The Taliban government runs on WhatsApp. There’s just one problem.

Late one night two months ago, a team of Taliban security officers assembled on the outskirts of Afghanistan's capital to prepare for a raid on an Islamic State group hideout.

As the zero hour approached, the men fiddled with their automatic rifles while their leader, Habib Rahman Inqayad, scrambled to get the exact location of their target. He grabbed his colleagues' phones and called their superiors, who insisted they had sent him the location pin of the target to his WhatsApp.

There was just one problem: WhatsApp had blocked his account to comply with U.S. sanctions.

"The only way we communicate is WhatsApp — and I didn't have access," said Inqayad, 25, whom The New York Times has followed since the Taliban seized power in August 2021.

He was not alone. In recent months, complaints from Taliban officials, police and soldiers of their WhatsApp accounts...