In the latest in a series of diplomatic rollbacks, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has announced the closure of the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. In its 30 January statement, the department said that the embassy would cease operations on 30 June 2026—a decision that will have consequences for the lives and the safety of Australia’s Afghan community.
In July 2024, the Australian government received a letter from the Taliban requesting the closure of the embassy. This decision is therefore viewed by some as a concession to the Taliban.
The Australian government should be supporting the Afghan embassy in Canberra, not advising it to close or restricting its services. During the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, Australia provided funds to allow those embassies to remain open and continue functioning.
In September 2024, the United Kingdom’s Afghan embassy closed due to the ambassador’s retirement. But far from retiring, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Australia, Wahidullah Waissi, is prepared and capable of continuing to serve.
DFAT asked the embassy to cease providing consular services in September last year. Until then, Waissi and his team had maintained the diplomatic functions of an embassy under the most trying circumstances after the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in August 2021. He wrote about his experiences as ambassador during that time, eloquent as always, in an August Strategist article.
The embassy has provided passports to Afghans who needed them for as long as they had access to blanks. Many of these passports allowed lifesaving evacuations including some I worked on with a former foreign minister of Australia. Even though the Taliban doesn’t recognise these passports, other countries do, and people who hold them can still use them to visit family in exile in those countries.
The embassy also verified national documentation needed by those trying to rebuild lives in exile, such as drivers’ licenses. The Australian government was supposed to take on these other functions, but the transfer is not yet complete. The Department of Home Affairs is responsible for many of the functions, but its communication on these issues has been lacking.
But more than that, the embassy has provided so many intangible services at a time when hope has been needed. It has been a space for cultural representation and expression in stark contrast to what is now experienced under the Taliban. For Afghans in Australia, it offers a deeply desired geographical space that is Afghanistan, a safe piece of land that is theirs, where they can raise and hold a flag that doesn’t represent a patriarchal terrorist organisation, but a nation they had hopes and dreams for and worked hard to build together.
Last year, Muzafar Ali rode around Australia to raise money for Afghan girls’ education. When he arrived at the embassy in Canberra he was near tears, draped in the Afghan national flag, he said.
After everyone abandoned us, the embassy was one of the few places we can call home, with the three coloured flag that represents our diversity, not the Taliban’s black and white flag and ideology … We look at this embassy as a glimmer of hope for us. When we come here, we feel safe.
Tens of thousands of Australians invested in the dream of a better future for Afghanistan. Many of them find hope in that little plot of land, in the people who keep working there, and in what it represents. The embassy is a space where Afghans and Australians have been able to experience an Afghanistan that is so much more than what the country has become under the Taliban—one that isn’t defined by the lives of friends and colleagues lost in Australia’s longest war, the physical injuries from terrifying explosions and firefights, or the invisible wounds that haunt the night and day of so many.
David Savage served with the Australian Federal Police for 20 years. After leaving the AFP, he participated in United Nations peacekeeping missions before joining the UN as a war crimes investigator in Afghanistan. He later returned to Afghanistan as a civilian adviser with the Australian Agency for International Development. It was on this second deployment he was critically wounded by a child suicide-bomber sent by the Taliban. He continues to advocate for veterans and Afghans and works closely with the embassy. He sees DFAT’s efforts to close the embassy as ‘a betrayal by acceding to the wishes of the Taliban.’
The Canberra embassy has been a remaining and uplifting symbol of hope, for a future that Afghans and 40,000 Australians sacrificed to build. Closing the embassy sends a terrible message and risks extinguishing that last light of hope, and inevitably leaves us asking ‘what exactly were our sacrifices for?’
The Australian government is currently in negotiations with the Taliban as part of the pretrial proceedings for a joint case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), relating to breaches of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women. It is possible the Taliban have included embassy closure in their negotiation requirements. But this is no reason to accede to the request. Indeed, a large gathering on Afghan women’s rights called for the embassy to remain open. The embassy has been a great supporter of Afghan women’s rights in Australia, across the region and globally.
Azadah Raz Mohammad is an academic at Melbourne University, legal adviser for the End Gender Apartheid Campaign and a global expert on gender justice for Afghan women. If ICJ negotiations are the reason for the embassy closure, she believes it ‘is unlikely to yield constructive outcomes, as there is substantial evidence indicating that the Taliban have not engaged in negotiations in good faith.’
‘For many,’ she says, ‘the embassy has functioned not merely as a diplomatic post but as a critical institutional link to identity, legal recognition and civic security in Australia. Its removal creates a significant vacuum in community support structures and representation.’
Australia’s special intake of Afghan refugees, established after the return of the Taliban, will close at the end of this financial year. Home Affairs has removed any criteria for prioritising the most vulnerable visa applications from Afghanistan. It is hard not to see all this as callous erasure of the ongoing plight of the women and most vulnerable Afghans.
Nothing could say more of our government’s desire to ignore the detailed horror facing Afghans today than the closure of the Afghan embassy. Rather than being closed, the embassy should be supported to continue representing the people of Afghanistan in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations 1961.
