India-Afghanistan Relations (PSIR Optional)

India and Afghanistan share no border, no river and no migration corridor, yet Afghanistan has occupied more of India’s strategic imagination than several neighbours that share all three. The reason is that Afghanistan is where the land approaches to the subcontinent begin and where Pakistan’s western frontier ends. For seventy years Indian policy rested on one assumption — that a friendly government would sit in Kabul — and in August 2021 it collapsed. What followed is the more interesting story: India rebuilt a working relationship with a government it has not recognised.

Why Afghanistan Matters to a Country That Does Not Border It

India’s Afghanistan interest is usually explained by sentiment and cultural affinity. The durable reasons are geographic and strategic, and they survive every change of regime in Kabul.

• Three variables have set the direction of Indian policy in every phase, and it is useful to name them before the narrative begins.
  • The state of India’s relations with Pakistan, since almost every Indian move in Kabul is read in Islamabad as a move against it.
  • The composition of the government in Kabul and the inclinations of whichever Afghan faction holds it, which India has never controlled.
  • The configuration of outside powers — Soviet, American, and now a crowded regional field — which has decided how much room India had to act at all.

The Khyber corridor and the memory of invasion

• Every land invasion of the subcontinent came through the Afghan passes — the Khyber above all, with the Bolan and Gomal as secondary routes.
  • The list runs from the Achaemenids and Alexander through Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Babur, Nader Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali.
  • India’s territorial reach no longer extends to those passes, but the strategic reflex does: whoever controls Kabul controls the approaches.
  • The point is not that an army will march through the Khyber again. It is that Afghanistan is the first zone of instability upstream of India, and disorder there has reliably travelled downstream.

Central Asia, energy and the transit Pakistan refuses

• Afghanistan is India’s only land bridge to Central Asia, and therefore to Central Asian hydrocarbons, uranium and markets.
  • Pakistan has consistently refused overland transit for Indian goods to Afghanistan and beyond — the single most consequential piece of economic geography in the relationship.
  • Afghanistan’s own 2010 transit agreement with Pakistan (APTTA) allowed Afghan goods to reach the Wagah border but not Indian goods to travel the other way, so the asymmetry was written into the arrangement.
  • This is why Chabahar exists. India’s investment in an Iranian port it does not need for its own trade is best understood as the purchase of a transit route that Pakistan will not sell.
  • Afghanistan’s SAARC accession in 2007 made no difference to this: the region’s premier organisation could not deliver transit for one member’s goods across another member’s territory, which is the clearest single illustration of what South Asian regionalism cannot do.
• India’s wider connectivity design places Afghanistan at a junction rather than at an end point.
  • Chabahar connects to the Iranian rail and road network and thence to Zaranj, and the Zaranj–Delaram highway connects Zaranj to the Afghan ring road.
  • The International North–South Transport Corridor and the Ashgabat Agreement, which India joined in 2018, are the outer frames.
  • The TAPI gas pipeline — Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India — has never moved beyond intermittent construction, and its Afghan and Pakistani sections are why.

Denying strategic depth and the second-front argument

• Pakistan’s “strategic depth” doctrine treats Afghanistan as rear area — territory to fall back into, and a source of manpower and sanctuary, in a conflict with India.
  • India’s mirror interest is straightforward: deny that depth, or at least raise its price.
  • The strongest version of the argument holds that an Indian presence in Afghanistan creates a second front, forcing Pakistan to hold forces on its western border that would otherwise face east.
  • The weaker but more defensible version is that India does not need a front at all — it needs only that Pakistan not be able to treat its west as secure. Events since 2021 have delivered that outcome without India lifting a finger.
• The second-front argument should be stated and then examined, because it is regularly overstated.
  • India has no military access to Afghanistan and no plausible route to it; the geography that blocks trade blocks troops.
  • Indian assistance has been overwhelmingly civilian, and the one exception — four helicopters in 2015 — proves the scale.
  • The realistic Indian instrument is presence, goodwill and reconstruction, not deployment.

