RASC News Agency: In his latest quarterly report on Afghanistan, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has delivered a sobering assessment of the country’s trajectory under Taliban rule marked by internal power struggles, an ideological war against women, and a dangerous retreat from responsible governance. Presented to the UN Security Council on Thursday, June 19, the report covers the period from February through April 2025 and offers a stark insight into a regime that, nearly four years after seizing power, continues to prioritize religious extremism and patriarchal control over stability, prosperity, or public service. Guterres pointed to persistent structural tensions within the Taliban leadership, with particular emphasis on the two-month unexplained absence of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the group’s Minister of Interior Affairs. According to the report, the absence stemmed from internal disputes over the Taliban’s harsh restrictions on girls’ education a rare admission of factional disagreement in a movement that routinely presents itself as ideologically unified. Though Haqqani has returned to his post, his temporary disappearance revealed growing cracks within the upper echelons of Taliban power, where differences over key policies continue to fester beneath the surface.
Yet, despite these internal rifts, Guterres noted that such disputes do not appear to pose a serious threat to the Taliban’s grip on power an observation that only highlights the regime’s reliance on coercion rather than consensus to maintain control. The report also sheds light on the increasingly autocratic posture of Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, whose Eid remarks earlier this year focused on demanding renewed public allegiance and rejecting democratic governance in its entirety. By openly dismissing democratic principles, Akhundzada reaffirmed the Taliban’s ideological opposition to pluralism, representation, and any form of people-centered government. His rhetoric confirmed what the international community has long feared: the Taliban remain firmly committed to authoritarian theocracy and unaccountable rule.
One of the most damning sections of Guterres’s report addresses the Taliban’s continued enforcement of the “Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” law a draconian code used as a legal framework for gender apartheid. Under this law, women’s access to education, healthcare, employment, and public services has been severely curtailed, rendering half the population invisible in the civic and economic life of the nation. Guterres warned that such policies are not only morally indefensible but also economically suicidal, as they prevent Afghanistan from mobilizing its human capital at a time of severe humanitarian need. The regime’s obsessive focus on controlling women’s bodies and voices has come at the direct expense of national progress.
Equally troubling is the Taliban’s refusal to publish a national budget for the current fiscal year an omission that has crippled state institutions and undermined public trust. Guterres reported that delayed or suspended salary payments have left thousands of civil servants, particularly in education, health, and security sectors, unpaid or dismissed, further exacerbating institutional decay. This financial opacity, Guterres implied, reflects not only administrative incompetence but a broader contempt for transparency, accountability, and planning hallmarks of functional governance that are systematically ignored under Taliban rule. In another reflection of authoritarian governance, the report revealed that the Taliban continue to fill leadership positions based on ideological loyalty and gender conformity favoring male clerics and combatants over technocrats or experienced professionals. This practice has hollowed out what little remains of Afghanistan’s administrative core and ensured that key sectors are staffed by individuals chosen not for competence, but for obedience.
In a move that borders on the absurd, Guterres noted that the Taliban have urged the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) to highlight their “achievements” in official reporting. Yet as the current report makes unequivocally clear, these so-called achievements are nonexistent in substance and contradicted by the regime’s own actions: the erosion of civil liberties, the collapse of institutional governance, the suppression of women, and the criminalization of dissent. The report concludes with a damning reality: Afghanistan under the Taliban is not simply facing a humanitarian or economic crisis it is confronting a political and moral catastrophe, driven by a regime that governs through fear, exclusion, and ideological rigidity.
Despite growing internal cracks, the Taliban remain entrenched, not through legitimacy or public trust, but through repression and absolutism. The group’s refusal to evolve or engage with international norms leaves the country in diplomatic isolation, and its people especially women and girls in a state of systemic despair. As the international community contemplates its next steps, the message from Guterres is unmistakable: so long as the Taliban continue to brutalize their own population and reject every principle of modern governance, Afghanistan will remain a failed state under authoritarian occupation.
