Since the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) was first deployed in 2002, its mandate has evolved significantly. The most recent reorientation came in 2022 in response to the Taliban’s takeover of the country. Since then, the mandate has not substantively changed, despite a high-profile Independent Assessment mandated by the Security Council in 2023. That assessment was intended to provide a new “integrated and coherent” approach for the Security Council and the mission to “advance the objective of a secure, stable, prosperous and inclusive Afghanistan.” Even as that objective seems as far away as ever, the mandate is effectively stuck in time.

The next renewal of UNAMA’s mandate in March 2026 offers an opportunity to reimagine the mission’s approach. Deteriorating circumstances in Afghanistan and significant budget constraints will impact UNAMA’s capabilities and priorities in the coming year. Ahead of the mandate renewal, it is therefore critical to assess how to reorient the mission toward supporting the goal of sustainable and just regional peace, someday taking Afghanistan off the council’s agenda after generations of conflict.

In particular, this requires strengthening UNAMA’s unique political role. Specifically, the Security Council should make clear that it prioritizes the Independent Assessment’s call for a political roadmap that derives from negotiations between the Taliban and other Afghan stakeholders. It may express this prioritization by changing the mandate language or at least giving clearer direction to UN leaders. The alternative is normalization of the Taliban’s domestic extremism and their tolerance of international terrorism, as well as the need for perpetual humanitarian aid delivery to a nation of 40 million people.

A Mandate Stuck in Time

During the period of the Afghan Republic (2001–2021), UNAMA’s mandate was broad and its staffing correspondingly extensive. By August 2021, its budget provided for 11 field and headquarters offices and 1,163 personnel, with a total cost of about $136 million. In coordination with donors, the NATO military mission, and the Afghan government, UNAMA was mandated to support the peace process and elections; oversee development assistance planning and spending; promote regional cooperation; strengthen domestic human rights functions and compliance with international human rights obligations; report on civilian casualties and demining; promote gender equality; defend the rights of children in armed conflict; improve government efforts to promote the rule of law and fight corruption; support humanitarian aid delivery; and promote counter-narcotics and anti-corruption cooperation with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

After the Taliban takeover, the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and the Security Council penholders revisited UNAMA’s mandate to ensure its viability. They reworked the mandate in early 2022 (Resolution 2626) to prioritize the coordination of humanitarian assistance and donor support. They also mandated UNAMA to facilitate dialogue with the ruling authorities on issues of inclusive governance and the rule of law. The council made only minor adjustments to the mandate in subsequent years (2023, 2024, and 2025) due to concerns about reopening previously agreed language amid geopolitical tensions on the council.

Circumstances on the ground since 2021 have constrained almost all of UNAMA’s activities, especially given the Taliban’s multiple decrees excluding Afghan women from public life and even barring them from working for the UN. Nonetheless, UNAMA’s current mandate is still broad, and the mission remains extensively staffed. It is tasked with coordinating humanitarian assistance; pursuing economic and social stability and resilience; providing good offices to political reconciliation; promoting governance and the rule of law, human rights, gender equality, and child rights; facilitating regional cooperation; mitigating risks of aid diversion to the Taliban; and reporting on issues of security, including the risks posed by mines to civilians and the small arms trade. In 2025, UNAMA’s budget was around $125 million with over 1,130 approved staff positions. Actual expenditures were lower, due to a nearly 25% vacancy rate, reduced security costs due to the increased use of local guards, and operational constraints on movement and activities. The proposed 2026 budget of $105 million represents a 15% decrease, to be met through cuts to UNAMA field offices, personnel, security, and operations, which may impact its reporting activities.

In addition to UNAMA’s work, since 2022 international efforts to promote human rights and security have emerged or strengthened. These include the work of the UN special rapporteur on Afghanistan, cases focused on women’s rights brought to the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, and active monitoring by the UN Security Council’s committee on Taliban sanctions (the Resolution 1988 Committee).

UNAMA’s Report Card

Since 2021, UNAMA’s performance has been mixed. The mission has commendably coordinated food and other assistance, support for returning refugees, and vital health care and education services for the most vulnerable Afghans. UN agencies such as the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization and their implementing partners have operated continuously and provided millions of people with at least one form of assistance, including food, healthcare, water and sanitation, nutrition, education, and emergency shelter. Yet the assistance picture is complex: some governments give direct aid to the Taliban, while others remain reluctant to shift their support from less efficient humanitarian channels to more sustainable development assistance due to international strictures against directly supporting the Taliban. Donor cuts have also impacted aid delivery, particularly after 2025, and there are persistent allegations of manipulation and diversion by the Taliban to deliver aid to supporters versus those most in need.

UNAMA has also creditably continued to implement its mandate to monitor and report on human rights. For example, the mission has put out special reports on the “Vice and Virtue” law and developments such as revenge killings of former government and military officials. UNAMA’s leadership has also quietly and successfully intervened to help human rights advocates, according to multiple sources.

But other key performance indicators are less impressive, according to the mission’s own reporting. Many believe UNAMA should be more focused on pushing for Afghan women to regain their basic rights. Instead, there has been a steady decline in freedom for women and girls, putting into question UNAMA’s conditions-free approach to engagement with the Taliban. Per the mandate’s requirement, the mission also has held “consultations with Afghan women to enable an articulation of their views for engagement with the de facto authorities”—but budget documents attest that it has only held at an average of one such meeting every two weeks.

