Nearly five years after the fall of Kabul, the regime that sold itself as the antidote to corruption, insecurity and chaos is presiding over a country where criminality is visibly expanding. Homicides, armed robberies, thefts, assaults, extortion and gang activity are being reported across Afghanistan, from Helmand to Badakhshan, from Herat to Kabul, from Balkh to Parwan, Faryab and Jawzjan. The country remains trapped under severe media restrictions, which means the full scale of the problem is almost certainly larger than the scattered reports suggest. But even the Taliban’s own figures are enough to puncture the myth.

According to data published by the Taliban Interior Ministry in November 2025 and reported in January 2026, total criminal cases rose from 10,834 in the solar hijri year 1400, corresponding to March 2021-March 2022, to 17,320 in 1403, March 2024-March 2025. That is an increase of about sixty per cent since the Taliban returned to power. Murder cases rose from 1,502 to 1,734, an increase of more than fifteen per cent. Theft cases doubled, from 3,102 to 6,225.

This is not a marginal deterioration. It is the statistical outline of a state that claims to have restored security while losing control of ordinary life.

The contradiction becomes even sharper when one looks at spending. According to the World Bank’s Afghanistan Economic Monitor, published in December 2025, the Taliban administration spent about 96.9 billion Afghanis, roughly 1.4 billion dollars, on security in the first nine months of the 2025 fiscal year. In other words, the Taliban is devoting enormous resources to security while Afghans experience rising crime. The regime has built a security apparatus powerful enough to police women’s clothing, silence journalists, hunt dissidents and impose ideological discipline, but not effective enough to protect ordinary citizens from robbery, murder and extortion.

That is not failure by accident. It is failure by design.

The Taliban’s security state is not built to protect society. It is built to control it. It is highly efficient when the target is a woman seeking education, a journalist asking questions, a former official, a protester, a musician, a civil society activist or anyone who challenges the regime’s authority. It is far less effective when the threat comes from gangs, armed robbers, extortion networks, drug economies or Taliban-linked actors operating under the cover of power. The state sees dissent more clearly than it sees crime, because dissent threatens the regime. Crime merely feeds the ecosystem around it.

The Taliban’s answer, predictably, is theatre. It presents itself as a regime of justice, punishment and moral order. It advertises the work of its courts, publicises punishments and wraps summary adjudication in the language of divine law. According to UNAMA’s update on the human rights situation in Afghanistan for January to March 2026, the deputy spokesperson of the de facto authorities announced that in 2025 de facto courts adjudicated approximately 241,799 criminal and civil cases, resolved about 54,956 cases through reconciliation, applied qisas to six people in four provinces, and imposed discretionary punishment on 1,118 criminals and accused persons. During the reporting period, the de facto Supreme Court issued twenty-nine announcements highlighting the courts’ mediation of thirty-three killing cases across seventeen provinces.

The numbers are meant to impress. They should alarm.

Afghanistan’s judiciary has not been strengthened. It has been dismantled and replaced. The transition to Taliban rule fractured institutional continuity with the previous government. Trained judges, legal personnel and public prosecutors were removed, replaced by Taliban members who largely lack formal legal credentials. Modern legal procedures gave way to swift, summary adjudications. Due process became subordinate to ideological loyalty. Law became performance. Punishment became publicity.

This is not justice. It is coercion wearing a turban.

The Taliban wants Afghans and the outside world to believe that harsh punishment equals public safety. But the rise in crime shows the opposite. A justice system that lacks professional competence, procedural safeguards and institutional independence cannot produce security. It produces fear, arbitrariness and impunity. It punishes selectively. It intimidates visibly. It fails silently.

The roots of the crime wave are not mysterious. One of the Taliban’s first acts after seizing power in August 2021 was to open prison doors. Thousands of inmates were released from Pul-e-Charki prison on the outskirts of Kabul, a facility that held around 5,000 prisoners. Many of those released later joined Taliban ranks, helped consolidate power, looted public assets and then contributed to the spread of violent crime. The regime has continued this practice through periodic amnesties, especially around Eid festivals. On 18 March 2026, the Taliban Supreme Court announced that 4,596 prisoners had been released and the sentences of another 4,407 inmates reduced ahead of Eid al-Fitr.

