Before dawn on July 17, fighters from a previously obscure militia calling itself Sepahiyan-e Mihan, or Patriotic Soldiers Front, slipped into the district center of Yaftal-e Payin in Afghanistan’s remote Badakhshan province. They disarmed Taliban personnel, tore down the white Islamic Emirate flag, and held the town until Taliban reinforcements arrived hours later to take it back.
Days later, a separate faction, the Afghanistan Freedom Front, said it had seized Taliban military positions in the province’s Zebak district, killing 21 Taliban fighters. It was the kind of sustained clash the Taliban had not faced since it marched into Kabul on August 15, 2021.
Five years after the last American aircraft lifted off from Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 30, 2021, Afghanistan is quietly becoming a live fuse again. For the first time since the Taliban takeover, analysts tracking the conflict say a cluster of fights in the mountainous northeast looks less like scattered raids and more like the early stages of an insurgency.
The fighting in Badakhshan “is the most significant armed resistance we’ve seen since the Taliban came back to power,” a resident senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council, Michael Kugelman, tells The New York Sun.
“But I wouldn’t overstate its clout. To pose a viable threat, the resistance will need external sponsorship and the arms and money that come with it. The world has essentially moved on and doesn’t want to get dragged into fresh conflict in Afghanistan.”
So, is the Taliban facing the first real crack in its control since it took Kabul, or just a passing flare-up in a country that has seen plenty of both? What’s more, can the United States do anything about it?
A Country Washington Stopped Writing About
For the time being, not the fighting, the escalating hunger, nor the growing Chinese footprint registers much in Washington. Afghanistan does not appear by name in either the 2025 National Security Strategy or the 2026 National Defense Strategy, the documents meant to define what keeps America’s national security apparatus up at night.
A country that consumed two decades, thousands of American lives and more than $2 trillion has, in five years, gone from the center of United States foreign policy to a blank page.
The omission is less an oversight than a symptom. A State Department official told Congress this past February that a review of American policy toward Afghanistan “is an ongoing process,” and that lawmakers would be told once officials “reach some sort of consensus.” Six months later, no consensus has been made public.
Part of the answer traces to a war that Washington would, perhaps, rather not revive.
“There is an aversion to revisiting an arena where the US was bogged down for twenty years, ending in an ugly withdrawal and political recrimination,” a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Edmund Fitton-Brown, writes to the Sun. “Counterterrorism is a lower priority than at any time since 9/11.”
Others go further, arguing Afghanistan was never as central to American interests as two decades of occupation made it seem.
“Afghanistan has returned to what it always should have been: a country of very marginal concern to the U.S. national interest,” a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities, Gil Barndollar, tells the Sun. “In an era of renewed great power competition, Afghanistan is best seen as a distraction, not a prize.”
Congress has proposed bills that would force the administration to report on aid reaching the Taliban and on its tightening restrictions on Afghan women and girls, who are still barred from attending secondary school. Requiring a report, however, is not the same as having a plan.
Five years on, that absence of a plan has effectively become the plan itself, although some Afghanistan watchers argue that the protracted crisis threatens both Afghans and international security, and that ignoring it won’t make it go away.
“A low-cost, high-impact pathway exists to address it in a way that advances US interests,” the director of the Afghanistan Program for Peace and Development at the University of Notre Dame, Aref Dostyar, tells the Sun. Mr. Dostyar, a former Afghan consul general at Los Angeles, points to multi-stakeholder efforts such as the Afghanistan Dialogue and Visioning Process, which he says have spent months building constituencies and mapping key issues among a new generation of Afghan partners.
“The Taliban are not yet prepared to participate; however, a clear U.S. policy supporting a political process would generate the necessary momentum and pressure to move forward,” he says.
The Hunger Crisis No One Is Funding
While Washington is relatively silent on Afghanistan, the humanitarian floor is falling out from under the country.
The UN World Food Program stated in August that nearly 14 million Afghans face acute hunger and that funding shortfalls mean it can reach only one in nine of them. Child malnutrition has hit critical levels across a record 12 provinces, and some famine-prevention distributions have already been halted for lack of money.
The agency says it needs roughly $500 million to get through winter, historically the deadliest season for Afghan children, as more than 2.5 million Afghans were pushed back from Pakistan and Iran last year, straining an economy that never recovered from the Taliban takeover and withdrawal of Western aid.
One recommendation from Washington’s shrinking circle of Afghanistan watchers is to find narrow, apolitical ways back into the country rather than abandoning it outright.
“It’s really hard to sell the American people on the fact that we may have an interest in what happens there anymore,” a defense expert and former intelligence officer, Del Wilber, tells the Sun. “A better approach would be constructive engagement, perhaps offering help clearing unexploded ordnance to make it safer for children. That could be a beginning to help counter China.”
Beijing Fills the Space America Left Behind
Where the United States has withdrawn, China has moved in, positioning itself as the only major economy willing to do business with a government still shunned by most of the world.
The centerpiece is the Mes Aynak copper deposit in Logar province, one of the largest untapped copper reserves on earth, where a state-owned Chinese firm is working toward extraction under a 30-year, roughly $4 billion contract. The Taliban’s own mining ministry recently had to press Chinese contractors to speed up stalled work.
Beijing has also pursued oil and gold development, plus a $10 billion lithium proposal that the Taliban turned down last year while leaving the door open to future capital investment. Yet, the relationship is transactional rather than sentimental, and Beijing’s investment has lagged its rhetoric.
“China is influential in Afghanistan, but it is not an easy arena for the Chinese, who are risk-averse and aware they could become targets for terrorism,” Mr. Fitton-Brown explains.
“That is why they have been so slow to exploit the mineral concessions they have secured. The Taliban are careful not to alienate China, but they will not imprison or extradite Uyghur extremists on Afghan soil either. There is an implied blackmail here, and China knows it.”
Mr. Kugelman cautions against reading too much into the influence narrative.
“I wouldn’t overstate China’s economic role in Afghanistan,” he says. “It expressed interest and met with Taliban officials about investment, but there’s not much there.”
Mr. Barndollar is even more dismissive of the stakes for Washington. “There are a host of places, from Brazil to Britain, that matter far more to U.S. grand strategy,” he says.
Not everyone is convinced China’s slow pace means Washington can afford to look away. Mr. Wilber sees a familiar playbook regardless of how slowly the Chinese money moves, one he argues the United States has seen before in other corners of the globe.
“For better or worse, Afghanistan has a part to play in our geopolitical strategy as it relates to China and the Southwest Asia region,” he points out. “Are we witnessing once again the ‘Domino Theory’ we were warned about decades ago? China is starting the same strategy in Afghanistan that they have been doing to make inroads and gain influence with the small Caribbean island nations with their Belt and Road Initiative.”
Security has proven complicated for Chinese nationals, with cross-border attacks from Pakistan killing several Chinese citizens in recent months, including a January bombing at a Chinese-run restaurant in Kabul claimed by ISIS-Khorasan. Unlike the United States, China has treated that risk as a cost of doing business, not a reason to disengage.
Taken together, the picture five years on is one of near-total American disengagement from a country it once occupied with more than 100,000 troops. The Taliban faces its most serious armed test in half a decade; millions of Afghans are on the edge of famine; and the one outside power methodically building influence in Kabul is not Washington.
For ordinary Afghans, the stakes are immediate: a winter without enough food and a government with no outside check on its behavior. For Washington, the consequences are slower-moving yet no less real: a foothold for Beijing in a country bordering China, Pakistan, and the Central Asian states.
“China isn’t in Afghanistan to open a chain of restaurants,” Mr. Wilber says. “They recognize the geopolitical importance of that region of the world.”
