Four years after the Taliban seized Kabul in August 2021, the crisis in Afghanistan has not resolved into either a stable authoritarian equilibrium or a collapsed state. It has settled into something harder to manage: a condition of frozen dysfunction, where a government internationally unrecognised governs over 40 million people, where 22.9 million Afghans require humanitarian assistance, where more than two dozen active terrorist organisations operate within its borders, and where the geopolitical calculations of every major power in Asia are entangled in what the country becomes next. For Bangladesh — 3,000 kilometres from Kabul, sharing no border with Afghanistan, engaged in no military alliance with any major power — this might appear to be a distant concern. The evidence argues otherwise.
What Afghanistan Looks Like Four Years On
The Taliban's return to power in August 2021 produced outcomes that surprised even its most pessimistic analysts. Afghanistan's economy contracted by approximately one-third within four years of the Taliban's takeover. The 2025 Afghanistan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan estimates that 14.8 million Afghans face limited access to healthcare and 14.3 million experience acute food insecurity. The World Food Programme reported in early 2025 that it had been unable to provide rations to roughly half the Afghans in acute need of food over the winter because of international funding shortfalls — the 2024 response plan required $3.06 billion and received only 40 percent of that figure.
The UN Monitoring Team assisting the Afghanistan Sanctions Committee documented in early 2025 that more than two dozen terrorist organisations operate inside Afghanistan's borders, posing — in the report's language — "a serious challenge to the stability of the country, as well as to the security of Central Asian and other neighbouring states." ISIS-Khorasan has been assessed as posing the "greatest extraregional terrorist threat," conducting attacks in Europe and actively recruiting from Central Asian states. Al-Qaeda maintains training camps and safe houses with what intelligence assessments describe as tacit Taliban support. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which ended its ceasefire with Pakistan in November 2022, continues to operate from Afghan soil — a source of escalating violence that reached open military confrontation in October 2025, when Pakistan conducted airstrikes in Khost, Kunar and Paktika.
The Taliban has not been diplomatically isolated to the degree Western policy hoped. China became the first country to formally accredit a Taliban ambassador in January 2024. The UAE followed in August of the same year. Russia's parliament approved legislation allowing the Supreme Court to remove the Taliban from its banned organisation list. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan removed the Taliban from their respective banned entity lists. The international community is splitting between those who insist on conditioning engagement on women's rights and counter-terrorism performance, and those — primarily China, Russia, and Central Asian states — who have concluded that pragmatic engagement serves stability better than continued isolation.
The Afghan-Bangladesh Security Thread
The connection between what happens in Afghanistan and what Bangladesh faces domestically is neither hypothetical nor historical. It is an active and documented threat pathway that runs through ideological transmission, organisational networks, and the radicalization pipeline that Afghan conflict has consistently fed into Bangladesh's militant ecosystem.
During the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-1989, an estimated thousand Bangladeshi volunteers travelled to fight with Mujahideen forces, returning with combat training, explosives expertise, and a Salafi-jihadi ideology absorbed in camps supported by Saudi, Pakistani, and other patrons. That generation of returnees seeded the militant organisational infrastructure of the 1990s — Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B), and the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh. JMB's founding chief Abdur Rahman explicitly stated that the Taliban were his model and had personally travelled to Afghanistan. JMB's most notorious operation — the synchronised detonation of approximately 500 bombs across 300 locations throughout Bangladesh on 17 August 2005 — was the operational expression of an ideology rooted in the Afghan jihadi tradition.
The lineage continued into the third generation. Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), established by Ayman al-Zawahiri in September 2014, consolidated jihadist factions across South Asia specifically including Taliban-affiliated fighters. Its Bangladeshi affiliate, Ansar al-Islam, was responsible for a series of targeted killings of secular writers and activists between 2013 and 2016. The 2016 Holey Artisan Bakery attack in Dhaka — which killed 22 hostages including Japanese, Italian and Indian nationals — was carried out by Neo-JMB, which had established links with ISIS-Khorasan in Afghanistan. The attackers were predominantly educated, urban young men radicalized not through poverty but through digital propaganda produced in part from the Afghan theatre of conflict.
The Stimson Center's regional security analysts, writing in August 2025 on the Taliban's four-year governance record, assessed that ISIS-K continues to pose a "greatest extraregional terrorist threat" specifically including South and Southeast Asia. Neo-JMB's surviving network has attempted to establish contact with ISIS-Khorasan even as its operational cells were dismantled by Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion. The RSIS Terrorism Trends and Analysis service has documented that local-language websites and social media accounts in Bangladesh actively spread ISK content, with radicalization pathways functioning independently of physical organisational membership.
