On October 20, fighters from the Afghanistan Freedom Front said they had attacked a Taliban checkpoint on the highway north of Kabul, killing three men and wounding two. A week earlier, the same organisation claimed an operation against Taliban intelligence personnel near the provincial police headquarters in Pul-e Alam, Logar. Neither attack threatened to bring down the regime. Both were directed at the machinery through which it controls the country.

Five years after the fall of Kabul, armed resistance survives inside Afghanistan. It is fragmented, uneven and a long way from providing an alternative government. Yet its persistence exposes a distinction that should inform every discussion of the country: the Taliban’s military victory settled who would exercise power. It did not settle whether Afghans would consent to it.

According to partial data compiled by the Institute for Conflict Management, the four principal resistance fronts were associated with 691 incidents between August 15, 2021, and October 21, 2026, with reported Taliban losses of 1,957 killed and 1,053 injured. The National Resistance Front accounted for the largest share, followed by the Afghanistan Freedom Front, the Afghanistan United Front and the National Mobilization Front. These are compiled reports, often dependent on the belligerents’ claims, rather than an independently verified casualty register. They establish the reported persistence of armed opposition more convincingly than they establish its exact military weight.

The geography matters as much as the totals. The material collated by the institute records resistance activity across 27 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. An attack in a province does not amount to a permanent presence there, still less control over it. Nevertheless, operations reported in Kandahar and Helmand complicate the convenient picture of an exclusively Tajik rebellion confined to the Panjshir Valley. In October, the Afghanistan United Front claimed killings in both southern provinces. Small operations, certainly. But in places central to the Taliban’s own history and power.

The targets also tell a story. Intelligence officers, checkpoints, military patrols, commanders and prison personnel recur throughout the resistance reports. On October 5, the National Mobilization Front claimed the killing of the head of discovery and intelligence at Nangarhar Central Prison in Jalalabad. The strategic logic is apparent: groups unable to confront the Taliban’s forces in sustained conventional warfare seek to make the daily administration of coercion more dangerous.

This imposes costs without necessarily changing the balance of power. A regime can lose intelligence officers and retain its prisons; replace a commander and keep his district. The question is whether repeated disruption can eventually produce a wider political and military organisation. So far, the resistance has demonstrated survival more clearly than expansion into a force capable of governing.

Its leading organisations draw heavily on the men and networks of the defeated republic. Ahmad Massoud’s National Resistance Front carries the inheritance of his father, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and the symbolism of Panjshir. The Afghanistan Freedom Front, publicly announced in March 2022, is led by former army chief Yasin Zia and includes former members of Afghanistan’s security forces. The Afghanistan United Front, publicly launched in October 2023 under Sami Sadat, has also built a political presence abroad, including an office in Washington. The National Mobilization Front operates with a less transparent leadership structure and presents itself as another vehicle for former soldiers resisting Taliban rule.

These backgrounds provide military experience, contacts and recognisable leaders. They also leave the opposition with a political problem. Restoring the authority of former officials is not automatically the same thing as building a credible alternative for a population that lived through the republic’s failures. The resistance must explain both how it would remove the Taliban and why a different government would deserve public trust.

Its stated programmes attempt to answer the second question. The main fronts speak of constitutional government, political choice, ethnic inclusion and women’s rights. Massoud has described resistance as a means towards a settlement allowing Afghans to choose their government and girls to return to education. The Freedom Front has offered cooperation with the UN Human Rights Council’s independent accountability mechanism. Both fronts have condemned the Taliban’s treatment of Shia communities.

Such positions matter because they challenge the political order the Taliban are constructing. A government that excludes women and subordinates religious and ethnic diversity to its own interpretation of Islam cannot plausibly claim that obedience demonstrates agreement. Opposition to that order exists in classrooms, homes and communities as well as in armed cells. The fronts do not acquire ownership of those struggles merely by invoking them. Their political credibility will depend on whether they can represent people whose rights they promise to restore.

That requires scrutiny of their own conduct. The European Union Agency for Asylum has cited reports that the NRF used children in direct hostilities, including carrying weapons, spying and handling explosive devices. It also makes clear that the frequently repeated estimate of 5,000 NRF fighters is the organisation’s own uncorroborated claim. Democratic language deserves to be judged against recruitment practices, civilian protection and accountability. Being an enemy of the Taliban does not settle those questions.

Nor does a proliferation of organisations necessarily indicate growing strength. Beyond the four main fronts are movements with overlapping names, regional identities and varying degrees of visibility. Some report operations; others offer little publicly demonstrable capacity. Separate leaderships and political platforms may preserve local initiative, but they also make it harder to build a common strategy. Several groups can share an enemy while remaining unable to agree on the state that should replace him.