Minerals, markets and the counter-terrorism stake

• Afghanistan’s mineral endowment is large, unproven and slow to monetise.
  • Survey estimates of copper, iron ore, rare earths and lithium have circulated for years; Mes Aynak, one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper deposits, was contracted to a Chinese consortium in 2008 and only broke ground in 2024.
  • India’s own investment interest ran through the Hajigak iron ore blocks, awarded in 2011 to a consortium led by Indian public-sector steel producers and never developed.
  • The honest assessment is that minerals are a long-horizon interest, not a driver of present policy.
• The counter-terrorism stake is immediate and concrete.
  • Afghan territory hosted training and transit infrastructure used by groups that operated against India through the 1990s, and the hijacking of IC-814 to Kandahar in December 1999 is the episode that fixed the point in Indian public memory.
  • India’s single non-negotiable ask of any Kabul government is therefore an assurance that Afghan soil will not be used against India — the formulation that recurs in every Indian statement since 2021.
  • The distinct question of cross-border terrorism as an instrument in the India–Pakistan relationship is treated with that subject; what belongs here is Afghan territory as the physical base.

Zero-sum for two, variable-sum for everyone else

The standard formulation holds that Afghanistan is a variable-sum game for the United States, Russia, China and Iran — each can gain without another losing — but a zero-sum game for India and Pakistan, because any Indian gain in Kabul is by definition a Pakistani loss. The formulation is a good starting point and a poor conclusion.

• What the formulation gets right: Pakistan has treated Indian presence in Afghanistan as inherently hostile, and has said so, which makes the perception self-fulfilling.
  • Attacks on Indian missions were directed at presence itself, not at any policy India was pursuing.
  • Pakistan’s objection to India’s reconstruction work was never that the roads were badly built.
• What it gets wrong: the events of 2021–2026 show a case in which India gained and Pakistan lost without India acting at all.
  • The variable that moved was Kabul’s relationship with Islamabad, not Delhi’s with either.
  • That makes Afghanistan a three-cornered relationship in which the third corner has agency, not a two-player board on which Afghans are the pieces.
  • The zero-sum reading also fails to explain why India and Pakistan converged, at the Moscow Format and elsewhere, in opposing the return of foreign military bases to Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is only a zero-sum theatre for India and Pakistan if Afghans are treated as the board rather than as a player; since 2021 they have been the player.

Phase One, 1947–1991: Pashtunistan Makes Kabul a Natural Partner

The Durand Line as the structural fact

• The single most important structural fact in the relationship is that Afghanistan has never accepted the Durand Line.
  • Drawn in 1893 by an agreement between the British Indian government and Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, it cut through Pashtun territory and left roughly half the Pashtun population on the Indian — later Pakistani — side.
  • Afghanistan was the only state to vote against Pakistan’s UN admission in 1947, on the ground that the boundary and the status of the Pashtun areas were unsettled.
  • Kabul’s support for a “Pashtunistan” — variously an independent Pashtun state, autonomy, or merger with Afghanistan — became the organising grievance of Afghan–Pakistan relations and remains so.
  • The legal question of the line as a boundary belongs with the wider treatment of South Asian border disputes; what matters here is its political consequence.
• That consequence was to hand India a partner without India having to earn one.
  • Afghanistan and Pakistan each had a quarrel with the other, which made Kabul and Delhi natural counterweights from 1947 onwards.
  • India never had to construct the relationship out of ideology or aid; geography and Pakistani insecurity supplied it.
  • Every subsequent phase of India–Afghanistan relations is a variation on this fact, including the current one.

The 1950 Treaty of Friendship and the Daoud years

• The Treaty of Friendship of 1950 formalised what geography had already arranged.
  • It affirmed perpetual peace and friendship, provided for diplomatic and consular relations and for freedom of movement of nationals, and was concluded as a five-year instrument renewable thereafter.
  • It carried no security guarantee and no basing arrangement — a friendship treaty in the plain sense, not an alliance.
• Mohammed Daoud Khan — Prime Minister from 1953 and President after the coup of 1973 — was the most explicit Afghan champion of the Pashtunistan cause.
  • His pursuit of it produced repeated closures of the Afghan–Pakistan border, in 1955 and again from 1961 to 1963, with severe consequences for landlocked Afghanistan.
  • Those closures drove Afghanistan toward Soviet economic and military assistance, which set the trajectory that ended in 1978–79.
  • India’s position throughout was one of friendly non-involvement — sympathy for Kabul’s position, no formal endorsement of the Pashtunistan claim.

