In January 2008, Taliban suicide bombers and gunmen stormed Kabul’s luxury Serena Hotel. Six people were killed, including a Norwegian reporter and an American citizen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation offered a $10 million bounty for the Taliban’s deputy leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who it believes orchestrated the attack.

In September 2021, two weeks after the last American troops left Afghanistan, Mr. Haqqani’s brother Anas—a former inmate of the notorious Bagram detention facility—came to the Serena Hotel for a chat...

In January 2008, Taliban suicide bombers and gunmen stormed Kabul’s luxury Serena Hotel. Six people were killed, including a Norwegian reporter and an American citizen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation offered a $10 million bounty for the Taliban’s deputy leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who it believes orchestrated the attack.

In September 2021, two weeks after the last American troops left Afghanistan, Mr. Haqqani’s brother Anas—a former inmate of the notorious Bagram detention facility—came to the Serena Hotel for a chat with a handful of Western reporters. We were his friends, he told us with an amiable smile, and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan desired good relations with all nations, including the U.S. Sirajuddin was now the country’s interior minister and had just met top United Nations officials to assure them they could safely travel anywhere.

America’s longest war—a conflict that killed 2,465 American troops and many times more Afghan civilians and combatants—has ended. The Taliban have won, their Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has been fully restored and, unlike in the 1990s, it is now in control of all 34 of the country’s provinces.

For the U.S. and its allies, who fought for 20 years to prevent just this outcome, Afghanistan’s new reality creates a fundamental policy dilemma: Do the Western democracies want the new Taliban regime to fail or succeed?

“‘Trying to legitimize the Taliban is a stupid and naive policy.... Terrorists are terrorists. They kill.’”

— Ahmad Wali Massoud, National Resistance Front

Even after the August military withdrawal and the closure of Western embassies in Kabul, these nations retain significant influence over Afghanistan’s future direction. Their actions—and inaction—are bound to have far-reaching implications, including for their own security.

While no country has formally recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, all major powers—including the U.S.—continue to have diplomatic contacts with Taliban representatives. Those talks are gaining new urgency as Afghanistan, crippled by American sanctions and asset freezes, hurtles toward a humanitarian catastrophe this winter.

Girls attend primary school in Kabul, Sept. 22. Secondary schools in the capital are currently for boys only.

Photo: Oliver Weiken/dpa/ZUMA Press

The calculations are complex. Moves to bolster the Taliban, even if they stop well short of diplomatic recognition, risk inspiring other radical Islamist movements in the Middle East and elsewhere. That is especially so because some key leaders of the new regime in Kabul, which has harshly restricted women’s rights, marginalized ethnic minorities and cracked down on dissent, have longstanding ties to al Qaeda and are designated as global terrorists by the U.S.

Undermining the new Kabul administration through economic and diplomatic isolation, however, could spark a refugee crisis in Europe comparable with the 2015 exodus from Syria—and empower the Taliban’s only significant armed rival, the far more extreme Islamic State, which wants to establish a world-wide caliphate through jihadist conquest. Islamic State has already intensified attacks against the Taliban and members of the Shiite minority in recent weeks.

“Ultimately the Taliban government cannot be stable without an inclusive political settlement, but for now the choice is either the Taliban or a breakdown, with ISIS emerging,” said Barnett Rubin, a senior fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation who served as a senior State Department adviser on Afghanistan. “There is no other alternative.”

The Taliban have been trying to project an image of safety and normalcy since retaking power. But as WSJ’s Sune Rasmussen reports from Kabul, harsh punishments, violence, and a crackdown on basic freedoms are becoming the reality. Photo: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

Anti-Taliban Afghan politicians who hope for Western support, and who are backed by some Republican lawmakers in the U.S., say that any steps to accommodate the Taliban are dangerously misguided. “Taliban and ISIS are two sides of the same coin,” said Ahmad Wali Massoud, a brother of late anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud

and a leader of the so-called National Resistance Front that sought to confront the Taliban after the Aug. 15 fall of Kabul. That resistance, centered in the Panjshir valley, was largely crushed in September.

“Trying to legitimize the Taliban is a stupid and naive policy. Do they want to show the world that the Taliban are a better terrorist and ISIS is a bad terrorist?” wondered Mr. Massoud, a former Afghan ambassador to London. “Terrorists are terrorists. They kill.”

Preventing terrorist movements like al Qaeda from using Afghanistan once again to threaten the U.S. and allies was the Taliban’s key commitment under last year’s Doha agreements with the Trump administration, which paved the way for American military withdrawal. Taliban leaders say they won’t waver from that obligation even now that all foreign forces are gone.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid addresses a press conference in Kabul, Sept. 6

Photo: WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images

“We have made a promise, and we will stick to it,” the Taliban’s chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid

said in an interview in Kabul this month. “The weakening of the Afghan government is not beneficial to anyone, neither to the Afghans nor to the Americans. The countries that were involved in the war here, which led to the country’s destruction, now have an additional responsibility to rebuild the ruins together with us. We extend our hand of friendship to them.”