Most importantly, UNAMA has failed to define and progress in its “good offices” responsibility—its unique task as a political mission—which DPPA states should be a “forward platform[s] for preventive diplomacy… and supporting complex political transitions.” Instead, the need to stay and deliver humanitarian assistance in a tough environment arguably has made UNAMA overly cautious with its political engagement.

Since 2024, mission leadership has focused on supporting the reintegration of the Afghan state into the international community through the “Doha Process”. This effort has varied in scope but at its core brings together key member states with the Taliban in plenary and working group formats, physically in Doha and online. Specific working groups on counter-narcotics and the private sector have focused on confidence-building mechanisms. Some member states and many Afghan groups and other human rights experts view the process as inherently flawed due to its exclusion of non-Taliban Afghans and its implicit acceptance of the Taliban as a legitimate political representative of the country. As many Security Council members noted in their December 2025 review, the process has yet to yield any positive results for the Afghan people.

In 2025, UNAMA leaders posited a “Mosaic” concept, intended to move the Doha Process forward by linking specific issues to a negotiating platform. This concept has also met with acute criticism, in particular for giving perceived equivalency to the Taliban’s demands (Afghanistan’s UN seat, the unfreezing of financial assets, and sanctions relief) and those of the international community (and most Afghan people) for inclusive governance and human rights. The imbalance in negotiating items, and the irreversible nature of possible concessions to the Taliban, would erode international leverage without securing tangible, enforceable commitments.

Time to Reimagine and Reprioritize

Rather than the current structure of the Taliban and foreign diplomats negotiating on behalf of the Afghan people, the 2023 Independent Assessment had proposed a process where Afghans reconcile their needs with one another. The assessment recommended “an Afghan national dialogue that would establish inclusive governance and ensure sustainable peace and social, cultural and economic development after 45 years of armed conflict.” It also asked that the international community “support Afghan stakeholders to ensure inclusive and representative participation in such a dialogue.”

Only a dedicated UN structure could help non-Taliban Afghans establish a strong and representative negotiating platform with which to engage the Taliban and advocate for their own rights. A political process for Afghanistan will need reliable funding and the greatest degree of impartiality possible. Since 2021, processes underwritten by Member states or private foundations have not managed to achieve both of those elements. The UN’s comprehensive membership, legitimacy, and assessed funding could meet these needs—and UNAMA is the one UN body tasked with helping this happen. UNAMA’s current mandate requests that it “provide outreach and good offices, including to facilitate dialogue between all relevant Afghan political actors and stakeholders, the region and the wider international community, with a focus on promoting inclusive, representative, participatory and responsive governance at the national and subnational levels.”

UNAMA personnel already hold general political consultation meetings within Afghanistan, averaging more than 150 every three months, according to its budget documents, but nothing has progressed—in part due to the Taliban’s draconian control over civil society, elders, and moderate religious leaders. The mission’s 2026 budget document admits this stasis: after the 2024 and 2025 documents repeated the same language describing these consultations as “continued efforts towards inclusive and responsive governance,” the 2026 goal only advances as far as “identification of a responsive and consultative governance model.” UNAMA is unable to secure political space for such groups to do more than privately express their concerns with Taliban restrictions on daily life, unjust or excessive taxation, or exploitation of mineral reserves—sources of dissent that Taliban authorities have routinely repressed with violence.

Meanwhile, UN officials have not supported or even officially attended many gatherings of Afghans in exile, judging them to be either too political and therefore jeopardizing the mission’s ability to stay in the country or too dominated by elites. There are complaints that the former special representative of the secretary-general (SRSG) refused to consider the views of exiled activists on the grounds that they were out of touch, a criticism many Afghans share. But the exile community is heterogeneous. Some members have wide networks within Afghanistan of people who are unable to meet with UNAMA freely, some may themselves be youth and female leaders who were unable to rise in the Afghan Republic’s gerontocracy. And those outside Afghanistan may deserve a seat at the table for yet another reason: as humanitarian aid declines, the relative economic importance of their remittances rises.

To make clear its intention to strengthen UNAMA’s political role, the Security Council could consider two changes. First, it could move some of the mission’s political functions out of the country in order to amplify the ongoing effort to “identify a responsive and consultative governance model” by formally including the views of those unable to participate through mechanisms inside Afghanistan. This external political office could eventually support a legitimate political process.

Second, while preserving UNAMA’s human rights reporting and coordinating functions, the council could instruct mission leadership to prioritize steps toward peace, stability, and sustainable justice via a political dialogue among Afghans worldwide, as envisioned in the Independent Assessment. To make this point clearer, the “good offices” paragraph could align with the Independent Assessment and call for the mission to “support consultation among all relevant Afghan political actors and stakeholders, the region and the wider international community, leading to a political dialogue among Afghans to create predictable, lawful institutions and a representative constitutional order.” The first step toward making this happen in practice could be a UN-sponsored analysis of all statements and declarations by Afghan political coalitions inside and outside the country, to determine a basic platform for political representation. This could be followed by a conference of Afghan and international mediation experts to design a mechanism for in-person and virtual consultations for underrepresented voices.

The world can do better than asking Afghans to settle for a status quo of repression and gender apartheid and being eternally on the world’s humanitarian and security agenda. No one except Afghans should set the agenda for exactly how their country can observe its international treaty commitments and be reintegrated into the international community. As we near a fifth year of Taliban oppression, the UN Security Council could instruct UNAMA to step into the vacuum, fulfill its political mission, and help Afghans come together to break a 50-year cycle of instability and harm.