Afghanistan's politics: an emirate ruled by decree with no constitution

Who holds power in the Islamic Emirate

Authority runs from the top down and stops there. The Taliban's leader, styled amir or supreme leader, has the final word on political, military and religious decisions and on appointments. Freedom House, in its 2025 report, describes him as exercising unlimited political authority and ruling by decree.

Beside him sits the Rahbari Shura, the leadership council, a body of 26 members that directed the movement as an insurgency and now, with the leader, appoints the prime minister, the deputy prime ministers and the foreign and interior ministers. It is based in Kandahar, not in the capital. An Al Jazeera report cited in the Wikipedia article on the country's politics found the Council of Ministers in Kabul powerless in practice, with real power vested in the leader and the council.

The cabinet announced on 7 September 2021 had 33 ministers, all men and all long-standing members of the movement. Two were Tajik and one Uzbek; the rest were Pashtun. It was called a caretaker or interim government, as the first Taliban administration of 1996 to 2001 had been. A decree of 15 August 2025 dropped the word interim and confirmed the ministers in their posts on a permanent basis.

No office is filled by a vote. Freedom House records that the Taliban have suspended all political and civic rights, abolished the representative bodies of the republic and prohibit criticism of the regime; protests without permission were banned on 9 September 2021, after demonstrations led by women.

What replaced the constitution of the republic

The Taliban have long described the Quran as their constitution. An ulema council drafted a dastur, a basic law, which their Supreme Court approved in 1998 and which was re-authorised for the insurgency in July 2005. It names a supreme leader who must be a male Sunni Muslim of the Hanafi school, sets up a council appointed by him, and provides for a Council of Ministers. It says nothing about how the leader is chosen or what limits the office.

After taking Kabul the movement announced that the parts of the 1964 constitution of the monarchy "not in conflict with Sharia" would apply in the interim. Observers noted few conflicts between that text and the dastur, since the 1964 constitution had given the king immense powers. The arrangement lasted about a year. In August 2022 the governor of Parwan said the leader had declared the 2004 constitution abolished and ordered that the 1964 text not be used in its place, as neither was compatible with sharia. An exploratory committee on a new constitution was formed in early 2022 and has published nothing since. In September 2022 an acting deputy minister of justice said the Quran functioned as the constitution and that Hanafi law could settle every issue without a written text.

The republic's constitution, approved by a Loya Jirga in January 2004, read very differently. It made Islam the state religion and provided that no law could contravene it, but it also declared men and women equal before the law in Article 22, and required that on average at least two women be elected to the House of the People from each province. It gave the country a directly elected president with two vice-presidents, a lower house of at most 250 elected members, and an upper house a third of whose members were appointed by the president. Article 4 named fourteen peoples as making up the nation, from Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek to Qizilbash, Gujur and Brahui, and applied the word Afghan to every citizen. Article 110 called the Loya Jirga "the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan".

How the republic's elections worked

The Islamic Republic lasted from 2004 to 2021 and ran its politics through the ballot, although every major vote was contested. Presidential elections were held in 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019, and parliamentary ones in 2005, 2010 and 2018.

The 2009 presidential vote was the one that exposed the system. The UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission received more than 2,000 complaints of fraud and intimidation, found polling stations reporting turnout above 100%, threw out the votes of more than 200 of them and cut the incumbent's share to 49.7%. A run-off was called and then cancelled when the challenger withdrew. In 2014 a run-off and an internationally supervised audit ended in a deal: one candidate became president and the other took a new post of chief executive officer, which the constitution did not provide for.

Turnout in the 2018 parliamentary election was about 4 million of 8.8 million registered voters, by Britannica's figures, and a complaints committee invalidated the Kabul vote before the election commission overruled it. The 2019 presidential result, published early in 2020, was again disputed until a power-sharing agreement was signed in May. Fifteen months later the state that ran these elections was gone.

How the country is run below Kabul

The modern state's institutions were laid down under Abdur Rahman between 1880 and 1901, and Britannica sums up what they favoured: a strong army, central control from Kabul and Pashtun primacy in government. They have rarely reached deep into the villages. Britannica describes a long bargain in which local power brokers did not challenge the state and the state did not interfere with them, so local areas kept their own economies and their own customary law whatever regime held Kabul. The one sustained attempt to push central control down to the village, by the communist government after 1978, ended in civil war.

