Germany does not recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government. Yet Taliban representatives are now in Germany, and their presence serves a very practical purpose: helping Germany deport more Afghans back to the country they rule.
A three-member Taliban delegation arrived in Germany on August 26. According to German public broadcaster ARD, the representatives received 30-day visas and are expected to spend about three weeks in the country. Their mission includes visiting Afghan diplomatic offices in Berlin, Bonn and Munich and helping prepare further deportations.
The arrangement immediately raises an uncomfortable question.
Is Germany simply dealing pragmatically with Afghanistan’s de facto rulers because immigration enforcement requires it? Or is Europe gradually normalizing one of the world’s most oppressive regimes?
There are serious arguments on both sides.
Germany wants deportations to work
Germany’s argument begins with a basic principle of immigration policy. If someone’s asylum claim has been rejected and all legal avenues have been exhausted, a deportation order is supposed to mean something.
That becomes particularly compelling when the person has committed serious crimes.
On August 25, Germany deported 23 Afghan men from Leipzig/Halle Airport to Kabul. Five deportees from Baden-Württemberg had criminal convictions. According to that state’s government, they included a serious sex offender and four people convicted of assault or sexual offenses.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has defended the policy on public-safety grounds. His position is that people who abuse Germany’s protection while committing serious crimes should not automatically be allowed to remain simply because returning them is diplomatically difficult.
There is a powerful argument here.
A liberal asylum system needs public confidence. If even serious foreign offenders who have no legal right to remain cannot realistically be removed, voters may conclude that immigration rules are largely symbolic.
But deporting someone requires another country to accept that person.
And that is where the Taliban enter the picture.
You cannot deport people to a government you refuse to talk to
Whatever Germany thinks of the Taliban, they control Afghanistan.
German authorities need Afghan travel documents. Someone must verify the identities and nationality of deportees. Kabul must accept incoming flights. Officials must decide how many people can be returned and when aircraft can land.
Those practical problems cannot be solved by pretending the Taliban do not exist.
The German government therefore describes its contacts as strictly technical and operational. It says such dealings do not constitute political recognition of the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government. Germany has maintained that distinction repeatedly in official responses to parliament.
The Foreign Ministry made essentially the same argument about the latest delegation: if Germany wants to conduct returns to Afghanistan, documents recognized by the country’s de facto government have to be issued. More personnel and infrastructure are therefore necessary as the number of deportations increases.
This position is not inherently unreasonable.
Governments routinely communicate with regimes they despise. Diplomacy is not friendship. Negotiation is not endorsement.
If Germany refuses every form of contact with the Taliban, it may also be effectively accepting that deportation to Afghanistan is impossible.
But Germany is no longer talking only about criminals
This is where the government’s case becomes more controversial.
Germany initially emphasized the deportation of convicted criminals and people considered security threats. That boundary is disappearing.
The federal government has acknowledged that the coalition agreement provides for deportations to Afghanistan more broadly, while criminals were merely the initial focus. In July, German officials confirmed that a charter flight included an Afghan without a criminal conviction. Dobrindt subsequently said deportations would no longer be limited exclusively to criminals and security threats.
That changes the moral equation considerably.
Deporting someone convicted of a serious sexual offense after an unsuccessful asylum claim is one argument.
Sending an otherwise law-abiding rejected asylum seeker into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is another.
What are people being sent back to?
Afghanistan is not simply another poor authoritarian country.
Under Taliban rule, girls remain banned from education beyond sixth grade. Women have been systematically pushed out of much of public life and face severe restrictions on employment and freedom of movement. Critics of the regime risk arbitrary detention and torture.
The humanitarian situation makes matters worse. Human Rights Watch reported this month that more than 17 million Afghans—around 40 percent of the population—were projected to face acute food insecurity.
Human Rights Watch consequently argues that nobody should be forcibly returned to Afghanistan under current conditions. It says deportations expose people to persecution and desperate economic circumstances while simultaneously strengthening the Taliban’s international standing.