1979 and the reputational cost of neutrality

• India did not condemn the Soviet intervention of December 1979, and the cost of that decision should be stated plainly rather than explained away.
  • India abstained on the UN General Assembly resolution of January 1980 calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops, and its representative at the Security Council effectively accepted the Soviet account that the intervention was at Afghan invitation.
  • The reasoning was structural: the 1971 Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the USSR, dependence on Soviet arms and Security Council cover, and the calculation that a Soviet-aligned Kabul was preferable to a Pakistani-aligned one.
  • The cost was reputational and lasting. India was seen by ordinary Afghans as having sided with an occupier, and by the West as a Soviet client at the precise moment it was seeking a wider international role.
  • India also maintained relations with the Najibullah government to its end in 1992, which meant that when the mujahideen took Kabul, India was on the losing side of the transition it had failed to anticipate.
• The lesson India drew was not that neutrality was wrong but that alignment with a single Afghan faction is a bet on its survival — a lesson it would relearn in 1996 and again in 2021.

Phase Two, 1991–2001: Exclusion and the Northern Alliance

Najibullah, Rabbani and the loss of position

• The Soviet withdrawal completed in February 1989, the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the fall of Najibullah in April 1992 removed the whole basis of Indian influence in a little over three years.
  • India’s position under the mujahideen government of Burhanuddin Rabbani (1992–96) briefly recovered, because Rabbani’s Jamiat-e-Islami was Tajik-led and resistant to Pakistani direction.
  • Najibullah’s murder by the Taliban in September 1996, after years sheltering in the UN compound in Kabul, was a public humiliation for India, which had been unable to extract him.
• The Taliban’s capture of Kabul in September 1996 produced the deepest exclusion India has ever experienced in Afghanistan.
  • India closed its embassy and had no presence in the country from 1996 to 2001.
  • Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognised the Islamic Emirate; India was among the states that continued to accredit the Rabbani government’s representatives.
  • The hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 to Kandahar in December 1999 and the release of three imprisoned militants in exchange for the passengers was the low point — an Indian government negotiating on Taliban-controlled soil from a position of no leverage whatever.

Farkhor, RAW and the covert investment

• India’s response was to invest in the one Afghan force still fighting: the Northern Alliance under Ahmad Shah Massoud, drawing on Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara constituencies.
  • India supplied high-altitude warfare equipment — reported at around US$10 million in value — along with helicopter spares, ordnance and technical assistance, coordinated through the Research and Analysis Wing.
  • Indian doctors ran a military hospital at Farkhor in Tajikistan, close to the Afghan border, which treated Alliance fighters and where Massoud was brought after his assassination on 9 September 2001.
  • Farkhor later became India’s first and only overseas military air facility, developed with Tajik and Russian consent.
  • India also worked from Ayni near Dushanbe and coordinated with Russia and Iran, both of which backed the Alliance — a convergence India used to deepen relations with Moscow and Tehran and to open its approach to Central Asia.
• This was the most militarily forward Indian policy of the whole period, and it is worth noting that it was conducted entirely without a presence inside the country.

Strategic depth and the transfer of militants to Kashmir

• The second consequence of the Taliban years was felt in Kashmir rather than in Kabul.
  • Pakistan’s security establishment used its position in Afghanistan to move fighters seasoned in the anti-Soviet and Afghan civil wars into the Kashmir theatre, changing the character of the insurgency from a largely local uprising to one with a transnational jihadist component.
  • Ayesha Jalal has described the purpose of this transfer as being as much diplomatic as military — to keep the dispute internationally visible.

“The tactic of pushing battle-hardened militants from Afghanistan across the LoC to wage a low-intensity war against Indian security forces in Kashmir was designed to keep the subcontinent’s most contentious dispute in the international gaze.”

