The return of the Taliban to power in 2021 has been predominantly understood through the lens of Islamic fundamentalism and religious extremism. This paper argues against this framing to argue that the Taliban exercises control over Afghanistan’s diverse population through differentiated forms of control, surveillance, and violence across intersecting axes of ethnicity, gender, religion, and linguistic identity selectively. As opposed to repression on a uniform level, the Taliban tends to calibrate its authoritarian practices against specific communities through ways that reflect pre-existing social attitudes within the dominant Pashtun ethnic group, effectively governing minorities through norms and social orders they did not historically author.