The Post-August 2024 Vulnerability
Bangladesh's counter-terrorism posture entered a period of structural weakness following the political transition of August 2024. The interim government's approach to security — documented in detail by The Diplomat in August 2025 — involved the active dismantling of counter-terrorism institutional capacity as part of a broader effort to dismantle the apparatus of the outgoing administration. Experienced counter-terrorism professionals were sidelined, dismissed, or transferred to non-operational posts. Others faced legal proceedings.
The consequences have been measurable. Previously isolated extremist groups have forged new alliances and organised public events in major cities. In July 2025, two individuals were arrested on suspicion of links with Tehreek-e-Taliban. In June 2025, Malaysia filed charges against 36 Bangladeshi nationals for alleged involvement with ISIS — a development highlighting how overseas labour migration channels, which send approximately 700,000 workers abroad annually, function as a radicalization transmission vector that Bangladesh's security apparatus is currently less equipped to monitor. In December 2025, an explosion at a madrasa in South Keraniganj, Dhaka injured four people; authorities found approximately 250 kilograms of bomb-making materials at the scene.
The political dimension is equally fraught. Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, whose student wing has historical connections to the militant ecosystem and whose financial network economist Abul Barkat has described as generating approximately $200 million in annual profit through a parallel economic structure, has returned to open political activity. The nomination of a cleric awaiting terrorism-related trial as a Jamaat electoral candidate in May 2025 illustrated the extent to which the boundary between political Islam and the militant fringe has become more permeable in the post-transition environment.
Regional Geometry: What South Asian Instability Means for Dhaka
Afghanistan's instability radiates through South Asia in ways that are not primarily military. The failure of state function in Kabul, combined with an active narcotics economy — Afghanistan produces the overwhelming majority of the world's opium — creates structural incentives for transnational criminal networks that intersect with militant financing. Pakistan's deteriorating relationship with the Taliban, which escalated into open military confrontation in October 2025, raises the spectre of a Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict that would destabilise the country whose territory borders Bangladesh on three sides. A materially weakened Pakistan — its financial system already under IMF structural adjustment, its military conducting operations simultaneously against TTP and in the context of post-Pahalgam India-Pakistan tensions — represents a compounded risk to the stability architecture of the subcontinent.
Bangladesh's trade and economic connectivity runs through regional stability in ways that are direct and quantifiable. The country's $47 billion annual garment export industry requires functioning logistics networks, international buyer confidence, and the continued participation of Bangladeshi workers in overseas labour markets. A South Asian security deterioration that triggers insurance premium increases, buyer sourcing diversification away from the region, or labour market restrictions in destination countries represents an economic risk that no quarterly FDI figure can offset. Remittances, which reached approximately $30 billion in FY 2024-25, flow largely from the Gulf and from the same migration corridor that connects Bangladesh's labour diaspora to Pakistan's transport networks and, through Pakistan, to the broader South Asian security environment.
Dhaka's Diplomatic Tightrope
Bangladesh has not established diplomatic relations with the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. No formal recognition has been extended. The country's foreign policy posture, inherited from successive governments and maintained by the Yunus interim administration, rests on a principle of non-interference combined with an emphasis on multilateral frameworks — the OIC, SAARC, and UN mechanisms — for addressing regional security questions. This is a defensible posture for a country of Bangladesh's size and strategic weight. It is also increasingly insufficient as a framework for managing the specific threat vectors that Afghanistan's trajectory creates.
The Lowy Institute's analysis from late 2025 framed the coming period as one of heightened geopolitical competition, with China and Russia pushing pragmatic engagement with the Taliban, the United States leveraging intelligence and economic tools, and regional states weighing the costs of containment versus cooperation. Bangladesh sits in the middle of this competition without a defined position, engaged in a deep economic relationship with China — Bangladesh's largest trading partner — while navigating the expectations of Western partners whose development financing has underpinned Bangladesh's infrastructure and social sector investment for decades.
What Bangladesh requires is not a dramatic diplomatic repositioning but a security policy recalibration that restores counter-terrorism institutional capacity, builds bilateral intelligence-sharing arrangements with regional partners that are insulated from political cycles, and participates constructively in multilateral frameworks — including the Doha process on Afghanistan — where decisions that affect South Asian stability are being made. The failure to do so does not produce neutrality. It produces a vacuum that the organisations tracing their lineage to Kabul's jihadi ecosystem, and the new-generation radicals who never needed to travel to Afghanistan to absorb its ideology, are positioned to fill.
WinTK covers geopolitical analysis and South Asian security affairs. For more on Bangladesh's regional security environment, visit our news and analysis section.