— Ayesha Jalal

• The point for this relationship is the linkage itself: what Pakistan gained in Afghanistan it spent in Kashmir, which is why India could never treat Afghanistan as a distant theatre.
  • The operation of cross-border terrorism as an instrument of India–Pakistan relations is treated with that subject; what belongs here is that Afghan territory made it possible.

Dixit’s formulation

• J.N. Dixit, Foreign Secretary and later National Security Adviser, gave the period its clearest Indian statement of purpose, and it is notable for framing the problem regionally rather than bilaterally.

“India, in cooperation with all like-minded countries, should resist the coercive propagation of any kind of religious, social, or ethnic extremism which can profoundly de-stabilise Afghanistan’s Asian neighbours.”

— J.N. Dixit

• Two things in the formulation matter.
  • It defines the threat as coercive extremism rather than as any particular group, which allowed India to oppose the Taliban without framing the opposition in religious terms.
  • Dixit tied an early settlement in Afghanistan directly to the energy and economic opportunities of the Eurasian region — the connectivity argument two decades before Chabahar was operational.

Phase Three, 2001–2014: Reconstruction as Strategy

The American intervention of November 2001 handed India, at no cost to itself, the outcome it had been unable to produce: the removal of the Taliban and the installation in Kabul of a government drawn substantially from the constituency India had backed. What India did with that opening defines the phase.

Bonn, Karzai and the first hundred million

• The Bonn Conference of December 2001 established an interim administration under Hamid Karzai, staffed heavily by Northern Alliance figures with whom India already had relationships.
  • India pledged US$100 million in reconstruction assistance immediately, a figure that would grow more than thirtyfold.
  • Indian assistance eventually exceeded US$3 billion in commitments, making India the largest regional donor to Afghanistan and the fifth-largest bilateral donor overall.
  • Crucially, India contributed no combat troops — a deliberate choice that preserved its standing with Afghans, avoided casualties in a war it had not started, and denied Pakistan the argument that India was an occupying presence.
• India’s method was visible public goods, delivered through Afghan institutions rather than through conditionality.
  • Assistance was routed across all thirty-four provinces, in four streams: large infrastructure, capacity-building and training, small development projects, and humanitarian aid.
  • The Small Development Projects programme built hundreds of schools, clinics, wells and irrigation works with local implementation and short timelines, and is the least-known and most effective element of the portfolio.
  • S. Jaishankar announced over 100 high-impact community development projects worth about US$80 million at the Geneva conference on Afghanistan in November 2020, which was the last major Indian commitment before the collapse.
• Indian effort after 2001 concentrated on three objectives, and they are worth separating because they were pursued by different instruments.
  • Reconstruction and economic growth, delivered through infrastructure and small projects.
  • Building the link to Central Asia, delivered through connectivity and the Iran route.
  • Reducing Pakistan’s influence, which India pursued indirectly by making itself useful to Afghans rather than by contesting Pakistan directly.

The physical legacy

Project	What it is	Why it counted
Zaranj–Delaram highway	218 km road from the Iranian border to the Kandahar–Herat ring road, built by the Border Roads Organisation, completed 2009	The land leg of the Chabahar route — it exists to bypass Pakistan; six Indians and 129 Afghans died building it, at a cost of about US$152 million
Afghan–India Friendship Dam (Salma Dam)	Rehabilitated dam on the Hari Rud in Herat, 42 MW and irrigation for some 75,000 hectares; inaugurated June 2016	India’s largest single project; also its most exposed — the Herat consulate attack of 2014 was aimed at it
Afghan Parliament building	Built at a cost of about US$90 million, inaugurated December 2015; a block named for Atal Bihari Vajpayee	The symbolic centre of India’s democracy-building claim
Pul-e-Khumri–Kabul transmission line	220 kV double-circuit line carrying Uzbek power to Kabul, with the Chimtala substation	Gave Kabul reliable electricity for the first time — the most-used Indian gift in the country
Salma–Herat transmission	110 kV lines from the dam to Herat city	Converted the dam from a structure into a service
Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health	Rebuilt paediatric hospital in Kabul	The most recognised Indian name in Afghan daily life
Habibia High School, Kandahar cricket stadium, Kandahar agricultural university	Reconstruction and new build	Soft power at street level, not at ministry level

