By: Salman Rafi Sheikh
South Asia is convulsing with contradictions. On one frontier, Pakistan and Afghanistan earlier this year stumbled into open warfare – air strikes, border battles, and a “ceasefire” patched together in Doha under Qatari and Turkish supervision. On another, India is rolling out the red carpet for the very Taliban it once denounced as medieval terrorists.
The irony could not be more stark. For two decades, New Delhi backed Washington’s war in Afghanistan, supported the anti-Taliban governments of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, and condemned the US-Taliban Doha deal as a capitulation to extremism. Yet last week, Taliban foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi – still on the UN sanctions list – was given a striking diplomatic welcome in New Delhi. The message from India’s corridors of power was unmistakable: engagement with the Taliban is the new realism.
What explains this dramatic reversal in India’s approach is a growing recognition in New Delhi that the Taliban are no longer Islamabad’s clients. Their bilateral ties are not stable. Plus, New Delhi also understands that the Taliban do not simply view themselves as a movement; they are an established government gaining slow but certain recognition. But the main factor driving New Delhi’s rapid normalization with the Taliban, evident from India’s decision to reopen its embassy in Afghanistan, is the growing wedge between Kabul and Islamabad.
The very regime once cultivated by Pakistan as a source of “strategic depth” against India has turned into a political and security liability. Since taking Kabul in August 2021, relations between Islamabad and the Taliban government have deteriorated sharply. Pakistan’s military establishment accuses the Taliban of providing sanctuary and operational space to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a militant network that emerged in the mid-2000s to resist Islamabad for siding with Washington’s War on Terror.
Far from being tamed, the TTP has resurged with deadly force, especially after the Afghan Taliban released hundreds of TTP fighters and commanders from Afghanistan’s prisons after August 2021. Between 2021 and 2025, the TTP has carried out hundreds of attacks on Pakistani soil, mostly targeting military and police installations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. In March, Pakistan climbed to second place on the Global Terrorism Index as a target of attacks by terrorists.
Islamabad’s reaction has been equally drastic: it fenced much of the 2,600-kilometre Durand Line, launched cross-border airstrikes inside Afghanistan, deported over a million Afghan refugees who had lived in Pakistan for decades, and suspended all cross-border trade. Even after the recent Qatar- and Turkey-mediated ceasefire, the border remains sealed as a symbol of the collapse of Pakistan’s long-cherished Afghan strategy.
For New Delhi, the deepening rupture between Islamabad and Kabul is not just a crisis next door; it is an opening. As Pakistan’s “strategic depth” implodes, India sees a rare chance to reinsert itself into a theater from which it was excluded after the Taliban’s 2021 takeover. This opportunity has arrived at a time when India’s regional influence has faced visible setbacks including the loss of friendly governments in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal, and the Maldives’ demand for an Indian troop withdrawal. Against this backdrop, Afghanistan – long a cornerstone of India’s West Asia policy – has again become too important to ignore.
In pursuing this new pragmatism, New Delhi appears to be taking cues from Moscow, which already recognized the Taliban regime in July 2024. Beijing offers another template. China became the first major power to exchange ambassadors with the Taliban in 2023 and has since promised large-scale investments in mining and infrastructure, particularly in rare earth minerals. Though Beijing, too, stops short of formal recognition, it has treated Afghanistan as a space for economic opportunity rather than ideological judgment.
For India, the lesson is clear: in a region where old alliances are fraying and new alignments are taking shape, ideology is no longer a strategy; meaningful and direct engagement is. The same holds true of the Taliban. Disregarding the Modi regime's aggressive imposition of Hindutva and its suppression of Muslims, the Taliban view New Delhi as a crucial partner against Pakistan. This has become especially important in the wake of India-Pakistan tensions since the Pehalgam attack in April and the war in May.
But what does India need to do to fill the space being left behind by Pakistan’s growing tensions with Kabul and co-opt the Taliban on a more long-term basis? To begin with, India must seek to achieve the same level of economic and commercial engagement with Afghanistan that it had before 2021.
Between 2001 and 2021, India emerged as one of Afghanistan’s largest regional development partners, committing nearly US$3 billion in reconstruction and aid projects that blended diplomacy with infrastructure building. New Delhi’s investments were not commercial ventures in the conventional sense but instruments of influence, which were designed to embed India in Afghanistan’s state-building process after the fall of the Taliban.
The results were visible across sectors: the Zaranj–Delaram Highway connecting Afghanistan to Iran’s Chabahar port; the Salma Dam (Afghan-India Friendship Dam) in Herat; the Afghan Parliament building in Kabul; and a 220-kilovolt transmission line bringing electricity to the capital.
Beyond hard infrastructure, India sponsored over a thousand scholarships annually for Afghan students, refurbished hospitals such as the Indira Gandhi Institute for Child Health, supplied hundreds of ambulances, and donated more than a million tonnes of wheat and other humanitarian aid. It also opened air-freight corridors and promoted the Chabahar route to bypass Pakistan. Collectively, these projects gave India both visibility and soft power, allowing it to position itself as a benign regional actor committed to Afghanistan’s stability and development. It can reposition itself along the same lines—not necessarily as a benign actor but as a major player.
One key step that India needs to take to revive the same levels of engagement is formal recognition of the Taliban regime. In the wake of Muttaqi’s visit, India announced it would upgrade its “Technical Mission” in Kabul to a formal embassy. This is a significant step in possibly the right direction. Several other countries, however, have embassies in Kabul. Therefore, if India wants to distinguish itself and push back Pakistan, it can use recognition of the regime in exchange for securing a deeper commercial and economic footprint.
This would be a major upgrade to bilateral ties insofar as the Taliban’s (former) best ally, Pakistan, is yet to recognize the regime in Kabul. In addition, recognition would allow Indian companies to legally operate in Afghanistan and reclaim geoeconomic space as much and as quickly as possible.
India’s re-engagement with the Taliban, therefore, is not a moral compromise but a strategic recalibration born of shifting fault lines in South Asia. As Pakistan’s Afghan gambit unravels and Russia and China entrench themselves in Kabul, New Delhi faces a choice: either cling to outdated postures of moral superiority or assert itself as a decisive player in Afghanistan’s new order.
Recognition of the Taliban would not merely symbolize pragmatism. It would mark India’s return to the regional chessboard as a power willing to shape outcomes, not just lament them. In a landscape where ideology is giving way to hard-nosed realism, the real question is no longer whether India can work with the Taliban, but whether it can afford not to.
The author doesn't know history, else he would not have failed to mention that the Afghans never recognized the Durand line border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the root cause of Af-Pak dispute. He also forgot to mention the Pak ISI's backing of ISKP terrorists as a lever to keep the Taliban in check, and also to promote terrorism in other countries.