The country is divided into 34 provinces, each under a governor appointed from the centre, and into nearly 400 districts. The republic's constitution provided for elected provincial councils and elected mayors; mayors were in practice appointed, and the provincial councils went with the other representative bodies after 2021.

Below the formal structure are the shuras, community councils, and jirgas, tribal assemblies, many of which have gone on meeting regardless of who governed nationally. Among Pashtuns the customary code is Pashtunwali. With the Taliban, Islamic courts and the clergy's interpretation of the law took over much of the authority once held by local khans. Britannica also notes that Afghan governments have long lived on foreign subsidies and trade taxes more than on internal taxation, and have been better at distributing resources than collecting them.

The loya jirga, the national form of the same institution, has survived the change of regime. The Taliban convened one in Kabul from June to July 2022.

What the decrees require of women and girls

Most of what the Emirate has legislated concerns women, and the decrees came in steps.

UNESCO counted more than 70 decrees restricting the rights of women and girls by August 2025. In secondary schooling, which in Afghanistan starts at grade seven, girls have been excluded since March 2022, and UNESCO estimated in 2026 that 2.4 million girls were kept out. Universities are closed to women. The virtue law of 2024 prohibits any representation of human figures and stops women's voices being broadcast on radio, and UNESCO found that more than 80% of women working in the media had lost their jobs since 2021. Women need a male guardian, a mahram, to travel.

The Taliban's own account has not been uniform. The ministry of education gave the lack of an acceptable school uniform as the reason for keeping secondary schools shut, and a senior Taliban leader described the dress decree as advisory. Six northern and central provinces were reported to be letting girls attend school beyond grade six despite the ban.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the UN have called these policies "gender apartheid". The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against the supreme leader and the chief justice over the persecution of women and girls; the Wikipedia article on human rights in the country dates them 23 January 2025, and the article on the Taliban July 2025.

Who recognises the government in Kabul

Recognition is the one lever outside states have held, and it has slipped. The first Emirate was recognised by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and denied the UN seat. The second asked for the seat by letter on 20 September 2021 and did not get it; the UN has said recognition is impossible while the restrictions on women's education and work remain.

Engagement has grown anyway. China accepted a Taliban ambassador in December 2023 while saying this was not recognition, and the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Türkiye and Pakistan followed at ambassador level. Taliban representatives attended the UN climate conference in November 2024, the first time since 2021. Russia removed the Taliban from its list of terrorist organisations in April 2025 and on 3 July 2025 became the first state to recognise them formally. India upgraded its technical mission in Kabul to an embassy in October 2025. By Crisis Group's count at least 17 countries kept embassies in Kabul in 2025.

Carnegie's analysis of the Russian decision called it more symbolic than economic, and put trade between the two at US$323 million at the end of 2024. The United States, which had made the republic a major non-NATO ally in 2012, rescinded that status in July 2022, and after the takeover it froze about US$9 billion of the central bank's assets.

Russia had built toward its decision through the Moscow Format, a regional forum it began in 2017 for talks on Afghanistan, to which the Taliban were invited as a full member in 2025. Crisis Group noted that Afghanistan's seat at the UN was still held by a representative of the former republic. The state's older memberships carry on beneath the question. Afghanistan joined the UN in 1946 and was a founding member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation; the record beside this article lists the others.

Why Pakistan and Afghanistan keep fighting over the border

The Durand Line of 1893 is recognised internationally as Pakistan's western border and remains largely unrecognised in Afghanistan, and this catalogue takes no position on it. After a Pakistani air raid on a village on the Afghan side in July 1949, a loya jirga was held and the Afghan government declared that it did not recognise the line. The claim to the Pashtun areas beyond it, the Pashtunistan question, led Pakistan to close the border in August 1961 for nearly two years.

The Taliban have not resolved it, and their relations with Pakistan, whose officials backed them in the 1990s, have turned hostile. Pakistani officials accuse them of harbouring Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban, which Freedom House reported in 2025 now operates from bases in Afghanistan; the Taliban deny it. Pakistan ordered the expulsion of Afghans in October 2023, Iran ordered the deportation of an estimated 4 million Afghan migrants and refugees in May 2025, and cross-border shelling in 2024 turned into direct war between the two governments in February 2026.