Warning to the West 2

The Taliban’s Silent Offensive on Western Public Opinion

It happened quietly, almost innocuously. A group of British Muslim clerics boarded a plane to Kabul, met with senior Taliban officials, smiled for Afghan state television cameras, and returned to London praising what they called a “beautiful government” with a “positive vision”, even delivering the same message at a respected London university (The Times, April 12 2024).

This was no goodwill visit or harmless cultural exchange. It was a small but revealing piece of a much larger and far more dangerous strategy, the Taliban’s systematic effort to reshape how the West sees them, not through battlefield victories, but through soft power, calculated hospitality, and targeted propaganda.

The Taliban understand something many in the West still do not: wars are no longer won only with guns. They are won in minds, through the slow drip of curated imagery, personal testimony, and repeated exposure to a manufactured reality. And right now, the battlefield they are most focused on is not in Helmand or Kandahar, but in Birmingham, Berlin, Rotterdam, and beyond.

They are pursuing this strategy through several converging channels. One is the deliberate courting of religious leaders from Europe. These clerics, often invited under the guise of humanitarian or fact-finding missions, are shown a carefully sanitized Afghanistan, bustling markets, safe streets, neat schools, while the repression of women, the persecution of minorities, and the silencing of dissent are kept out of sight (The Times, April 12 2024). When these leaders return, their endorsements carry weight among their congregations, particularly young Muslims already suspicious of Western institutions.

A second tactic is the invitation of Western youth, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to visit Afghanistan. These trips, tightly choreographed under Taliban security, present an Instagram-ready version of the country. Participants, many with large online followings, post smiling photos, scenic videos, and glowing captions. They may believe they are simply documenting an adventure. In reality, they are serving as unpaid ambassadors for one of the world’s most repressive regimes.

The soft power campaign extends into the diplomatic arena as well. In Germany, after a series of violent incidents involving Afghan nationals, including a February 2025 car attack in Munich and the May 2024 stabbing of a police officer in Mannheim, political pressure to accelerate deportations grew. By July 2025, the Taliban had secured control of the Afghan embassy in Berlin, without formal recognition. Functionally, it gave the regime a European diplomatic foothold, a direct line to the Afghan diaspora, and a steady stream of revenue from consular services.

Inside Afghanistan, the regime is building an ideological infrastructure at breathtaking speed: over 22,000 religious seminaries in just three years, compared to 269 general schools (Nasiri, May 17 2025). These are not centres for broad learning; they are factories for producing a generation steeped in the Taliban’s rigid worldview. From there, the ideology is exported abroad through “digital warriors”, operatives flooding social media with multilingual pro-Taliban messaging, attacking critics, and normalising the regime’s image.

In the West, sympathetic or hard-line imams magnify the effect. While many religious leaders reject extremism, others promote values that are fundamentally at odds with democratic norms, creating parallel cultural spaces resistant to integration. When such leaders return from Taliban-arranged visits, their praise carries moral authority that can subtly shift perceptions.

The danger is compounded when these imams operate without meaningful oversight from national security agencies. In such cases, their influence is not only ideological but potentially financial. Informal money transfer systems, such as hawala networks, make it easy to channel funds between supporters in the West and Taliban-linked entities in Afghanistan. Mosques or religious centres led by such figures could, knowingly or unknowingly, become conduits for financial and logistical support. This combination of unchecked influence and the ability to move funds outside formal banking oversight dramatically increases the Taliban’s capacity to spread its propaganda and deepen its reach within Western Muslim communities.

Crucially, this is not the Taliban of the late 1990s, a backward, isolated militia confined to the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Today, they operate as a structured, transnational terrorist system under a broader umbrella of extremist networks, capable of projecting influence far beyond their traditional strongholds. They have adapted from ruling remote valleys to shaping conversations in Western capitals, from enforcing decrees in Afghan villages to exporting narratives through global media channels. This evolution makes them not only harder to contain, but also far more dangerous to democratic societies that underestimate their reach.

The Taliban’s very name, meaning “students of religious knowledge”, is a branding triumph. It cloaks a violent, exclusionary movement in the language of scholarship and piety. Combined with Deobandi theology and a militant jihadist ethos, it becomes an identity that resonates emotionally in communities where faith is central to belonging.

This is why the danger is not theoretical. It is here, unfolding in slow motion. Step by step, the Taliban are working to normalise themselves in the minds of Western Muslims and to plant seeds of legitimacy where once there was near-universal condemnation. If this continues unchecked, the result will not simply be a shift in opinion polls. It will be a generational change in how parts of the West’s own citizenry view one of the most regressive regimes in the world.

The West has long been wary of the Taliban’s guns. It is time to be equally wary of their smiles. This is a battle for narratives, for legitimacy, for hearts and minds. Losing it will not make headlines tomorrow, but the consequences will arrive, quietly, steadily, and perhaps irreversibly.

The question is not whether the Taliban’s silent offensive is real. It is whether we will notice it, and act, before it has already succeeded.