Amnesty International has likewise opposed Germany’s deportations. In July, it intervened in the case of Faridoon Tofan, an Afghan man without a criminal conviction whom Germany intended to deport. Amnesty argued that returning him could expose him to the very people from whom he faced a concrete threat.
There is also a fundamental legal principle at stake: governments cannot return people to places where they face a real risk of persecution, torture or other grave abuses.
A rejected asylum claim does not erase that obligation.
Pragmatism can slowly become normalization
Perhaps the most difficult issue is not deportation itself but what Germany must give the Taliban in exchange for cooperation.
Earlier negotiations already produced concessions.
ARD reported in June that Germany was prepared to allow six additional Taliban-appointed diplomats into the country as deportation cooperation expanded. Taliban authorities had reportedly pushed for additional diplomatic personnel, partly because officials were needed to identify Afghan citizens and issue travel documents.
Now another Taliban team is temporarily operating inside Germany.
Berlin insists this is not recognition.
Formally, that is true.
But recognition is not necessarily a switch that governments suddenly turn on. Normalization can happen incrementally.
First come technical conversations. Then visas. Then consular officials. Then regular meetings. Each individual decision can be defended as pragmatic. Taken together, however, they can gradually give an internationally isolated regime something it desperately wants: the ability to behave like a normal government abroad.
That is exactly what critics fear.
The Taliban benefit too
This relationship is not a favor the Taliban are performing for Germany.
They have interests of their own.
A government whose international legitimacy remains severely restricted benefits when European states negotiate directly with its representatives, accept its officials at diplomatic missions and depend on its cooperation.
The Taliban can then point to those interactions as evidence that international isolation is weakening.
Human Rights Watch argues that this is already happening. It warns that migration agreements risk teaching abusive governments that even extreme repression will not prevent other countries from eventually doing business with them when political interests demand it.
That concern deserves to be taken seriously.
Yet the opposite argument also deserves an answer: how long can Western governments maintain complete political isolation of a regime that has controlled an entire country for five years?
Isolation has not removed the Taliban.
It has not restored women’s rights.
And it has not eliminated the practical need to communicate about passports, humanitarian assistance, migration and other cross-border issues.
Talking to dictators is not the same as supporting them
There is a danger of making the opposite mistake as well.
The mere existence of negotiations with the Taliban should not automatically be described as appeasement.
Democratic governments communicate with dictatorships constantly. They negotiate prisoner exchanges, ceasefires, humanitarian access, migration arrangements and security matters.
Sometimes they have no realistic alternative.
Germany therefore has a defensible distinction: talk to the Taliban when necessary, but do not recognize their government as legitimate.
That position can work—but only if Germany maintains clear boundaries.
Technical cooperation should not become political rehabilitation. Taliban representatives should not receive legitimacy merely because Germany wants their help with immigration. Most importantly, individual deportations must still be judged according to the risks facing the person being returned.
There is no simple answer
It is tempting to reduce the controversy to a slogan.
One side can say Germany is collaborating with a misogynistic theocracy.
The other can say Germany is simply enforcing its immigration laws.
Neither captures the entire problem.
Germany has a legitimate interest in enforcing final immigration decisions, particularly when serious criminals are involved. It is also unrealistic to deport people to Afghanistan without communicating with the authorities who actually control Afghanistan.
At the same time, the Taliban run a brutally repressive system. Women and girls have been stripped of fundamental freedoms. Critics face persecution. Sending people into that environment demands an extraordinarily high level of scrutiny.
And every new concession to Taliban officials carries a political price.
The real question is therefore not whether Germany should ever speak to the Taliban. Governments sometimes have to speak to terrible regimes.
The question is how far pragmatic cooperation can go before pragmatism becomes normalization.
Germany believes it can maintain that line.
It needs to make sure the Taliban do not erase it.
