Five years after driving the United States out of Afghanistan, the Taliban are inviting it to come back — with diplomats and cash, but no military.
“We consider the chapter of war to have come to an end, and from now on, we want relations based on mutual respect and a new chapter of positive engagement,” Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, said in an interview with The New York Times in Kabul.
Mr. Muttaqi said the United States could “reopen its embassy, maintain a diplomatic presence and invest” in Afghanistan’s vast mineral wealth, dams and roads — projects that three U.S. administrations and their allies spent billions trying to develop, and that the Taliban insurgency spent two decades trying to dismantle.
The public overture, the first by such a high-ranking Taliban official in years, is the Afghan government’s latest push in a long effort to extract the country from isolation, with mixed results.
Over the past year, the Taliban administration has signed a defense partnership with Russia and secured dozens of trade agreements with Central Asian neighbors like Uzbekistan. Some of its officials regularly travel to Gulf countries and have met with Syria’s president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. It is also cooperating with European countries eager to deport Afghan migrants.
The government would see renewed engagement with the Trump administration, with its appetite for commercial diplomacy and little consideration for human rights, as the crowning achievement of its diplomatic efforts, according to five former U.S. and Afghan officials familiar with Kabul’s approach.
The Taliban argue that they have brought order and security across Afghanistan, cleaned its administration of corruption and created favorable conditions for foreign investment.
But efforts to engage with the United States have stalled.
“There is no appetite in D.C.,” said Hassan Abbas, a U.S.-based scholar and the author of a recent book on the Taliban in power. “No one wants to touch this topic. Everyone wants to forget about Afghanistan.”
In fact, the Trump administration has further distanced itself from the Taliban over the past year.
It has moved closer to one of Afghanistan’s neighbors, Pakistan, which launched dozens of airstrikes on Afghanistan earlier this year. It is embroiled in a conflict with another neighbor, Iran, one of the Taliban’s few steady partners. It has also designated the Taliban as a state sponsor of wrongful detention, paused issuing visas for Afghans and barred them from traveling to the United States.
The Taliban have also rebuffed President Trump on the few things he has publicly asked for, including regaining control of Bagram Air Base, which U.S. forces occupied for 20 years; the return of U.S. weapons abandoned in Afghanistan; and the release of a U.S. prisoner whom the Taliban deny holding.
“No Afghan wants or can tolerate the military presence of another country on Afghan soil, as history has demonstrated,” Mr. Muttaqi said at the foreign ministry this week, sitting in a plush armchair with the white flag of the Taliban behind him.
In a written response to questions, the U.S. State Department rejected the prospect of normalization. The response, attributed to “a department spokesperson,” said the Taliban had failed to make Afghanistan more stable and uphold counterterrorism commitments, instead allowing terrorist groups to use Afghanistan as a launchpad for attacks.
It said the United States engages with the Taliban “only when it is in the interest of the American people.”
A veteran member of the Taliban and a central figure in past negotiations between the United States and the group before it swept back to power, Mr. Muttaqi said his administration wanted to reopen diplomatic missions in the United States.
Mr. Muttaqi, 55, also confirmed that Afghanistan was negotiating migration agreements with European countries.
“We have made progress in this area, and we hope to make significant further progress in the future,” Mr. Muttaqi said, without elaborating.
In recent months, the Afghan government held several bilateral meetings on migration with countries like Germany and France. A delegation of five Afghan diplomats also met more than 20 diplomats from 15 E.U. countries in Brussels in June to discuss repatriating rejected asylum seekers and convicted criminals, according to three participants and an official briefed on the discussions.
One of the participants, an Afghan diplomat, said that in Europe, the taboo of talking to the Taliban had been broken and that Afghanistan would now engage in bilateral discussions with all interested countries to finalize agreements.
Still, no European country recognizes the Taliban administration as Afghanistan’s legitimate authority, and the government remains a pariah excluded from international bodies like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.
The Taliban’s ultraconservative leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity over the persecution of Afghan women and girls. And the United States has frozen billions of dollars from the Afghan Central Bank.
And yet, a growing chorus of analysts and former diplomats in the United States is calling for renewed U.S.-Afghan dialogue beyond counterterrorism cooperation against the Islamic State and prisoner negotiations.
Mr. Trump has the opportunity to do what President Joseph R. Biden Jr. could not, said Robin Raphel, a former U.S. diplomat with extensive experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Moving past the current paralysis, Ms. Raphel said, could create new access to minerals, strengthen relations with Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbors, and counter China and Russia, which do trade and have diplomats in the country.
“But that requires hands-on engagement through a U.S. presence in Kabul, which remains a hard sell in Washington,” Ms. Raphel said.
In an initial exchange with The Times earlier this year, Mr. Muttaqi highlighted Afghanistan’s mines as a potential starting point for a “new chapter for the two countries.”
“I view President Trump’s deal-making ability, pragmatic approach and decisiveness as factors that can facilitate constructive engagement with his administration,” Mr. Muttaqi said.
Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow for South Asia at the D.C.-based Atlantic Council, said minerals were the right pitch to make to the Trump administration. Afghanistan holds vast untapped reserves of lithium, copper and iron ore, as well as rare earth elements that are on the U.S. Geological Survey’s list of critical minerals.
“Values-based considerations like brutality and the Taliban’s horrific treatment of women and girls would not necessarily keep this administration from engaging with the Taliban, particularly if that could help advance U.S. economic interests,” Mr. Kugelman said.
Discussions around Afghanistan’s mineral wealth are not new.
The United States spent nearly $1 billion between 2004 and 2021 to develop Afghanistan’s extractive industry but failed to accomplish any “tangible progress,” according to a 2023 report from SIGAR, the defunct U.S. government oversight agency for Afghanistan. The Taliban administration now holds mining investment deals with companies from China, Iran and Qatar, among others.
Beyond the United States, Mr. Muttaqi called on any country to invest in Afghanistan, where the Taliban administration is in desperate need of foreign capital.
Pakistan, which used to be Afghanistan’s primary trade partner, has closed its border over security concerns, sending the Taliban scrambling for alternative avenues of trade with Central Asian states, Iran and India.
During the interview, Mr. Muttaqi brushed aside a question about whether his government’s crackdown on women and girls was a barrier to international recognition. Earlier this year, he declared the government’s move to keep them out of secondary education was “temporary” — an argument the Taliban also used during their first rule, between 1996 and 2001, when Mr. Muttaqi served as education minister, and immediately after their return to power in 2021.
Mr. Abbas, the academic, said he expected the Taliban to remain isolated as long as they refused to move on their most extreme policies — which are largely dictated out of the city of Kandahar, the group’s spiritual heartland and home to Sheikh Akhundzada.
“Without compromising, without changing anything that they stand for, it is a no-starter,” Mr. Abbas said. “Something has to happen, and the Taliban are not offering that.”
Yaqoob Akbary and Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting.