Trade, the Preferential Trade Agreement and the Strategic Partnership

• The Preferential Trade Agreement of March 2003, signed during Karzai’s visit, gave Afghan exports substantial access to the Indian market.
  • It granted 100 per cent duty concessions on 38 Afghan product lines, principally dried fruit, nuts and fresh fruit, with reciprocal concessions on a smaller Indian list.
  • Its practical value was limited by the thing no agreement could fix: goods still could not cross Pakistan, so Afghan exporters faced air freight costs or the long Iranian route.
• Manmohan Singh’s visit of August 2005 produced two memoranda and a cooperation agreement, and India supported Afghanistan’s SAARC membership, which took effect in 2007.
• The Strategic Partnership Agreement of October 2011, signed during Karzai’s Delhi visit, was the first such agreement Afghanistan concluded with any country.
  • It created a Partnership Council at foreign-minister level and four working structures covering political and security cooperation, trade and economic cooperation, capacity-building and education, and social, cultural and civil-society links.
  • It committed India to training and equipping Afghan security forces, which is the provision that mattered, and the one India was slowest to use.
  • Its timing was deliberate: it was signed as the American drawdown was being announced, and was India’s attempt to lock in a relationship before the security umbrella folded.
• Capacity-building was the quietest and most durable instrument.
  • India offered around 1,000 scholarships a year through the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and technical training slots under the ITEC programme; by 2023 roughly 14,000 Afghan students were enrolled in Indian universities.
  • Afghan officers, civil servants, diplomats and police were trained in India in large numbers, producing a generation of Afghan officials educated in India — an asset that survived 2021 in ways buildings did not.

Soft power at hard cost

• India’s civilian posture did not protect it: Indian missions were attacked repeatedly and specifically.
  • Kabul embassy bombing, 7 July 2008 — a suicide vehicle attack killing around 58 people, including the Defence Attaché Brigadier R.D. Mehta and the press counsellor V. Venkateswara Rao.
    • American and Afghan investigations attributed the operation to the Haqqani network with ISI involvement; it is the moment the “soft power is safe” assumption died.
  • Kabul embassy bombing, 8 October 2009 — a second attack killing about 17.
  • Herat consulate assault, 23 May 2014, days before Modi’s swearing-in and read at the time as a message about the incoming government; the consulate was defended successfully.
  • Mazar-e-Sharif consulate attack, January 2016, and the killing of Indian engineers and BRO personnel on the Zaranj–Delaram route through the 2000s.
• The analytical point is that development assistance in a contested theatre is not a low-risk alternative to a security presence — it is a security commitment with a civilian face.
  • India’s response was to accept the casualties and continue, because withdrawal would have conceded the argument Pakistan was making about Indian presence.
  • It also drove the slow shift from purely civilian assistance toward security assistance, which is what the next phase is about.

Phase Four, 2014–2021: From Non-Lethal to Lethal, and Back to the Sidelines

The shift in assistance

• India had long confined itself to non-lethal assistance — vehicles, training, uniforms, communications — on the reasoning that arming Afghan forces would trigger a Pakistani reaction disproportionate to the benefit.
  • Abdullah Abdullah’s visit of March 2015 — in which he said that “India ought to look at Afghanistan as a permanent friend” — came at the low point of Indian confidence, when Ashraf Ghani’s government was experimenting with an opening to Rawalpindi.
  • That experiment failed within a year, and India’s position recovered without India doing anything.
• The transfer of four Mi-25 attack helicopters, announced December 2015, was the break with the non-lethal rule.
  • It was small in scale and large in signal: India was now willing to supply weapons systems to the Afghan state.
  • Later transfers included refurbished Mi-24s sourced through Belarus and 285 military vehicles, and India serviced and repaired Afghan air force aircraft.
  • Modi inaugurated the Afghan Parliament building in December 2015 on the same visit, pairing the two symbols deliberately.
• The December 2015 joint statement carried the formulation India wanted on record: that groups and individuals using violence and terror against the Afghan government and people “cannot be allowed to exercise control or wield influence over any part of Afghanistan’s territory in any manner whatsoever”.

