Accountability Without Transparency in Afghanistan: UNAMA’s Assessment of the Taliban Security Sector

A new UNAMA report, published in August 2026, examines whether Afghanistan’s Taliban administration has established meaningful accountability mechanisms for its security forces nearly five years after taking power. The report’s central finding is not that oversight structures are absent, several genuinely exist, but that their near-total lack of public transparency makes it impossible to assess whether they function as anything more than institutional architecture without operative substance.

Since 2021, the Taliban leadership has issued a series of decrees prohibiting torture and arbitrary detention, including Decree No. 175 on prisoner treatment and Decree No. 29 on detention procedures, alongside establishing multiple oversight bodies: the Security and Filtration Commission (December 2021), the High Directorate of Supervision and Prosecution of Decrees and Edicts (March 2023, replacing the former Attorney-General’s office), and the Ministry of Virtue and Vice’s Commission for Hearing Complaints, formalised by decree in November 2023.

Each institution has some documented record of activity. The Security and Filtration Commission reported dismissing 4,350 individuals in February 2022, though without specifying grounds. The Commission for Hearing Complaints reported handling 9,808 complaints by August 2024, with 56 percent resolved. The Ministry of Interior reported arresting 449 personnel over six months in 2023 for offences including bribery and equipment embezzlement.

The report’s more consequential finding concerns what these figures do not show. None of the reporting institutions disclose disaggregated data, the type of offence, which security institution was involved, or judicial outcomes, that would allow independent verification of whether accountability is genuinely occurring or merely being asserted.

The High Directorate, despite a legal requirement to report quarterly to the Taliban leader’s office, has not publicly disclosed any findings since its 2023 establishment, with one narrow exception: a Balkh provincial office reporting 13 cases forwarded to military courts in November 2024.

Judicial data compounds the opacity. UNAMA notes the Supreme Court “regularly publishes figures” on civilian caseloads (185,591 of 250,762 filed cases addressed, per a September 2024 announcement) but reports military court activity only sporadically, and never confirms whether defendants sentenced for crimes like murder, theft, or “moral corruption” were security personnel at all.

The report identifies only one instance, in February 2024, where a Supreme Court announcement initially named defendants as military personnel before the post was edited to remove that identification. Meanwhile, the Court has continued unusually frequent public announcements of corporal punishments for ordinary citizens (lashings for offences from adultery to alcohol consumption) until a marked drop-off after April 2026, a contrast UNAMA describes as undermining any claimed uniform deterrent standard.

The report also documents specific mechanisms of interference: provincial-level directors of the High Directorate reportedly pressuring monitoring staff not to forward findings to Kabul, and instances where military courts refused to accept petitions against Taliban personnel, telling complainants to stop filing claims against “mujahideen.”

A Supreme Court circular from November 2023 formally prohibits sharing “figures and types of lawsuits from which defamation or corruption can be deduced” regarding the judiciary’s own conduct, an explicit textual bar on precisely the transparency UNAMA’s recommendations call for..

Institutional effort is “not clear” to be absent, but its opacity “undermines” the Taliban’s own repeated claims to transparency and risks, in UNAMA’s words, “reinforcing the perception of immunity” regardless of what internal processes may or may not be occurring behind it.

SAT Commentary

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