A senior Biden administration official said that while it is clear that there is no love lost between the Taliban and Islamic State, the U.S. doesn’t have full clarity at present about the exact nature of the Taliban’s “complicated” relationship with al Qaeda. One encouraging sign, the official added, is that “we are not yet seeing what a lot of people worried might happen, a rapid influx of foreign fighters into Afghanistan.”

Embarrassment about the Taliban’s sudden military triumph in August, and subsequent political recriminations, are complicating the Afghanistan policy debate in Washington and other Western capitals. “There is so much history here, with the wounds, the humiliation, with our own mistakes, with our total failure to stabilize that country,” a senior European official said. “You cannot expect the West to act totally coldhearted and rational without taking the recent 20 years into account.”

“‘The U.S. doesn’t have the capacity to overthrow the Taliban. And it is politically impossible for them to help the Taliban succeed.’”

— Barnett Rubin, New York University

The political polarization in the U.S., where President Biden’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal has galvanized Republican opposition, makes it particularly difficult for Washington to decide how to engage with Afghanistan going forward, added NYU’s Mr. Rubin. “They don’t have the capacity to overthrow the Taliban,” he said. “And it is politically impossible for them to help the Taliban succeed.”

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Washington’s decision in August to freeze more than $9 billion in Afghan central-bank assets, coupled with American sanctions that cut off the country from the global financial system, has already caused an economic meltdown. Doctors, teachers and other government employees haven’t been paid for months. Even though the U.S. has exempted humanitarian assistance from the sanctions regime, banks worldwide remain afraid of running afoul of complex U.S. regulations, and most have preferred to cut off all dealings with Afghanistan. As a result, even the United Nations and its agencies have trouble getting money into Afghanistan to pay their own local staff, U.N. officials say.

An Afghan mother holds her 3-year-old son, who suffers from malnutrition, at the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul, Nov. 9.

Photo: Paula Bronstein for The Wall Street Journal

With the worst drought in decades adding to Afghanistan’s woes, large parts of the country risk mass starvation in coming months, the U.N. has warned. Already, more than half the country’s population—a record 22.8 million people—face acute food insecurity, according to the U.N.’s World Food Program.

“I am terrified for this country, of where it could possibly go if we can’t resuscitate the economy,” said Mary-Ellen McGroarty, Afghanistan representative and country director for the WFP. “Desperate people make desperate decisions. How much more stress can people take?”

Afghans wait in long lines for rations from the U.N.’s World Food Program in Kabul, Nov. 6

Photo: Paula Bronstein for The Wall Street Journal

At a WFP food distribution center in Karte Seh, which used to be one of the most prosperous parts of Kabul, former members of the middle class lined up recently to receive rations of wheat flour, pulses and vegetable oil—for many of them, now the only source of food. “Everyone is upset and miserable here. This is the only way we can survive,” said Enjila, a 30-year-old employee of Azizi Bank who hasn’t been paid for months—and who is the sole provider for her husband, paralyzed after a stroke five years ago, and their six children.

Standing in a separate men’s line nearby, tailor Syed Mohammad Aga, 54, said he is asking for food aid for the first time because his business of making women’s dresses has dwindled under Taliban rule. “Women are afraid to come to the shop. The situation is really bad,” he said. “Since the beginning of the Emirate, I have not worked a single day,” added Mohammad Ismail, a 46-year-old construction worker in the same line.

Some senior Taliban commanders say they aren’t particularly alarmed by this misery. “Yes, there will be poverty, but it is worth it. The control of our home is finally in our own hands,” said Hajji Qari Osman Ibrahimi, head of the Taliban’s central region military commission, which oversees Kabul and neighboring provinces. “We’re not bothered that the foreigners are not helping us. We are happy that we can finally decide by ourselves, even if it means having to live just on water and bread.”

A senior Biden administration official said that, while Washington is helping contribute to humanitarian assistance for Afghanistan, “the likelihood of staving off a more severe crisis is not particularly high.”

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Financial sanctions, asset freezes and the withholding of international recognition from the Taliban’s new regime in Kabul all aim to pressure the group to become more moderate, to respect women’s rights and to establish a more inclusive administration, he said. Those issues, as well as counterterrorism, humanitarian assistance and the departure of Afghans who assisted the U.S. and its allies, are the focus of continuing diplomatic contacts between Western nations and the Taliban in Qatar.

“There are things that we have the ability to do that they want. We haven’t rushed into doing a lot of those things,” the senior Biden administration official said. “If they want to get things from us, they are going to have to demonstrate that they are not going to govern the way they did in the 1990s, and the jury is still out.”

