Afghanistan’s exportable threat

On a spring (Opens in new window) evening earlier this year, an object the size of a dinner plate flew in low over Rawalpindi, the garrison city that houses the headquarters of Pakistan’s army. Air defences caught it before it hit anything. But it wasn’t alone. The Taliban claimed credit (Opens in new window) for a number of drone strikes inside Pakistan, reaching from the alleys of Quetta to the outskirts of Islamabad. The machines involved were not much to look at: plastic frames, lithium batteries, and motors you could buy on a hobbyist website, the whole thing assembled for a few hundred dollars. Nobody in Washington or Brussels said much of anything.

That silence is the story. Almost five years after the last American military cargo plane left Kabul, Afghanistan has become the world’s most ignored security problem. The country doesn’t appear in the latest (Opens in new window) US National Security Strategy. It hardly stands out in European capitals preoccupied with Ukraine, Iran, Gaza and migration policies. The reasoning, when articulated, usually goes like this: the war has ended, the Taliban are now in control, and whatever unfolds within that country is no longer our concern.

This line of thinking is not holding up.

The drones clearly show a larger trend: a government that spent 20 years in a war against a superpower is now developing equipment to combat a smaller adversary on its own terms. Kabul is reportedly running (Opens in new window) a covert drone program, a technology cheap and deniable. Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban’s ideological cousin, announced the formation (Opens in new window) of its own “air force” unit and quadcopter drone attacks in Pakistan surged.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. It’s happening on the back of a relationship with other militant groups that the Afghan Taliban never severed. The United Nations Security Council’s sanctions monitoring team, about as close to a neutral referee as exists on this question, has said plainly that Kabul maintains (Opens in new window) a “permissive environment” for multiple terrorist organisations: Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State’s regional affiliate, ISIS-Khorasan. When the Taliban insists no terrorist groups operate on its soil, the UN’s own monitors have called that claim not credible. Al-Qaeda, (Opens in new window) once written off as a shadow of dozens of stragglers, is now assessed to run training camps across multiple provinces. Whether al-Qaeda has genuinely gone quiet or is simply waiting is not a question anyone can currently answer with confidence, which is itself the problem.

This is where the story stops being about Afghanistan and Pakistan and starts being about everyone else. Techniques tested at Pakistani checkpoints are not confined to Pakistan. Components pass through the same smuggling networks that have supplied militants for decades. Training doesn’t respect borders, and neither does recruitment – which can happen online, reaching people who have never set foot near the Hindu Kush. A cheap drone that works against a police post today is a cheap drone that can be taken to work against a distant target tomorrow. Afghanistan has become precisely as long warned: an ungoverned space where hardline groups get to experiment, fail, adjust, and eventually export tactics that work.

So what would actually help? Put Afghanistan back on the list of things that matter enough. A country incubating the symbolic homeland of al-Qaeda, a resilient Islamic State franchise, and an insurgency launching drones at a nuclear-armed neighbour is not a footnote. Australia’s move (Opens in new window) in December 2025 to sanction senior Taliban ministers directly, rather than leaning entirely on the older UN framework, is a small but useful template: specific, verifiable, and tied to behaviour rather than the mere passage of time.

Afghanistan has become the West’s most consequential blind spot. And the people paying for that blindness right now are not in Washington or Brussels but in Quetta, Peshawar, and the border towns that get shelled by one side and bombed by the other while the rest of the world checks its phone for news from somewhere else.