Herat, the Friendship Dam and the Amir Amanullah Khan Award

• Modi visited Herat on 4 June 2016 — his second Afghan visit within six months — and jointly inaugurated the Afghan–India Friendship Dam with Ghani.
  • His formulation there is the most-quoted Indian statement on the relationship: “India will not forget you or turn away… Your friendship is our honour; your dreams are our duty.“
  • Afghanistan conferred on him the Amir Amanullah Khan Award, its highest civilian honour, named for the king who won Afghan independence from British control in 1919 — a choice of name that carried its own message about sovereignty.
• The rhetorical commitment was real, and it made the events of 2021 harder for India to absorb than a colder policy would have been.

Air freight corridors and the Chabahar route

• Direct air freight corridors were launched in June 2017, initially Kabul–Delhi and Kandahar–Delhi, later extended to Mumbai, Amritsar and Herat.
  • They existed for exactly one reason: to move Afghan perishables to Indian markets without crossing Pakistan, and they worked, carrying dried fruit, saffron, medicinal plants and asafoetida.
  • Their limitation is cost. Air freight cannot carry the bulk trade an economy needs, so the corridors were a demonstration of will rather than a solution.
• Chabahar was the structural answer.
  • The trilateral transit agreement of May 2016 between India, Iran and Afghanistan committed the three to develop the port and the corridor to Afghanistan and Central Asia.
  • India took over operations at the Shahid Beheshti terminal in December 2018, and in May 2024 India Ports Global signed a ten-year operating contract — about US$120 million in equipment plus a US$250 million credit line.
  • The first shipment through the corridor was wheat to Afghanistan in 2017, and wheat has remained its most politically significant cargo.

Doha: how India was written out

• The US–Taliban agreement signed at Doha on 29 February 2020 by Zalmay Khalilzad and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was concluded without Indian participation and without the Afghan government as a party.
  • Its core bargain was withdrawal of US and NATO forces within fourteen months against a Taliban commitment not to allow Afghan soil to be used to threaten the United States and its allies.
  • It provided for prisoner releases and for a ceasefire to be an item on the agenda of intra-Afghan talks rather than a precondition — a sequencing that gave the Taliban everything it needed and the Afghan government nothing it could hold.
  • India had no seat. Its only card had been the elected government’s legitimacy, and Washington had discounted that card in the act of signing.
  • Russia’s own Moscow consultations of that period had at one point convened Washington, Beijing and Islamabad without inviting India at all — the plainest statement of where India stood.
  • The republic kept trying to keep India in: Foreign Minister Hanif Atmar visited Delhi in March 2021, following visits by Abdullah Abdullah, Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Mohammad Noor.
• India’s discomfort was strategic rather than procedural.
  • The agreement legitimised the Taliban as a negotiating party and thereby vindicated Pakistan’s twenty-year wager.
  • India’s belated adjustments — attendance at the Doha intra-Afghan talks opening in September 2020, participation in the Moscow Format, and reported contacts with Taliban figures including Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai — were the beginning of a policy correction, not its completion.
  • The Delhi Regional Security Dialogue of November 2021, which brought together the national security advisers of Russia, Iran and the five Central Asian states, was India’s attempt to build a regional platform of its own; Pakistan and China declined to attend.
• The wider arc of American policy is a story about the limits of American strategic patience.
  • Bush’s global war on terrorism, Obama’s surge and exit, Trump’s South Asia policy and the Khalilzad track, and Biden’s completion of the withdrawal.
  • For India it produced one durable conclusion: its Afghanistan position had been underwritten by American power it did not control.

