The Afghan Taliban have commenced an aggressive attempt to thrust aside and silence critical Afghan voices in international circles. If Western governments are sincere in their protestations of concern about human rights in Afghanistan, they will resist these endeavours, forcefully.

Seemingly emboldened by a meeting held in Qatar on 30 June-1 July 2024 (‘Doha III’) at which the United Nations welcomed the Afghan Taliban but excluded Afghan women from the gathering, as well as the Taliban’s gender apartheid from the agenda, the Taliban are now seeking to cripple Afghan diplomatic and consular missions which they do not control.

The Taliban campaign began with a statement on 30 July 2024 that they would cease to recognise consular documents issued by Afghan missions that do not operate on their behalf. This was accompanied by messages to various states purporting to dismiss Afghan ambassadors who had declined to acquiesce in the Taliban’s violent seizure of power in August 2021. Given that the Taliban had been unsuccessful in their quest for de jure (legal) recognition from those states, the Taliban’s statement and messages were of no intrinsic legal significance. They could acquire importance if and only if states responded in ways to the Taliban’s liking. Two states did, with the United Kingdom and Norway moving to close the Afghan Embassies in London and Oslo, although apparently not through the presentation of formal notes verbales, and—perhaps out of some embarrassment—with no mention of the moves on their foreign ministry websites.

The explanation for the British approach, and possibly the Norwegian, likely lies in domestic politics, perhaps in a desire to secure cooperation from the Taliban in deporting Afghan nationals with a view to appeasing anti-immigrant sentiment. Germany deported 28 Afghans in late August 2024 as elections loomed in Thuringia and Saxony in which the far-right Alternative für Deutschland was expected to poll strongly, as indeed it did. For Afghans, being pawns in other players’ political games is nothing new. But from the point of view of diplomatic and consular practice, the British and Norwegian moves had no obvious logic. Since the position of both states remains one of not recognising the Taliban de jure, there is no obvious reason why a communication from the Taliban should have been given any weight, let alone have been treated as if it were a classic Lettre de Chancellerie rather than junk mail.

The logic of the status quo

As a matter of principle, states now commonly view embassies as representing states, not governments. Australia, for example, moved formally to such a position in 1988 following a coup in Fiji which, under then-existing policy, gave rise to the awkward question of whether the coup leaders should be recognised as a government. This was a question that the Australian government preferred not to confront. Claimants to power have no legal right to be recognised as a government, and this is why Afghan missions not under Taliban control have continued to operate in many countries since August 2021. Their funding is covered from fees paid for consular services which embassies are authorised to provide under Article 3.2 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

The Taliban’s refusal to accept documents issued by embassies they do not control is a matter of much less practical significance than one might think. Afghan refugees who sought to return to Afghanistan would risk losing their refugee status as a result of the operation of Article 1.C(4) of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and are therefore unlikely to want to travel to Afghanistan; and citizens of other countries wishing to visit Afghanistan can apply for visas in offices that the Taliban control, such as that in Pakistan—although Western governments routinely advise their citizens not to travel to Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, the Taliban moved to adopt exactly the position that they announced on 30 July 2024, and it backfired badly. The only people who were inconvenienced were those whom the Taliban were trying to attract to Afghanistan, namely aid workers and the occasional friendly journalist.

On the other hand, the closure of embassies and the loss of access to various consular services would be a serious inconvenience for Afghan refugees living in the West and beyond. For such refugees, the acquisition or renewal of an Afghan passport from an Embassy beyond Taliban control—an action unlikely to imperil their refugee status—could be vital in enabling them to visit close family members evacuated to other parts of the world. This is the case since alternative travel documents may be much more difficult to obtain expeditiously. In addition, the laws of a country in which Afghan refugees are living may require that documents be notarised or authenticated for use in their new home, and in the absence of an embassy, this may be very difficult to achieve. A mission under Taliban control would likely be useless in this respect. Wise refugees, concerned for the safety of family still in Afghanistan and wary of sharing personal information with Taliban agents, would in all probability give any such mission a very wide berth. Wise governments, meanwhile, would attach little weight to Taliban “authentication.” Some Taliban sympathisers might seek to set up private channels for the issuing of Taliban-approved passports or visas, but anyone minded to do so would need to tread with considerable caution: to be recognised as a consul, a person requires an authorisation known as an “exequatur” from the receiving state, and it is dangerous to proceed without one. In Australia, for example, the Diplomatic and Consular Missions Act 1978 allows a court on the application of the Attorney-General to restrain a wide range of actions that might involve claims to consular capacity made by unapproved persons.

Politics and recognition

Beyond these points, there are strong moral and political grounds for making no concessions to the Taliban. As early as 10 March 2020, UN Security Council Resolution 2513 stated that “the UN Security Council does not support the restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” Much more recently, US Vice-President Kamala Harris described the Taliban as a “terrorist organization.” These words alone would provide prima facie reason for proceeding with the utmost caution. But so would two other factors: the Taliban’s own behaviour, and lamentable experiences of misreading them in the past. The reports of Richard Bennett, appointed on 1 May 2022 as Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan, and now barred by the Taliban from entering the country, have supplied overwhelming evidence of the human rights catastrophe that has engulfed Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover.

Furthermore, the spectacular failure of previous engagement with the Taliban—notably the disastrous 29 February 2020 US-Taliban Agreement, which led to the Taliban takeover and inspired rogue players such as Russia and Hamas but appalled many responsible actors—suggests that engaging the Taliban is not a credible alternative to laying down firm red lines, an activity which at least has the virtue of preserving the claim to moral integrity of those states which purport to be human rights defenders. Indeed, despite the efforts of the UN to engage the Taliban at the “Doha III” meeting, the Taliban proceeded on 31 July 2024 to publish a new decree, extreme even by Taliban standards, that sought the complete exclusion of women from the public space, and prohibited “Befriending non-Muslims and assisting them.”

Notwithstanding the British and Norwegian capitulations, the Taliban attempt to silence moderate and democratic Afghan voices may well peter out. While the objective of the Taliban regime is plainly to expand de facto (factual) recognition, many states would still see this as the thin edge of the wedge: growing engagement with the Taliban does risk legitimating them and their policies, irrespective of what some Afghan businessmen try to argue, and the Taliban would certainly trumpet it as a victory. Furthermore, democratic states have their own domestic politics, and many political players would not want to risk being depicted by their opponents as the Taliban’s best friends. In light of these factors, there is an obvious and appropriate response to communications from the Taliban in which they seek to bully their way to recognition. Any such messages should either be ignored completely or returned with the simple response nul et non avenu (“null and void”)—the classic diplomatic expression by which an unwelcome missive is rejected. A response falling short of this runs the risk of being interpreted by the Taliban as a marker of growing international acceptability of their regime, and as a vindication of their grotesque policies. For this to happen is in the interest neither of the Afghan people nor of the wider world.

Emeritus Professor William Maley, AM, FASSA, FAIIA is author of Rescuing Afghanistan (2006), What is a Refugee? (2016), Transition in Afghanistan: Hope, Despair and the Limits of Statebuilding (2018), Diplomacy, Communication and Peace: Selected Essays (2021) and The Afghanistan Wars (2021), and co-author (with Ahmad Shuja Jamal) of The Decline and Fall of Republican Afghanistan (2023).

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.