Taliban leaders were also invited to Brussels in recent months to meet with European Union officials over the outflow of Afghan refugees to the bloc – a visit heavily criticised by rights groups.

It is not clear where all this will lead. The Taliban is rattled, but these opposition forces have a way to go to demonstrate a sufficient degree of coordination and a united national agenda. The Taliban is also more deeply entrenched and much better equipped than the groups.

Pakistan’s turn against the Taliban is rooted in the group’s support of the Pakistani Taliban (Tahreek-I Taliban Pakistan, or TTP). Islamabad accuses the Afghan Taliban of providing TTP members with a base of operations to launch attacks across the border. It has retaliated by launching airstrikes on its neighbour.

Tightening its control

Islamabad now seems determined to maximise pressure on the Afghan Taliban by bombing its bases – at a high cost of civilian casualties. It has also hosted meetings with some of the Taliban’s opponents.

It has also taken advantage of the geopolitical rivalries in the region and globally to govern without any form of popular legitimacy or need for international recognition. Only Russia has so far formally recognised the Taliban government, but many others, including China, have boosted their diplomatic contacts with the country’s leaders and pursued economic and trade ties with them.

Most Afghans would be pleased to see the back of the Taliban. But for the opposition to be seen as a viable alternative, it will need to build trust with the people and provide hope for the future. The history of Afghanistan shows how hard this has been to achieve.

This comes at a time of increased fighting in the northeastern province of Badakhshan between the Taliban and followers of a dissident commander, Juma Khan Fateh, over control of resources and local grievances against the group. Senior Taliban officials have been assassinated in the region.

There are a number of armed opposition groups operating there. These groups remain fragmented, though some reports indicate the resistance is expanding.

Yet, Washington has maintained dialogue with the militia. The UN has also indirectly delivered billions of dollars in funds from the US government to the Taliban’s coffers over the past five years.

Millions of Afghans now live outside the country – most in neighbouring Iran and Pakistan. About half a million have applied for asylum in the EU since the Taliban came back to power, and many host countries have been keen to deport them.

Threats on multiple fronts

Acting in the name of a self-centred version of Islam, the group has made no effort to modify its hardline ideological beliefs in favour of a more humane and inclusive approach to governing.

The situation has only worsened with US President Donald Trump’s decision to shutter the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Pakistan’s closure of transit roads into the country.

Prior to the takeover of Kabul in August 2021, Taliban leaders indicated they had changed. They claimed to have learned lessons from their draconian rule from 1996 until the US-led intervention in late 2001.

Yet, none of these promises has been met. If anything, the Taliban has only hardened its brand of Islam, which is not practised anywhere else in the Muslim world, and tightened its repressive, misogynist and regressive rule.

Washington has pursued an ambiguous policy towards the Taliban. Trump has demanded the return of the Bagram airbase in Kabul and US billion worth of military assets left behind by departing US forces in 2021.

The Taliban is also facing growing security challenges from within its own ranks and a cluster of armed resistance forces. Relations with its former patron, Pakistan, have completely broken down, with the country’s defence minister declaring an “open war” on the group earlier this year.

Nor has it refrained from hosting many like-minded violent extremist groups. The United Nations has issued repeated warnings about the resurgence of terrorism from Afghanistan.

Inside Afghanistan, meanwhile, most citizens are facing unprecedented poverty, mass unemployment, spiralling inflation and a severe lack of basic goods. Some families have found it necessary to sell a child to survive.

Five years after returning to power in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s rule remains as ultra-extremist as ever.

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President Donald Trump has long made it clear that he wants Paramount to purchase Warner Brothers because its CEO, David Ellision has indicated that he will make CNN more sympathetic to Trump’s MAGA movement. Yet apparently one anti-Trump fixture of Paramount is so popular, Ellison isn’t going to touch him.

“LateNighter reports that Paramount wants to keep Stewart on board, as his presence has renewed interest in the program both on television and online,” reported The Daily Beast’s Vic Verbalaitis on Monday. “Company executives consider South Park and The Daily Show two Comedy Central assets that keep the cable channel relevant in the age of streaming, Semafor reports.”

Verbalaitis added, “The lack of confirmation on whether Stewart will extend his contract at this point in the year is nothing new. The outlet emphasized that the late-night host’s last two contract extensions weren’t announced until even later in the year: early November 2025 and late October 2024.”

Stewart, for his part, has made it clear that he will continue criticizing Trump even if doing so means Ellison eventually fires him.

“You don’t compromise on what you do, and you do it until they tell you to leave,” Stewart told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in 2025 shortly before extending his Paramount contract.

He added, “They’ve already done things that I’m upset about. If I had integrity, maybe I would stand up and go, ‘I’m out.’ Or maybe the integrity thing to do would be to stay in it and keep fighting in the foxhole.”

As The Atlantic’s David A. Graham reported earlier in August, Ellison is leveraging the friendship between Trump and his father, Oracle CEO David Ellison, to create a media empire.

“David Ellison, who, along with his father, Larry, is a friend of Trump’s, decided to use the new Trump administration as an opportunity to build a huge media conglomerate,” Graham said. “First, his company Skydance merged with Paramount. Taking control of CBS News, he installed Bari Weiss as editor in chief, seeking a leader who would appeal more to both the White House and to conservative viewers. But Weiss’s makeover has so far looked like a flop: 60 Minutes has hemorrhaged staffers, and the Evening News has hemorrhaged viewers. Her proposition was that a slightly more conservative version of the mainstream media would bring the audience back to a struggling network, but that doesn’t appear to actually be appealing to either MAGA viewers or legacy CBS watchers.”

He continued, “Ellison has already moved on to an attempted merger with Warner Bros., reportedly promising administration officials deep political changes at CNN if the deal was approved by federal regulators. Ellison got approval, but now that deal is in trouble anyway. Facing an antitrust lawsuit led by the attorney general of California, Paramount agreed to pause the merger until a trial next year. Experts are divided on how likely Paramount is to prevail, but if the merger doesn’t close by September 30, the company will owe Warner Bros. shareholders $7 million every day until it does. In a New York Times column last week, Ellison complained that people are drawing incorrect inferences about his politics, but his private views are beside the point: What is public is Ellison’s willingness to play to the Trump administration’s politics to build an empire.”

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday released data on the vaccination rates of US kindergarteners in the 2025–2026 school year, revealing that rates have once again decreased from the previous school year.

Vaccination rates have been slipping since the 2019–2020 school year, when the US had obtained rates of around 95 percent, the threshold needed to keep outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases from spreading in communities. The latest data shows the US is moving further away from that target.

Nationally, only 92.4 percent of kindergartners were vaccinated with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the 2025–2026 school year, down from 92.5 percent last year. Coverage with the DTaP vaccine, which covers diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis (whooping cough), similarly fell from 92.1 percent to 92.0 percent.

More than half of states saw decreases in coverage for MMR, DTaP, polio vaccine, and varicella/chickenpox vaccine. Only 10 states have MMR vaccination rates at or above the 95 percent threshold: West Virginia, Connecticut, Maine, New York, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Maryland, Massachusetts, California, and New Mexico.

While vaccination rates slipped further, the number of children with exemptions from school vaccine requirements jumped more dramatically. In the 2025–2026 school year, 4 percent of kindergartners had a nonmedical exemption—meaning it was an exemption based on personal or religious beliefs. That’s up from 3.2 percent nonmedical exemption rate in 2024–2025. Medical exemptions have held steady over recent years at 0.2 percent.

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