15 August 2021

• Kabul fell on 15 August 2021, faster than any assessment had predicted, and the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces that India had helped train dissolved without a general engagement.
  • India lost, in a fortnight, twenty years of investment, its entire diplomatic presence and every partner it had cultivated.
  • Operation Devi Shakti evacuated Indian nationals, embassy staff and a number of Afghan nationals — Sikh and Hindu minority members among them — using Indian Air Force C-17s staged through Dushanbe and Doha.
  • India closed its embassy in Kabul and its four consulates at Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Kandahar and Jalalabad.
  • A new e-Emergency X-Misc visa category was created for Afghan nationals, though its administration has been criticised as restrictive.
• The deeper loss was conceptual. India’s Afghanistan policy had been built on the premise of a friendly government in Kabul; there was now no government in Kabul that any part of the Indian system had a relationship with.

Phase Five, 2021–2026: Engagement Without Recognition

This is the phase in which India’s Afghanistan policy was rebuilt on a new premise. The old policy required a friendly government in Kabul. The new one requires only that the government in Kabul find India useful — and Pakistan has spent five years making India useful.

The technical team and the incremental upgrade

• India’s re-entry was deliberately incremental, each step small enough to be reversed and large enough to establish a precedent.
  • 31 August 2021: India’s ambassador to Qatar, Deepak Mittal, met Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai in Doha — the first acknowledged official contact, at India’s request, focused on the safety of Indian nationals and the assurance on Afghan soil.
  • June 2022: a delegation led by Joint Secretary J.P. Singh visited Kabul; a “technical team” was stationed at the embassy to oversee humanitarian delivery. The label was chosen precisely because it implied no diplomatic status.
  • January 2024 onward: working-level meetings on trade, Chabahar and humanitarian assistance became routine.
  • May 2025: S. Jaishankar spoke by telephone with Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi — the first ministerial-level contact since 1999. The call followed the Taliban’s condemnation of the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025, which India read as a deliberate signal.
  • October 2025: Muttaqi visited India.
• Each step was calibrated to be deniable as recognition and undeniable as engagement, which is the whole technique.

The Muttaqi visit and the embassy

• Amir Khan Muttaqi’s visit of 9–16 October 2025 was the highest-level Taliban engagement with any non-recognising state.
  • He met Jaishankar in Delhi; the two sides recorded commitments on sovereignty and territorial integrity, regional stability and counter-terrorism, and on reviving trade, investment and cultural links, with cooperation flagged in hydropower and air freight.
  • India announced it would upgrade the technical mission in Kabul to an embassy, formalised on 21 October 2025, and would receive Taliban-appointed diplomats in New Delhi.
  • The visit was framed carefully. Jaishankar spoke of advancing ties; the language of recognition was avoided in every Indian document.
  • Muttaqi’s separate visit to Darul Uloom Deoband was the symbolic event of the trip, and Pakistan’s simultaneous air strikes on Kabul were the other.
• Mufti Noor Ahmad Noor took charge of the Afghan embassy in New Delhi on 10 January 2026 as Chargé d’Affaires — the first Taliban-appointed diplomat to head the mission.
  • India accepted a chargé d’affaires and not an ambassador, which is exactly the distinction that keeps recognition unextended.
  • The Afghan mission in Delhi had been in limbo since the republic’s diplomats ran out of a state to represent; the transfer settled a four-year anomaly.

Humanitarian assistance as the working instrument

• Humanitarian delivery was the instrument that made everything else possible, because it required no political relationship to justify.

Assistance	Quantity	Route
Wheat	50,000 MT pledged from 2021, of which about 47,500 MT delivered through the World Food Programme, feeding close to five million Afghans; a further 20,000 MT announced March 2023	Overland through Pakistan by special dispensation in 2022, then via Chabahar
Medicines	13 tonnes of essential and life-saving medicines, later consignments of medicines and vaccines	Air and Chabahar
COVID-19 vaccines	500,000 doses of Covaxin, plus a million doses for Afghan refugees in Iran	Air
Earthquake relief	27 tonnes of relief after the June 2022 Paktika earthquake; further relief after the August 2025 Kunar earthquake	Air
Other	Winter clothing, sanitary and disaster-relief material, polio and TB programmes, artificial limb fitment camps	Various

