they more or less rubbered countries for their national interests.
Bush tried to justify this with some democracy vs autocracy discourse, while Trump does not even try. He says ¨we’ve got the [Syrian] oil,¨ and he claims that the Europeans are cowards when they do not join him to Iran to take the oil from Iran. Both the Republican lawlessness and Democrat’s perceived American moral higher ground reduces the authority of the UN, while the increasing debt of the US to the UN budget and the UN peacekeeping budget reduces their ability to do well resourced peacekeeping.
Final Notes
Russia is the only country to have formally recognised the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. However, several states — including China, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — maintain varying degrees of engagement with the Taliban authorities. In March, the United States ended foreign assistance to Afghanistan, reversing elements of the Biden administration’s foreign assistance and immigration policies toward the country.
On July 9, 2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, and the group’s chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, for crimes against humanity of gender-based persecution against women, girls, and others. The decision followed the ICC’s 2022 Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution.
Akhundzada and Haqqani have not yet been brought before the Court. Meanwhile, many Afghan and international voices continue to question why other senior Taliban figures have not also faced prosecution.
Reports from inside Afghanistan suggest that Taliban abuses against women and girls continue to worsen, while international attention has steadily declined. As Professor Kivimäki notes in this interview, the United Nations has also been seriously weakened over the past decade, limiting its capacity to respond effectively.
In the case of the United States, this omission raises doubts about the credibility and consistency of its stated commitment to democracy, human rights, counterterrorism, and counternarcotics abroad. It also invites renewed scrutiny of Washington’s record of unilateral interventions, often justified on contested grounds and frequently criticised as violations of international law — a precedent entrenched after the end of the Cold War and accelerated under George W. Bush after 2001.
As Kivimäki argues in this interview, “if we want to learn from our mistakes and avoid repeating them, we need to examine what went wrong.” Yet neither the Trump administration nor previous US governments appear willing to undertake such a reckoning.
