Governments in Europe have long shunned the Taliban, primarily because of their severe restrictions on women and girls. But under pressure to appear tougher on migration, they are deporting refugees to Afghanistan, and in recent months have been negotiating with the Taliban to make more expulsions possible.
At a meeting in Brussels in late June, more than 20 European officials met with five Taliban representatives to discuss deportations, breaking a taboo against holding talks with the group in the European Union.
The Europeans never mentioned human rights abuses committed by the Taliban, according to three participants and three other officials briefed on the meeting.
The details of the meeting are being reported here for the first time. This article is based on information from the German foreign ministry, along with interviews with seven other diplomats, including five representing European countries, and two Afghan government officials, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.
Afghanistan has for years been one of the main sources of unauthorized migrants to Europe, and the European governments in talks with the Taliban insist they are solely technical and limited to expulsions. But many human rights groups say that the deportation drive ignores the risks faced by Afghans back home.
“The European Union cannot credibly condemn the Taliban’s systematic repression while engaging with them to deport Afghans into the very abuses they claim to oppose,” said Fereshta Abbasi, the Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Full diplomatic recognition of the Taliban remains a taboo. Russia is the only country in the world to formally recognize the group.
But the Taliban see sustained engagement on deportations as a gateway to acceptance of their rule, five years after sweeping back to power. Some European diplomats acknowledge this is correct.
Germany has allowed Taliban officials to operate in the Afghan diplomatic missions in Berlin and Bonn, a step that German officials describe as effective recognition of the Taliban as the legitimate government. France is considering doing the same in Paris. Representatives from 15 other European countries met a Taliban delegation in Brussels in June.
The Taliban are pressing their advantage. They have asked European governments for wider access to Afghan missions across Europe and financial support for the reintegration of expelled Afghans. They also want broader economic assistance — a red line for European governments that have limited their assistance to humanitarian aid. Providing development assistance would end up financing the Taliban government, further entrenching their rule, and could benefit officials who are under international sanctions.
“The Taliban have real leverage, and the European Union is quite powerless,” said Conrad Schetter, the director of the Bonn International Center for Conflict Studies in Germany. “European countries are under so much pressure that they are ready to do almost any deal to remove criminal refugees.”
Germany opens the door
Germany has been leading the charge to expel Afghans, as its government, led by a center-right chancellor, struggles to follow through on promises to deport migrants with criminal records aggressively. Its pace of deportations has drawn fire from a surging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which leads national polls and has promised to deport millions of migrants.
Late last year, German officials struck a deal with the Taliban government to allow direct deportations of unauthorized Afghan migrants, instead of routing returnees through third countries.
More than 500,000 Afghans live in Germany, the vast majority legally. Twenty percent of asylum seekers in the country are Afghans.
In February, a charter flight carrying 20 Afghan men — convicted of crimes by German courts — left Leipzig for Kabul, the first deportation carried out under the new agreement.
The pact with the Taliban “creates a reliable basis for direct and permanent deportations to Afghanistan,” Alexander Dobrindt, the German interior minister, said in a statement.
Under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Germany has deported 263 Afghans since May last year, according to the German interior ministry.
State and federal officials have pushed to speed up that pace and have begun deporting Afghan migrant men without criminal records.
Women remain largely shielded from the effort; government statistics show that nearly 95 percent of Afghan women who applied for asylum in Germany were granted protection in the first half of this year.
Since May last year, a handful of Taliban diplomats have operated out of Germany to facilitate the deportations.
As the German government began its plans to step up deportations, the Taliban sent three additional officials to process the expulsions. Those three are in Berlin and in Bonn on a monthlong mission, the German foreign ministry said last month.
France, which has long been one of the most reluctant among E.U. countries to engage the Taliban, is considering a similar path, according to four European and Afghan diplomats involved in the negotiations.
A spokesman for the foreign ministry, Pascal Confavreux, said in a news briefing on Thursday that the discussions were meant to “facilitate the removal of Afghan nationals who are in the country illegally and who pose a national security risk.”
Britain, whose officials pay regular visits to Kabul, is watching developments in the European Union closely, according to three diplomats. Several other European countries are also considering striking direct agreements with the Taliban, according to the Taliban and two diplomats.
The United States has been deporting Afghan citizens to third countries and has pushed some Afghans, who are stranded in a former U.S. military camp in Qatar, to return to Afghanistan voluntarily. But it has not sent Afghans back to Afghanistan publicly.
Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban ambassador to Qatar, said he tells European diplomats that they should engage more openly with the Taliban and provide economic assistance to Afghanistan.
If they don’t, he said, the number of Afghans migrating to Europe will only increase. “If there is unemployment and an economic crisis in Afghanistan, Afghans will go like a flood to Europe.”
Rendezvous with the Taliban
European diplomats regularly meet with Taliban officials in Doha and Istanbul, and the taboo against holding talks with the Taliban on E.U. soil was broken on June 23.
Five Taliban officials who had flown into Brussels from Istanbul were escorted by Belgian plainclothes officers in black vans to a Novotel hotel near the international airport, where more than 20 European officials awaited.
The two sides discussed how to cooperate on returning Afghans, and the Taliban asked for economic assistance and a stronger diplomatic presence in Europe.
The announcement of the visit to Brussels caused such an outcry among human rights groups and European politicians that the meeting’s location was kept secret until a few hours before it started.
The meeting was co-hosted by Sweden and the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union. Abdul Qahar Balkhi, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s foreign ministry, led the Afghan delegation, accompanied by four officials from the foreign and interior ministries.
European Union spokespeople have said that the bloc helped to organize the June meeting at the request of member nations, and that the focus is on deporting people who have committed serious crimes or who pose a security threat.
Fifteen European countries were represented, including Greece, Austria, Poland and Norway.
After the big meeting in Brussels, the Taliban delegation held bilateral conversations with at least four European countries, including Sweden, according to the participants.
Anastasia Sofla, a spokeswoman for the Sweden’s minister of migration, said government agencies have been working with the Taliban government to expel 200 Afghan citizens convicted of crimes in Sweden. She said the relationship was “at the technical level.”
The relationship between the European and Afghan governments remains fraught with mutual distrust.
Before the meeting in Brussels, the five Afghan representatives felt disrespected because the Belgian government had taken months to issue their visas. So the Taliban boycotted lunch with European diplomats on June 23.
The Taliban officials had a visa only for one day, so they left that afternoon, after meeting with their European counterparts for just over five hours.
Engaging with the Taliban
Some prominent European nonprofits groups and experts support greater engagement with the Taliban.
Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, has called on governments to send their diplomats back to Afghanistan. The Norwegian Afghanistan Committee, a humanitarian organization with a widespread presence in the country, has called for European countries to expand assistance to Afghanistan’s people and institutions.
In Norway, which is not an E.U. member, Taliban diplomats have discreetly operated for years.
For now, the Taliban diplomats in Norway and Germany have been respectful of the European governments’ uneasiness over their presence. There is no Taliban flag outside the embassies in Oslo and Berlin, and no plaque reading “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” the official name of their government.
One European diplomat said that the governments were on a pathto more concessions to the group. The Taliban, the diplomat said, already have the advantage, and public pressure to deport migrants is rising.
Jeanna Smialek, Christopher F. Schuetze and Lynsey Chutel contributed reporting.
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