Leaders of Afghanistan’s opposition, after a parley in Vienna last week, will unveil in the next few days a “political roadmap” for their struggle against the Taliban.

The opposition leaders met in Vienna last week for a third round of discussions on the path forward toward deposing the Taliban and instituting a multi-ethnic democracy — but how effective is a conference in a foreign nation when the Taliban retains its tight grip and international interest wanes?

This week’s conference was the third round of talks hosted by the Austrian Institute for International Affairs. About 40 Taliban opposition leaders attended, including the head of the National Resistance Front, Ahmad Massoud. Other Afghan civil and political activists and a few former Afghan government officials also attended.

The National Resistance Front’s spokesperson, Ali Nazary tells the Sun that the conference was fruitful and that participants agreed to and signed the political roadmap to be unveiled in the next few days. Mr. Nazary posted to X a “Declaration of the Third Round of the Vienna Conference for a Democratic Afghanistan.”

The declaration calls on the United Nations, human rights organizations, and the international community to support Afghanistan, fight terrorism, and condemn violations by the Taliban of human rights and of women’s rights.

“We once again reaffirm our commitment to the foundational principles of democracy, human rights, and national unity as a basis for establishing a democratic and representative political system in Afghanistan,” the declaration says.

“The whole purpose was to create consensus unity among the opposition to the Taliban, the democratic opposition,” Mr. Nazary, tells the Sun. “There has been demand by the international community that Afghanistan’s people have to unite to show unity and then they’ll act. Well, we’ve done that.”

An Afghanistan researcher at the Institute for the Study of War, Peter Mills, is less sanguine. He tells the Sun that while the National Resistance Front and other organizations are fighting the Taliban on the ground in Afghanistan, it’s “notable” that the National Resistance Front led the Vienna conference and that other insurgent groups like the Afghanistan Freedom Front and Afghanistan United Front were not in attendance.

“There’s still this competition for leadership of the anti-Taliban opposition,” Mr. Mills says. “The two big hurdles right now for the opposition deposing the Taliban remain unity on the anti-Taliban side and a lack of substantive foreign support.”

“It’s going to be, I think, some time before the opposition becomes strong enough to start really threatening the Taliban control over Afghanistan,” Mr. Mills says. “I would say that’s a ways off, several years at the very earliest.”

While Mr. Nazary presents the National Resistance Front and the Vienna conference attendees as “the only force right now standing against the Taliban politically, militarily, and so forth,” he concedes that international support is crucial for this fight. “Without the support of the international community, how are we going to expect political change?” he says.

With the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, though, international — and American — interest in Afghanistan is, at best, quiescent. A majority of Americans now think the war in Afghanistan was “not worth fighting,” according to an Associated Press/NORC poll. After 20 years of combat, with nearly 2,500 American lives lost, the Taliban immediately returned to power. 

“You’ve got China to think about. You’ve got Russia, Ukraine. You’ve now got the Hamas-Israel war in the Middle East, which has a whole bunch of regional components,” Mr. Mills says. “I don’t think there’s much interest in the U.S. in really going after the Taliban.”

Mr. Mills says the insurgency led by the National Resistance Front and other groups is still “fairly weak compared to the Taliban,” but that perhaps internal divisions within the Taliban and the poor economy there will weaken the Taliban’s grip on power over time and create an opening for the opposition to succeed.

Again, he stresses, this will take time. Mr. Nazary, though, warns that time is not a good thing when it comes to global terrorism. He is pleading for international help. He warns that Al Qaeda and ISIS are finding a safehaven again in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. “Whatever happens in Afghanistan doesn’t stay in Afghanistan,” Mr. Nazary says.