I imagine it has less to do with accuracy and more to do with not wanting legitimizing their rule.

Certainly, I think that's exactly it. But we have no pretense about states actually being ethical entities themselves (even if we think that any particular state is ethical), so these sorts of articles always read as a little linguistically tortured.

Honestly, I think signing the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban pretty much acknowledged them as de facto government of at least some of Afghanistan. The controlled 90% of the country at their pre-2001 peak, though, so they're definitely not more of a state now than then.

Well, 20 years ago they were 100% of the state, now a mere 25%.

> At what point do we drop the normative pretense and recognize that they're more of a state than they were when we started bombing them 20 years ago?

The million dollar question to many Palestinians, I'd wager.

As popular as it is to make sweepingly nihilistic statements about all states being unethical (Trump's "you think our country's so innocent?" could have just as easily come out of the mouth of Bernie Sanders), I think this elides the differences between states, mafias, and totalitarian movements. The 'Ndrangheta, a mafia, is estimated to do about $44 billion a year in business, dwarfing the Taliban and performing some functions of a state in areas they control. They don't constitute a state. If they controlled all of the Italian government, Italy might be called a state, but the mafia would still be the mafia. Putin's gang is not a state; it's similarly a parasitic mafia that controls the levers of the Russian state. The Khmer Rouge was a totalitarian movement that came into possession of a state, which they completely demolished. Their reign of terror over Cambodia was never recognized by most nations and they were finally attacked and eradicated by, of all people, the communist army of Vietnam.

A movement is a permanent revolution. A revolution is not a state, nor is it a form of government. It can eventually settle and become a state, while still calling itself a revolution, as the Cuban revolution or Iranian revolution unfortunately did, but that only happens when it crystalizes into a non-revolutionary and stable form, having eliminated all internal enemies. Some movements never crystalize and require permanent enemies (Nazism, Stalinism). These resemble dictatorships and clothe themselves in state functions, but they do not demolish the basic structural aspects of the state. They keep them for appearances. What's left of the state itself operates below the movement and seeks whatever level of normalcy is possible through bureaucracy, just as the movement seeks legitimacy by cloaking itself with the state. i.e. the German state was a hostage of the Nazis. Some plain old despotisms even seek to impersonate revolutions (Gaddafi's little green book, the Kim family mafia). But the Taliban is much closer to the Khmer Rouge, or ISIS. Controlling the economic output of a territory doesn't make a movement a state, much as they may wish it so. At most, the Taliban are a mafia dressed up as a totalitarian movement which controls territory. When they controlled 90% of Afghanistan, there was no Afghan state.

I'm not going to argue that the Mafia is a state! But I think the Taliban satisfies the primary condition for statehood: possessing a monopoly on violence over a physical territory. Being a general menace to the population within that territory is just icing on the cake. The Italian Mafia might be extraordinarily effective in parts of Italy, but I don't think even they have the monopoly on violence: the Italian police are free to saunter in and arrest anybody not involved in their particular flavor of organized crime.

And, FTR, I don't believe that all states are themselves unethical. What I've said is that ethicality is neither necessary nor sufficient for statehood, at least in the "classic" Western political theory definition of the state.

Hm. Monopoly on violence in the political sense doesn't mean being the unchallenged masters of the territory - it means that people in that territory can't do violence to each other, or in this context engage in tribal or clan conflict, because the settlement of disputes and the application of law is the remit solely of the governing power. I don't think that's ever been the case in Afghanistan, i.e. even the Afghan state ain't much of a state.