Social Liability in Post-Regime-Change Afghanistan: The Taliban and Former Regime Supporters

Abstract

Since the Taliban's return to power in August 2021, the movement has publicly maintained a blanket amnesty for members of the former Islamic Republic's government, armed forces, and civil service. In practice, United Nations, treaty-body, and non-governmental monitors have documented a persistent pattern of extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, arbitrary arrest, and torture directed at this population through 2025. This paper develops the concept of social liability, the extension of that risk to relatives, associates, witnesses, and communities connected to a targeted individual, and situates it against four adjacent bodies of thought: the law-of-armed-conflict doctrine of collective punishment, constitutional guilt-by-association jurisprudence, the comparative-historical literature on kin punishment, and the imputed-political-opinion doctrine of refugee law. It sets explicit scope conditions distinguishing centrally ordered policy from tolerated systemic practice and decentralized opportunism, tests whether the concept generalizes through comparison with post-2003 Iraq and post-2024 Syria, and closes with testable propositions for future monitoring and with implications for asylum adjudication and international accountability efforts.