Last Wednesday, a German delegation traveled to Kabul to speak with Taliban government representatives about Germany’s efforts to return Afghan migrants with criminal records to Afghanistan. The meeting reflects the German government’s growing reliance on the Taliban, which it does not officially recognize but which it has relied on to help carry out its migrant deportation program. 

“This kind of diplomacy with the Taliban legitimizes terror and oppression and betrays those who have worked with us for a democratic Afghanistan,” Green Party representative Luise Amtsberg told Tageszeitung.

 The German government’s Afghan deportation efforts are one element of its broader hardline policies on immigration, which it has adopted due to pressure from far-right, anti-immigrant parties such as Alternative für Deutscheland (AfD). To carry out these restrictive policies, the German government has become an uncomfortable bedfellow of the Taliban, an organization widely condemned for its human rights abuses and restrictive treatment of women. Human rights organizations and other analysts have denounced both the government’s deportation agenda and its collaboration with the Taliban. 

The Wednesday meeting involved a senior member of Germany’s Interior Ministry and senior Taliban officials including Mohammed Nabi Omari, the first deputy to Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani and a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner. 

A History of Deportation

Chancellor Friederich Merz’s government has scaled up efforts to deport certain Afghan migrants since it took power in February. Around 400,000 people who were born in Afghanistan currently live in Germany, which has been a center for Afghan migration since the Soviet-Afghan war in 1979.

The current government successfully carried out its first flight of deported migrants in August, removing 81 Afghans from Germany. “These are Afghan men who are legally required to leave the country and who have a criminal record,” the Interior Ministry said at the time.

Germany received international criticism for the move. Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the United Nations Human Rights Office, stated in a press conference that it “was not appropriate to return people to Afghanistan” given continued human rights violations in the country. 

 Under international conventions, it is unlawful to deport people to their home country if it is likely they will experience human rights violations in that country. Human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch claim that the Taliban’s rule has made Afghanistan an unsafe place for deportations, and that Germany may be violating international law by deporting people to the country, even if they have received criminal convictions.

 “For Afghanistan, it’s easiest to make that point that every return would amount to a violation of human rights non-return obligations,” said Julian Lehmann, Program Manager at the Global Public Policy Institute.

 Nonetheless, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has since signaled his intention to accelerate the deportation of Afghan migrants, including to Syria. “My goal is to deport regularly and systematically,” he told DPA. 

The August flight was the second to have taken place since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021. Merz’s predecessor, Olaf Scholz, deported 28 Afghan migrants in August 2024, following backlash after an Afghan migrant killed a police officer in a mass stabbing.

Before the Taliban took power, deportations of this kind were common. Between 2016 and 2021, Germany removed over 1,100 Afghan migrants from its borders.

A report from the time found that more than 90 percent of migrants deported to Afghanistan faced some level of violence upon their return.

Germany suspended its deportation program after the Taliban took control of the Afghan government, given the danger posed by deportation.

The Political Landscape

Merz’s government has made migrant deportations one of its core priorities. The ruling “grand coalition,” consisting of the center-right Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CDU) alliance and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), ran on a campaign pledge to “start deporting people to Afghanistan and Syria, beginning with criminals and dangerous individuals.”

Striking a balance on the issue of migration has been a challenge for the ideologically diverse coalition. To Martin Sökefeld, a migration scholar at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, its conservative voters have been pushed to the right on immigration by inflammatory rhetoric from the far right, which has identified deportation as an effective tool to control migration. “It has become a highly emotional and symbolic issue to try to deport people, particularly to Afghanistan and also to Syria,” Sökefeld said.

At the same time, CDU also faces pressure from the left to take a strong stance against AfD’s proposed solutions to that question, which the left describes as extreme. 

Lehmann said that CDU’s actions, including its collaboration with the Taliban, demonstrates that the party failed to strike this balance, and has instead followed an approach proposed by the AfD. “They haven’t walked the line,” he said. “They’ve passed it.”

Taliban Talks

Wednesday’s meeting is the latest evolution of a complex relationship between Germany and the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

On the one hand, Germany refuses to recognize the Taliban government because of its human rights violations. On the other, it has relied on the Taliban to carry out its deportation agenda. According to Georg Menz, a migration professor at Old Dominion University, it is difficult to facilitate the kind of deportations that Germany seeks without maintaining an open line of communication in Kabul. 

To balance these competing priorities, Merz has claimed that his government’s collaboration with the Taliban falls short of official recognition because it is of a technical, not political, nature. During the two deportation flights under the Scholz and Merz governments, Germany stated that it relied on communication with “technical contacts” in Kabul, mediated through Qatar. “Rather than formally recognize the Taliban and negotiate with it directly, Germany used Qatar as a go-between,” said Michelle Pace, an Associate Fellow at Chatham House and a professor in global studies at Denmark’s Roskilde University. 

Similarly, the German government emphasized that Wednesday’s meeting consisted of “technical talks” concerning the deportations.

Despite these moves, Germany has remained adamant that it does not intend to recognize the Taliban. “Diplomatic recognition of the Taliban regime is not up for discussion. That is simply out of the question,” Merz said at a press conference.

Nonetheless, the Taliban may yield further gains from its assistance to Germany in the long term. “In the absence of diplomatic recognition, Afghanistan’s Taliban government would welcome engagement on migration management as a way to build rapport with the West,” Pace stated.

“Engagement will likely come at the expense of those seeking protection from the Taliban regime,” she added. 

But potential consequences to deported individuals has not stopped the Merz government from pursuing deportations. To Sökefeld, it can react with a simple response: “It’s not our issue anymore.”