Afghanistan International, 5 August 2026
A very interesting analysis of the state of the Taleban regime by Hassan Abbas, describing it as “a government that is administratively more capable than its critics expected and politically more brittle than its own propaganda suggests” and with its leader “Hibatullah Akhundzada (…) stronger today than at any point since 2016. This is not an accident of personality, and it is certainly not the product of charisma.
He then looks at the four factors behind this development, tribal, clerical, coercive and legal-bureaucratic. On the clerical factor he writes:
Hibatullah’s real constituency is not the old guerrilla commander but the new mosque-based clergy: prayer leaders and teachers in provincial towns who had status without resources under the Republic. The Taliban have given them both.
A leadership decree specifying dormitories for five hundred to a thousand students per madrassa, daily student stipends, and graded salaries for shaykh al-ḥadīth and Qur’an instructors is not merely an education policy. It is a patronage system with a curriculum attached. Alongside some fifteen thousand registered madrassas sits a parallel network of leadership-sponsored schools operating outside the ordinary system, with their own syllabus, oaths of allegiance to the leader, and — in provinces like Panjshir — buildings repurposed from shuttered girls’ schools. Provincial ulema councils extend the same logic into dispute resolution.
Interesting enough, this kind of financial cooption of the mullahs had also been implemented by former (non-Taleban) rulers of Afghanistan, not least by Amanullah (1919-29).
Revisions:
This article was last updated on 1 Sep 2026
