Loyalty Over Law: Corruption in the Taliban’s Afghanistan

Over the past several months, a wave of corruption scandals has surfaced across the Taliban government, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), implicating not a single ministry but several arms of the state. Officials have been arrested, dismissed, reinstated, and investigated, and at least one minister’s home raided — yet little accountability has followed. The most prominent case has unfolded at the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), but it sits within a broader pattern reaching into the interior ministry, the intelligence services, a provincial directorate in Herat, and Akhundzada’s own inner circle.

When the Taliban swept back into Kabul in August 2021, part of their appeal rested on a promise to govern more honestly than the Western-backed government they replaced. During the insurgency, the movement had cultivated a reputation for swift, low-bribe justice through its shadow courts, casting itself against a government that had become a byword for graft. The contrast was not invented: the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) concluded that the state Washington spent two decades building was riddled with corruption, from tens of thousands of ‘ghost soldiers’ whose salaries were pocketed by commanders to aid diverted at nearly every level.