Since taking power in August, Afghanistan’s new rulers have indeed imposed an authoritarian system, dismantling the democratic institutions of the fallen Afghan republic and dismissing calls for elections. Despite past promises of creating an inclusive government, the new administration in Kabul is made up almost exclusively of ethnic Pashtun Taliban clerics. Protests, particularly by women’s activists, have been dispersed by force and outlawed. Some Afghan journalists who attempted to cover the demonstrations were briefly detained and severely beaten.

The Taliban haven’t reopened government-run secondary schools for girls in most provinces, although they promise to do so in the future. Nor have they allowed women to return to work in most government offices, though they pledge to do so once what they consider appropriate gender-segregation arrangements are in place.

Yet, despite all these new curbs on civil liberties, the Taliban so far haven’t enforced the kind of draconian, obscurantist rules that earned them international condemnation during their previous time in power. Arguably, many—if not most—governments in the region have comparable or worse human-rights records.

Shortly after taking power in Oct.1996, the Taliban burned films outside Kabul’s Zaynab cinema.

Photo: Reuters

When the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, they started off by torturing to death, mutilating and then publicly hanging former President Mohammad Najibullah. By contrast, after taking Kabul this past Aug. 15, Taliban leaders proclaimed an amnesty for members of the former government and security services and visited former President Hamid Karzai in his home to provide security guarantees.

While hundreds of former military and intelligence officers have been assassinated across the country since August, many of these killings appear to be private vendettas—sometimes carried out by Islamic State—rather than government policy. So far, there is no evidence that Afghanistan is experiencing the kind of blanket arrests and reprisals that followed the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975—or the mass killings that American-backed Afghan warlords perpetrated after defeating the Taliban in 2001. Civil servants of the former government have been asked to return to their jobs.

Though the Taliban complain that the Western-promoted exodus of educated elites undermines prospects for an economic recovery, they also continue allowing Afghans who used to work for the U.S. and allies to trickle out of the country, mostly on flights to Qatar.

Unlike in the 1990s, the Taliban haven’t imposed mandatory beards, formally banned music or prohibited women from leaving home. Private TV stations continue broadcasting, and access to the internet and social media, including via mobile broadband, remains uncensored. Primary schools for girls operate across the country. The once fearsome religious police for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, whose members used to enforce strict Taliban rules with beatings and arrests, possesses only advisory powers—at least for now.

At Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barchi hospital, which was attacked by Islamic State gunmen last year because most of the patients are members of the Shiite Hazara minority, the new Taliban overseer, Hussain Gul, pointed out that all of the 23 women doctors and other medical staff are working as usual. “The international community should help us. The requirements that they wanted us to meet are all being met now,” he said. “None of the female workers here have been fired—it shows inclusivity. I’m the only new person here.”

Dr. Husna Mohammadi cares for a girl at the emergency room of the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul, Nov. 10

Photo: Paula Bronstein for The Wall Street Journal

Because of the funding crunch, the 100-bed hospital lacks most medication except basic painkillers, and its maternity ward doesn’t have an anesthesiologist or operating theater anymore. Pregnant women are turned away, in hopes that another hospital could offer adequate treatment, if any complications are likely, said gynecologist Manija Ramzi. The Taliban, so far, haven’t interfered with her work, she said. Yet, she added: “In the previous time, when the Taliban were in Kabul for five years, we’ve all had bad experiences—which is why we are still so afraid of them.”

Despite their desire for international recognition and aid, the Taliban say that they won’t compromise on the movement’s core principles to accommodate the U.S. “The international community cannot change the policy of the Islamic Emirate by putting pressure on it,” said Akef Muhajir, the spokesman of the new Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which has taken over the former Afghan republic’s ministry of women’s affairs. “They couldn’t do it in 20 years of bombardments, when they were hitting our schools, mosques, wedding parties and funerals. They won’t succeed now, either.”

In the nearly three months since Kabul’s fall, the diplomatic contacts of the U.S. and other Western nations with the Taliban, under way in Doha, Qatar, haven’t generated much progress. “The two sides are sticking to their own respective positions. We haven’t seen any flexibility, and therefore we continue to see the deterioration of the situation on the ground,” said Mansoor Ahmad Khan, the Pakistani ambassador in Kabul. Pakistan, along with China, Russia, Iran and Turkey, is one of the few major nations that have kept their embassies open after the Taliban takeover.

The Taliban, however, aren’t a monolithic movement, and the West is missing an opportunity to encourage the more moderate parts of the movement, said Faiz Zaland, a professor at Kabul University who has chosen to remain in the city and work with the country’s new rulers. Now that the Taliban have reopened all girls’ schools in northern Afghan provinces like Balkh, Kunduz and Jowzjan, Western nations should respond by paying teachers’ salaries in those parts of the country, he said.

“Why are you not setting an example? If the Taliban cooperate, we cooperate, so at least the Taliban can learn,” he said. “Within the Taliban leadership, there are very extreme people. The revenge by the U.S. and the EU is providing more weight to them, is supporting these extremists because they can now say that these foreigners, these infidels, these non-Muslims can never be friends.”