A state that releases thousands of inmates for political and symbolic purposes should not be surprised when criminality expands. But surprise is not really the issue. The Taliban is less concerned with the quality of public security than with the symbolism of mercy when useful and severity when useful. The result is predictable: criminals circulate, institutions weaken, and ordinary Afghans pay the price.

Then there are the weapons. Afghanistan is saturated with arms. According to the Small Arms Survey’s March 2025 briefing paper, M4 and M16 rifles and other US-supplied weapons continued to be widely available in informal markets across Afghanistan and in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions. More than 300,000 of the 427,300 weapons provided by the United States to Afghan forces remained in Afghanistan at the time of the US withdrawal. Large quantities of ammunition also remained in the country.

This is the material inheritance of collapse: a radical regime in power, a shattered legal system, released prisoners, armed markets, unemployed young men, criminal networks and a population stripped of protection. The Taliban may control ministries, checkpoints and ceremonies. It does not control the forces its own victory unleashed.

Extortion has become another pillar of insecurity. The Global Organized Crime Index 2025 describes extortion and protection racketeering as widespread in Afghanistan and a significant revenue source for criminal groups. Since 2021, these practices have been formalised and incorporated into old and new “taxation” systems. The distinction between tax, bribe, protection money and theft is often deliberately blurred. Businesses, traders, street vendors and ordinary citizens remain vulnerable not only to traditional criminal actors, but also to former warlords, powerful local figures and gangs operating under the cover of Taliban authority.

In April 2026, armed robbers were reported stopping vehicles along the Herat-Ghor highway and stealing money and belongings from passengers and civilians. The police chief of Karukh District in Herat stated that the gang had been operating for three to four months. In February 2026, in Qarabagh District of Kabul, local gangs operating under the protection or cover of Taliban authority were reportedly demanding daily or weekly “protection money” from street vendors and small shopkeepers. Those who refused faced harassment and physical violence.

This is what criminal governance looks like. It is not always a gang against the state. Often it is a gang beside the state, under the state, inside the state, or protected by the state. Afghanistan today is not simply suffering from crime. It is suffering from the fusion of crime, power and ideology.

The drug economy adds another layer. The Taliban boasted about reducing opium cultivation, but illicit economies do not disappear because a regime changes the crop. They mutate. According to UNODC, as agricultural-based opiate production declines, synthetic drugs appear to have become the new business model for organised crime groups because they are easier to produce, harder to detect and more resilient to climate pressures. Another UNODC report in June 2025 described open drug use in graveyards, under bridges, parks, abandoned buildings and farmlands, with more than one hundred such sites in Kabul and Kandahar alone. One third of those who used drugs admitted engaging in criminal activity to fund addiction.

So the Taliban has not ended the drug-crime nexus. It has presided over its transformation. The old opium economy has been squeezed, but synthetic drugs, arms trafficking, human smuggling and extortion have filled the space. Organised crime is adapting faster than the regime’s slogans.

For ordinary Afghans, the result is a daily collapse of safety. The danger is no longer only political repression, though that remains brutal. It is also the fear of being robbed on a highway, beaten for refusing extortion, assaulted in a market, murdered in a dispute, or trapped between local Taliban commanders, criminal gangs and a judiciary that offers punishment without justice.

This is the great deception at the heart of Taliban rule. The regime equates control with order. It mistakes obedience for peace. It believes that because women can be forced out of classrooms, journalists can be silenced, music can be banned and public punishment can be staged, society has been pacified. But a society can be silent and still be unsafe. It can be terrified and still be lawless. It can be watched by armed men and still be abandoned.

The Taliban’s Afghanistan is not a stable Islamic order. It is a coercive and criminalised landscape where the state’s violence is organised, but public safety is not. The regime has built a machine capable of repression, not governance. It can issue decrees, but not trust. It can punish, but not adjudicate fairly. It can spend billions on security, but not protect citizens. It can claim justice, while presiding over the steady expansion of murder, theft and extortion.

The rise in criminal incidents is therefore not a side issue. It is a verdict on Taliban rule. The Taliban returned to power claiming that it alone could end chaos. Instead, it has produced a darker bargain: less freedom, less justice, less accountability, and still no security.

Afghans were promised order. They received a prison with thieves at the gate.