Australia's strange relationship with the Taliban

Following a letter of demand from the extremist Taliban, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has moved to shut down the Afghan Embassy in Canberra from 1 July 2026. How this could serve any Australian ‘national interest’ remains a complete mystery.

The only conceivable beneficiaries of this move are the Taliban, who have been desperate to secure the closure of Afghan embassies they cannot control, of which the embassy in Canberra is a prominent example. With DFAT’s help, they will have silenced a robust voice denouncing their abominable treatment of women, vulnerable minorities, and political opponents. No matter how DFAT seeks to spin it, the Taliban will see it as a vindication of their brutality and intransigence.

By contrast, the list of losers from this move is a long one. Afghans in Australia will be deprived of access to consular services that only the Embassy can provide, and there is very little evidence that DFAT has thought carefully about what this could mean.

To take just one example: in recent times, the Liberal Party, the ALP, and the Greens have all endorsed candidates of Afghan background for election to the Commonwealth Parliament. The closure of the Afghan Embassy will make life much more difficult for Afghan-Australians interested in running for election, given strict requirements for renunciation of dual nationality. Until now, such persons have been able to approach the Embassy for necessary documentation. In the future, this will no longer be possible, and parties may therefore be reluctant in the first place to preselect Afghan-Australians if their eligibility to be elected could later be challenged.

Of course, the damage that flows from the closure of the Embassy is more subtle and insidious than just this. Thousands of Australian military personnel and civilians were deployed to Afghanistan to support the Afghan Republic and protect the Afghan people from a Taliban resurgence. They felt the first sting of betrayal when the Trump Administration, in February 2020, went behind the back of the Republic to sign an exit deal with the Taliban.

Closing the Afghan Embassy following a demand from the Taliban can only add to that sense of betrayal, with potential ramifications for the psychological wellbeing of those who served. There is no evidence that DFAT has given this even the slightest attention.

The closing of the Embassy also raises questions about the credibility of Australia’s stance with respect to terrorist groups. The Taliban, in their quest for power, made relentless use of terror tactics, detonating explosives in public places, and targeting non-combatant aid workers, families at supermarkets, diners at hotel restaurants, and students at university classes. They consistently accounted for the bulk of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

Their advent to power was welcomed by Hamas, and the Taliban, in turn, have offered condolences on the deaths of prominent Hamas figures. Indeed, a 4 February 2026 UN report concluded that Al-Qaida continues ‘to enjoy the patronage’ of the Taliban, as do several other terrorist groups. The Taliban are emphatically not the kind of group whose self-serving demands should be met by any self-respecting Australian government.

It is thus unsurprising that DFAT officials have been extremely secretive about their interactions with the Taliban. Questioned on 7 November 2024 in Senate Estimates about the letter from the Taliban (a letter of which the DFAT Secretary disavowed any knowledge), a senior DFAT official instead spoke of noticing a tweet from the Taliban on ‘X’ directed against embassies beyond their control.

On 10 October 2025, the issue arose again. Senator Fatima Payman asked the same official why she did not ‘share with the committee that the department had not only noticed a tweet on X but received a third-party note from the Taliban calling for the removal of the Afghan ambassador to Australia?’ The official replied, ‘We don’t normally talk about correspondence that we might receive privately as a foreign ministry’.

Needless to say, if DFAT cannot distinguish between formal diplomatic communications (which may indeed give rise to legitimate expectations of confidentiality) and gratuitous and unsolicited demands from radical groups which Australia declines to recognise (and which carry no legal weight whatsoever), then the management of Australia’s foreign relations is at risk of becoming seriously degraded. A Senate inquiry into DFAT’s interactions with the Taliban might be a way of setting things right.

Ironically, although the US and Israeli attacks on Iran have drawn attention away from developments elsewhere in West Asia, Australia’s move to close the Afghan Embassy has come at a time when the Taliban regime has never appeared more fragile. The disintegration of its relationship with Pakistan, which has seen bombing raids by the Pakistan Air Force on targets in Kabul, Kandahar, and parts of eastern Afghanistan, exposes the Taliban to the greatest danger their regime has faced since they seized the Afghan capital.

If the regime disintegrates, the network of Afghan embassies outside Taliban control would likely be an important channel for engagement with future powerholders. In the current fraught environment, closing off these channels makes no sense at all.

William Maley is Emeritus Professor of Diplomacy at The Australian National University.

He is the author of: Rescuing Afghanistan (2006), What is a Refugee? (2016), Australia-Afghanistan relations: Reflections on a half-century (2019), Diplomacy, Communication, and Peace (2021), The Afghanistan Wars (3^rd ed., 2021), and Australia: The Politics of Degraded Democracy (2024).