Five years after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, there is little ambiguity about the character of their second regime. Women and girls have been stripped of education, employment and much of public life. Independent media have been dismantled, dissent criminalised, and the UN Security Council warns that Afghanistan remains home to numerous transnational terrorist organisations operating under Taliban protection. If anything, the regime has become more repressive, confident and deeply entrenched than when it entered Kabul in August 2021.

Yet over these five years, another transformation has unfolded beyond Afghanistan’s borders as the language used to describe the Taliban has softened markedly. The group, which returned to power as an armed Islamist movement and international pariah, is now discussed in terms of engagement, pragmatism and governance.

The United Nations has stopped calling the Taliban “de facto authorities” and now refers to them as the “relevant authorities” – a small but significant change that moves the organisation’s terminology a step closer to formal recognition. Western diplomats speak of dialogue and co-operation; aid agencies emphasise practical engagement. Influential journalists, commentators and media executives frame accommodation as both necessary and inevitable. Life under Taliban rule is increasingly portrayed as routine, while Taliban leaders themselves are presented as misunderstood.

No single institution or individual engineered this linguistic evolution. It emerged from the convergence of humanitarian necessity, diplomatic realism, profit incentives and journalistic practice. The UN sought to preserve access; Western governments wanted channels of communication; businesses saw opportunities in media, mining, banking, telecommunications, aviation, logistics and trade.

Together, these interests created a powerful incentive to describe the Taliban in ways that have facilitated acceptance, rather than reinforced isolation. This has contributed to the steady normalisation of a regime whose conduct has changed only – in its degree of repression – for the worse.

Journalism’s responsibility is to describe governments accurately. Five years after the republic disintegrated, the way the Taliban are described has drifted so far from reality that it has arguably been integral to the process that has made the Taliban internationally acceptable.

The changes have been incremental, often imperceptible. But small shifts in vocabulary, emphasis and framing have accumulated into something much larger. Nowhere has the shift been more visible than at the United Nations, where senior officials argue that Western governments must engage with Afghanistan to prevent renewed instability, extremism, drug trafficking and refugee flows. Their case is built on the need for aid and security, not ideological sympathy for the Taliban.

The vocabulary of engagement increasingly dominates the UN’s discussion of Afghanistan, even as officials continue to acknowledge the regime’s repression of women and minorities, and the presence of transnational terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda.

The same vocabulary has been echoed by diplomats, commentators, business leaders and prominent journalists, whose public standing has lent authority to the proposition that the Taliban should be treated as a government the world must accommodate. They have reinforced a narrative in which “engagement” is the only pragmatic option. The language of diplomacy and humanitarianism has steadily become the language through which Afghanistan itself is reported.

Reporting from authoritarian states often depends on an unspoken bargain – governments control visas, accreditation, interviews and movement; journalists who retain access continue reporting from inside the country. The bargain is rarely explicit – governments seldom tell correspondents what they may write; they do not have to. The knowledge that access can be withdrawn is often sufficient to encourage restraint. Whether it is Iran, Russia, China, North Korea or Afghanistan, the contract is clear, the consequences less so.

Commercial interests have reinforced the same trend. That is probably best illustrated by the reaction to remarks made in London in June by the media executive Saad Mohseni. Speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Mohseni described the lives of women in Afghanistan as “normal”, saying women could move around cities freely and that girls were attending school. Days later, reports emerged that Taliban authorities in Herat had shot into crowds protesting against draconian dress codes as dozens of women had been detained for violating them.

Mohseni’s comments provoked immediate outrage among Afghans, including journalists and women’s rights advocates, not because he argued for engagement with the Taliban, but because his description of life under their rule bore so little resemblance to the experience of Afghan people. His remarks mattered because they came from one of the most influential interpreters of Afghanistan for Western governments, media organisations and investors. As the founder of Afghanistan’s largest private media company, Mohseni has long argued that engagement with the Taliban is the only realistic path for preserving both journalism and commercial broadcasting inside the country, even though media are now under tight regime control.

The same tendency appeared, albeit in a different form, in comments by the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, who told an Australian radio interviewer of knowing senior Taliban leaders who “find themselves at odds” with edicts that ban girls from education and women from working. The observation might be true; it is beside the point.

The women excluded from schools and universities, the journalists silenced, and the people imprisoned for their sexuality or ethnicity are not oppressed by private reservations inside the Taliban. They are oppressed by Taliban rule. To emphasise the alleged professed discomfort of individual Taliban members risks turning the perpetrators of repression into conflicted administrators, while those living under their decrees disappear once again into the background.

Governments will engage with regimes such as the Taliban regardless of what journalists say and write. Journalism exerts its influence elsewhere: by holding power to account while resisting the temptation to adopt the language that power uses to describe itself.

Five years after seizing power, the Taliban do not have international recognition, but they are increasingly discussed as a legitimate government, rather than the Islamist movement that returned to power through force. Whether that vocabulary still reflects the reality faced each day by Afghanistan’s people is ultimately a question journalism should continue to ask of itself.