Salman Rafi Sheikh
IN EARLY JANUARY, India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, met Amir Khan Muttaqi, the acting foreign minister of Afghanistan’s Taliban government, in Dubai. This was the highest level of engagement between Kabul and New Delhi since August 2021, when the Taliban overthrew Afghanistan’s republican government and returned to power. The meeting was also a diplomatic setback for Pakistan.
Afghanistan has always been of geopolitical importance to Pakistan, providing it “strategic depth” in case of military attack by India. This was why Pakistan invested in and cultivated the Taliban for decades, long before the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. India never had a similar reason to develop ties with the Taliban, which it considered to be a Pakistan proxy in Afghanistan.
But now India’s intent is clear – it wants to normalise ties with Afghanistan regardless of who is in power in Kabul. By establishing ties with the Taliban, New Delhi hopes to not only marginalise Pakistan in Afghanistan but also gain access to Central Asian trade routes, where it can compete with China.
The timing of New Delhi’s gesture in reaching out to Kabul is partly an outcome of the fact that the Taliban regime is here to stay and, as a result, engaging with it is almost an inevitability for all regional powers. The push to normalise ties comes against the backdrop of growing involvement between countries in the region and Kabul. China sent an ambassador to Afghanistan in 2023, in what many saw as a step towards Beijing recognising the Taliban government – something no country has yet formally done since the Taliban’s return to power. In 2024, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan both took the Taliban off their lists of designated terror groups. Russia has indicated its intention to remove the Taliban from its terror list too.
New Delhi’s outreach to Kabul is also a response to the growing discord between the Taliban and its long-time supporter, Pakistan. In late December, Pakistan carried out air strikes inside Afghan territory targeting alleged hideouts of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a militant group that had claimed responsibility for several attacks in Pakistan. Pakistan justified its actions by saying the Taliban has not done enough to curb the TTP’s crossborder terrorism. Kabul said that 46 civilians were killed in the air strikes and carried out a retaliatory strike days later on what it called “centres and hideouts for malicious elements and their supporters who organised and coordinated attacks in Afghanistan.” The Taliban has warned Pakistan against taking further unilateral action against Afghanistan.
India sees an opportunity in this rift between its two western neighbours.
INDIA AND AFGHANISTAN had close ties that were severed after the first Taliban takeover of the country in 1996. India shut its embassy in Kabul and cut off all diplomatic relations with Afghanistan only to resume ties with the United States-backed Afghan republican government in 2001. Now, after more than three years of Taliban rule, New Delhi is turning to Taliban-controlled Kabul with open arms.
Before the Taliban’s takeover in 2021, India was one of the largest external players in Afghanistan through the years of the country’s United States-led occupation. Since 2001, India has pledged more than USD 3 billion to Afghanistan’s reconstruction, emerging as the fifth-largest external donor to the country in 2018. It has contributed towards vehicles for the Afghan army, granted scholarships for Afghan students, gifted aircraft, sent food aid and humanitarian assistance, and more. India provided the entire USD 90 million required for the construction of Afghanistan’s parliament, which began in 2007 and was completed in 2015. The move was highly symbolic as it underscored India’s support for parliamentary politics and its opposition to the Taliban’s armed mobilisation to overthrow the democratic government then in power.
Given Afghanistan’s unceasingly precarious economic situation, Kabul today probably sees India as a country that can offer it crucial economic assistance. Meanwhile, the Taliban views Pakistan as increasingly troublesome.
Islamabad’s decision in October 2023 to expel hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees who had lived in Pakistan for several decades has become a particular sore point. Pakistan said its deportation drive was due to security concerns following a series of militant attacks for which the TTP claimed responsibility. What it left unsaid was that the deportations might well have been meant to punish the Taliban regime for its continued support for the TTP.
Pakistan claims that the TTP has safe havens in Afghanistan and that this is the reason for the sharp rise in militant attacks in Pakistan in recent times. These claims are not unfounded. Successive reports by the United Nations Security Council’s Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team show the TTP’s presence in Afghanistan and that the Taliban regime continues to support it. A report from the Islamabad-based Centre for Research and Security Studies shows that 2024 was the deadliest year in a decade for Pakistan’s security forces. The country saw 2546 fatalities, 1612 of them involving civilians and security personnel, across 1166 terror incidents and counter-terror operations that year.
The Taliban has denied supporting any militant group and sees Islamabad’s decision to expel Afghan refugees as a way to put its regime under additional burden. In July 2024, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees noted that 28 percent of Afghanistan’s population – some 12.4 million people – were expected to face acute food insecurity by October. Nearly 2.4 million Afghans were predicted to experience emergency levels of hunger just short of famine. The deportations from Pakistan would send another million people back into Afghanistan, which is already struggling and ill-prepared to accommodate them.
