Engagement without recognition

The UAE’s acceptance of a Taliban ambassador is a continuation of the ‘engagement without recognition’ policy that some states have adopted for post-2021 Afghanistan. This implies transactional dealings combined with limited diplomatic interactions, without the official recognition of the Islamic Emirate that could impart legitimacy to the Taliban government. The presence of the former allows states to keep Kabul engaged, while the absence of the latter prevents misalignments with international sanctions regimes and UN restrictions.

The actual manifestation of this approach has been direct and indirect engagement through limited diplomatic presence in Kabul and interactions through the Taliban’s Doha office, without formally accepting a Taliban-blessed envoy in any capital, even if the Afghan embassies in key capitals have come to be run by Taliban sympathisers/members. This has also been the approach of states such as India, where the Afghan Embassy was forced to dry its dirty laundry in public, bringing the external affairs ministry into the tussle between diplomats from the older regime versus the new.

The acceptance of a Taliban-appointed ambassador by any state legally remains below the notional threshold of full recognition, but politically stretches the act to its limit. With more ambassadors and chargé d'affaires in countries, the Taliban’s diplomatic bandwidth only expands. Moreover, the UN Security Council’s Resolution 2255 remains operational (with humanitarian exemptions applying through Resolution 2615) which outlines the sanctions regime applicable to the Taliban under Chapter VII of the UN Charter (binding on all UN member states). While China had remained an exception to the norm thus far, the increase in states accepting credentials from Taliban-appointed diplomats dilutes the adverse effects of the lack of formal recognition.

From competing to co-opting

For states such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia (which were among the three states that had formally recognised the first Taliban regime), relations with the Taliban have gone through several cycles. While the aftertaste of bolstering the mujahideen in Afghanistan lingered till the late 1990s, it soured considerably in September 2001.

Both the Saudis and Emiratis were quick to break diplomatic ties with the Taliban after the terror attacks in the United States. For Abu Dhabi however, continued ties with the Taliban were necessary at some level, given the large number of existing Afghan workers in the Emirates as well as the need for more unskilled labour.

Even as private wealthy Arab individuals continued to funnel funds to the Taliban’s guerilla fight against NATO, Arab states like the UAE’s view of the Taliban became increasingly coloured by regional geopolitics. Among the simmering internecine rivalries between Arab states (including between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi), their collective rift with Qatar across the last decade was arguably the most prominent.

In 2011, UAE actively competed with Qatar to court the Taliban to open an office in their state but lost out to Doha. This effort was part of the Emirates’ dual approach to the Taliban at the time – to pressure the Taliban to moderate their extreme views, while also advocating for the Taliban as a political entity, distinguishing them from other terrorist entities. By 2017, as the UAE and Saudi Arabia led an economic blockade on Qatar, Riyadh fiercely criticized Doha’s backing of the Taliban, who the Saudi envoy called “armed terrorists”. This was also part of an effort to undermine Qatar’s efforts to mediate between the Ashraf Ghani government and the Taliban.

When the Taliban stormed to power in Kabul in 2021, Abu Dhabi risked publicly offering asylum to Ashraf Ghani. Four years since, the calculus in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi has shifted. Having buried the hatch with Qatar at least ostensibly, Saudi Arabia has moved its focus to undoing the erosion of Afghan public trust in Riyadh with more humanitarian and Islamic (institutional) outreaches.

The UAE on the other hand, has moved from contesting Qatar’s mediatory role – to actively looking to co-opt it.

Doha has evidently achieved significant stature not just as a mediator (also involved in the Gaza ceasefire negotiations), but also as the host of pariah groups like Hamas and the Taliban. Leaders of the latter two even met in Doha in May, hosted by the Qatari Emir. Rather than publicly fight this, Abu Dhabi has instead focused on parallel engagement with the Taliban, enough to also directly engage Doha on sharing the latter’s load.

Moreover, even due to the hazards of the trade, Qatar’s engagement with the Taliban has witnessed several bumps over the last year – especially on the issue of women’s rights. The UAE moved to leverage this to boost its own engagement with the Taliban. Several of the group’s leaders held both secret and public meetings in Abu Dhabi – Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (deputy prime minister) in September 2022 and acting defence minister Mullah Yaqoob (son of late Taliban supremo Mullah Omar) in December of the same year.

A Carnegie report by Giorgio Cafiero showed how Baradar’s meeting helped seal a deal between the Taliban and the UAE for the latter’s GAAC Solutions to manage the airports in Kandahar, Kabul, and Herat. Notably, the Taliban had signed a preliminary deal with Turkey and Qatar for the same airports in early 2022, before negotiations went South. Perhaps most symbolic of the UAE’s proactiveness with the Taliban in the face of an over-stretched Qatar, is the fact that Afghanistan’s acting interior minister – Sirajuddin Haqqani – was able to travel to Abu Dhabi for his foreign trip and meet bin Zayed in June 2024 despite visa restrictions and a 10 million USD bounty by the FBI on his head. The UAE’s acceptance of a Taliban-appointed Ambassador then is a natural continuation of Abu Dhabi’s positioning as a pragmatic regional actor looking to make the best of a geopolitical opportunity.

Bashir Ali Abbas is a research associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi, and a South Asia Visiting Fellow at the Stimson Center, Washington DC. The views expressed are personal.