There are signs of cooperation. On October 15, the NRF and AFF issued a joint warning about possible attacks against diplomatic missions, UN offices and international institutions. Their statement alleged potential involvement by elements linked to Taliban security structures, extremist networks and foreign actors using the Islamic State’s name or other identities. Those allegations require independent investigation. The statement demonstrates coordination between the two fronts; it does not establish who might be behind a future attack.

The distinction is essential in a conflict where competing actors seek to turn violence into proof of their preferred explanation. Armed opposition to the Taliban includes organisations with profoundly different objectives. Resistance fronts advocating constitutional government cannot simply be placed in the same political category as Islamic State. Equally, their denunciations of jihadist organisations do not establish the operational relationships they allege.

For the moment, the decisive military fact remains Taliban predominance. In its September briefing to the Security Council, the UN assessed that the authorities faced no significant armed or political threat. The opposition has not demonstrated the capacity to replace the administration of a province or sustain a rival government in a major city. Sami Sadat’s August appeal to NATO for material assistance, while explicitly rejecting the need for foreign soldiers, illustrates the gap between the resistance’s ambitions and the resources available to it.

That shortage of external backing creates an opening for Pakistan, whose military establishment spent decades supporting the movement these men are now fighting. Islamabad helped the Taliban consolidate power in the 1990s and provided sanctuary during the insurgency that followed the American intervention. Afghan resistance groups are therefore being presented with the possibility of assistance from a state that helped create the conditions for their defeat. The irony comes with a substantial political bill.

On October 22, The New York Times reported that Pakistani military and intelligence officials had met leaders of anti-Taliban armed groups in recent months to discuss potential support. Its sources included a Pakistani intelligence official, a former national security official briefed on the meetings and a senior Afghan resistance member. Pakistan subsequently denied allegations that it was arming or recruiting Afghans. Reported contacts do not establish an operational supply programme, and they certainly do not establish Pakistani direction of the attacks listed above. They do make the question of Islamabad’s intentions impossible to ignore.

The immediate context is the deterioration of relations over Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the TTP, a separate organisation closely allied with the Afghan Taliban. Islamabad demands action against militants operating from Afghan territory; Kabul denies responsibility for attacks in Pakistan. UN monitoring has nevertheless documented Taliban support for the TTP, including the provision of weapons and documents. The contradiction is particularly awkward for Pakistan’s security establishment: a movement it helped return to Kabul has protected militants fighting the Pakistani state.

That outcome exposes the limits of the assumption that sponsorship produces obedience. The Taliban have their own ideological loyalties, internal bargains and interests. Pakistan’s ability to assist their ascent never amounted to permanent authority over their decisions. Military confrontation between the two countries now makes that distinction rather difficult to overlook.

Outreach to the resistance could offer Islamabad another instrument of pressure. Supporting attacks on Taliban personnel would raise the cost of refusing Pakistani demands without requiring Pakistan to occupy Afghan territory. Such assistance would not necessarily imply a commitment to overthrow the regime. A resistance force useful for extracting concessions could become inconvenient as soon as those concessions were obtained. The risk for its leaders is that they might be financed to keep fighting, then abandoned before achieving the political objective for which they fought.

For a movement promising Afghan self-government, dependence on Pakistan would also threaten its standing at home. Accepting assistance from the Taliban’s former patron would require an explanation to families who lost relatives fighting the insurgency. Pakistani airstrikes in Afghanistan sharpen the problem: could a recipient of Pakistani support condemn civilian deaths, reject an imposed target or refuse a bargain made over its head? Those are practical tests of political independence.

Pakistan’s involvement must therefore be examined without allowing it to erase Afghan agency. The resistance emerged after the Taliban takeover, years before these reported approaches. Its grievances and networks cannot simply be explained away as products of an intelligence service. But an existing insurgency can be exploited without having been invented by its prospective sponsor. Fragmentation makes that easier: separate fronts seeking money and sanctuary can be courted individually, encouraged to compete and offered different conditions.

The distinction that matters is between helping Afghans acquire a political choice and acquiring another means of influencing Kabul. Pakistan’s history in Afghanistan gives the resistance ample reason to demand evidence of the former. A change of partners would not, by itself, demonstrate a change of purpose.

The Taliban still hold the decisive military advantage. The resistance still needs resources, coordination and a political programme credible beyond its own ranks. Pakistan’s reported interest may alter the resources available; it does not resolve those other weaknesses. It introduces the possibility that an Afghan struggle for political freedom will be subordinated to a negotiation about Pakistani security. For men already fighting the Taliban, being useful to Islamabad could prove considerably easier than securing its commitment to an Afghanistan free to choose its own government.