ONE WAY FOR the Taliban to resist and challenge Pakistan is to engage positively with India. This could help the Taliban assert its autonomy and fight the perception that it is Pakistan’s lackey. Pakistan’s significant worry if India reestablishes its footprint in Afghanistan is that India, through its intelligence services, will revive support for actors inimical to Islamabad, including Islamist groups and Baloch separatists.
If India gains ground in Afghanistan due to Pakistan’s tensions with Afghanistan, it will mean a diplomatic victory for the Taliban but a loss for Pakistan. So far, Pakistan has only tried pressure tactics with Afghanistan – sending refugees back, fencing the countries’ shared border, frequently closing the border and disrupting trade, and conducting air strikes inside Afghanistan. But this strategy has failed. If Pakistan wants a different outcome, it needs to follow an alternative path.
When it comes to Afghanistan, other countries in the region have only a range of bad options to choose from. Engaging with the Taliban, with its dire record on women’s freedoms and human rights, brings plenty of problems. But isolation of the Taliban brings the threat of an unstable Afghanistan with a power vacuum for terror groups like the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) to fill. China, for instance, has repeatedly said that it respects Afghanistan’s right to deal with its own internal matters and will not intervene in them. Pakistan’s best “bad option”, meanwhile, is to help the Taliban fight the IS-K.
As the UN Security Council report shows, the Afghan Taliban sees the TTP not as a terror group but as a vital ally against the IS-K – the Taliban’s ideological nemesis. Pakistan may have to give up the unrealistic expectation that the Taliban will eliminate its own ally. Instead, it could try and convince the Taliban to just make sure that the TTP does not infiltrate and attack Pakistan. In return, Pakistan can offer the Taliban help against the IS-K, since the IS-K has a presence in Pakistan as well and it has attacked Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Taliban specifically on several occasions. In this scenario, Pakistan can push for close cooperation with the Taliban against this common enemy.
A push for cooperation does not need to be limited to sharing intelligence. Pakistan can offer to help the Taliban transform from a loosely configured movement into a more organised entity with a standing military force, integrating all its factions, including the TTP, under a single structure. The risk here, however, is that the Taliban can use an organised military to enforce its oppressive policies even more firmly and prolong its undemocratic rule over Afghanistan.
The UN Security Council reports show how militant groups continuously move between Central Asia and West Asia via Afghanistan. Pakistan can also push other states such as Iran, China and Russia to get Afghanistan to act against the TTP. These countries are equally interested in denying groups like the IS-K the use of Afghan territory to attack them.
In return for the Taliban asserting control over militant groups, Pakistan could show a willingness to resolve outstanding issues with Afghanistan, including the question of the Durand Line – the 2640 kilometre-long border between the two countries drawn by the British Indian government in the late 19th century. For decades, the Durand Line was an open border across which people could move freely. Pakistan’s recent decision to fence its entire length has been seen as a massive disruption to crossborder local trade patterns. Afghanistan sees Pakistan’s approach as unilateral. It has long disputed the legitimacy of this border, calling it a colonial imposition, while Pakistan has defended the legality of the border as supported by international law. But Pakistan’s dismissal of Afghanistan’s concerns has only created friction between the two countries. This is evident, for instance, in Pakistan’s almost total disregard for Kabul’s request to avoid mass deportations. Pakistan can leverage a willingness to listen to the Taliban’s concerns to impress upon the Taliban its need to act against TTP and keep India at arm’s length.
Pakistan could benefit from an approach that takes into account Afghan interests – not only those of the Taliban but also those of the Afghan people. This could in part be accomplished via joint management of the border and an easy visa regime for each other’s nationals. In 2023, Islamabad announced that entry to Pakistan from Afghanistan would require a proper visa and a valid passport. Previously, such requirements did not exist. Perhaps, a return to visa-free movement and trade across an open border managed jointly by both countries can diffuse tensions and allow border markets to flourish – which, in turn, can act as spaces of amicable exchange and as deterrents to local support for terrorism. If local economies flourish, residents near the border have fewer incentives to provide TTP fighters sanctuary in exchange for money and at risk of renewed instability.
All of this requires a meaningful shift in Pakistan’s Afghanistan strategy away from coercion and towards diplomatic engagement. Pakistan’s powerful army chief recently told political leaders in a meeting that the only source of tension with Afghanistan was the TTP. The statement shows that Pakistan views Afghanistan through the narrow prism of terrorism only – but Pakistan’s policymakers must allow for other considerations.
SOURCE : himalmag