• The wheat consignments of 2022 are the most instructive episode in the phase.
  • Pakistan agreed, after months of negotiation, to permit Indian wheat to transit to Afghanistan on Afghan trucks — a one-off humanitarian exception that proved the rule about transit.
  • India’s decision to move subsequent consignments through Chabahar was the practical conclusion drawn from that experience.
• India also resumed development assistance rather than only relief: a ₹200 crore development allocation from 2022–23, and the Union Budget for 2026–27 raised the Afghanistan allocation to ₹150 crore, an increase of ₹50 crore at a time when the allocation for Bangladesh was halved. Budget lines are a form of signalling.

What recognition would and would not change

India’s refusal to recognise the Islamic Emirate is frequently described as a contradiction, given that it now runs an embassy in Kabul and receives Taliban diplomats in Delhi. It is better understood as a deliberate separation of function from status, and the separation has costs on both sides of the ledger.

Question	With recognition	Without recognition (India’s present position)
Embassy and diplomats	Full ambassadorial exchange	Already achieved — embassy in Kabul, chargé d’affaires in Delhi
Humanitarian and development delivery	Unchanged	Already operating, routed through UN agencies and directly
Trade and customs cooperation	Unchanged in substance	Already operating — joint working group, customs cooperation, commercial attachés
Banking, credit and insurance	Would ease sharply	The binding constraint — Afghan banks remain outside the international system, so trade runs on cash, barter and third-country intermediaries
Afghan central bank assets and IMF/World Bank access	Would help unlock	Not in India’s gift — held by the United States and the multilateral institutions
UN seat and international standing	Would confer legitimacy	India cannot deliver this alone and gains nothing by trying
Domestic and international cost to India	Substantial — India would be endorsing a government that bars girls from secondary and higher education	Avoided
Leverage over Taliban conduct	Spent	Retained — recognition is India’s one remaining card and it is worth more unplayed

• The conclusion the table supports is that recognition is a certificate, not a capability.
  • Almost everything India wants from Afghanistan it is already getting; almost everything it cannot get, recognition would not deliver.
  • Russia is the only state to have recognised the Islamic Emirate, on 3 July 2025, and the gains it has drawn from doing so have been modest.
  • China accredited a Taliban-appointed ambassador in January 2024, the UAE in August 2024 and Uzbekistan in October 2024, all without formal recognition — a pattern that shows the practice of diplomacy has moved well ahead of its formal categories.
• India’s stated conditions for any further move remain constant: an inclusive government, protection of women and minorities, and an assurance that Afghan territory will not be used against India.

Recognition is India’s last unplayed card in Afghanistan, and its value lies in not having been played.

The state of the relationship in 2026

• The relationship in 2026 is thicker in substance than at any point since 2021 and still unrecognised in form.
  • Bilateral trade in 2025–26 was about US$908 million — Indian exports US$254 million, imports US$654 million — against a pre-2021 level of roughly US$1.8 billion, which is now the stated target.
  • The fourth Joint Committee Meeting was held in New Delhi in July 2026, and the Joint Working Group on Trade, Commerce and Investment met virtually on 1 September 2026, covering customs cooperation, visa facilitation for Afghan traders, banking, pharmaceutical and agricultural trade, energy, tariff concessions and port access.
  • Both sides agreed to post commercial attachés, and the Kabul–Delhi and Kabul–Amritsar air freight corridors were reactivated.
  • Afghan requests on the table include faster business visas, regular shipping from Chabahar, a dry port in Nimruz, and streamlined clearance at Nhava Sheva.
  • India participated in the seventh Moscow Format consultations — the first at which the Afghan delegation sat as a full participant — and joined the regional consensus opposing the re-establishment of foreign military bases in Afghanistan.
• The trade figures deserve a note of proportion.
  • US$908 million is a rounding error in India’s external trade and a significant share of Afghanistan’s.
  • That asymmetry is India’s leverage and also its limit: India can matter enormously to Kabul at very little cost to itself, which is a comfortable position but not a commanding one.

The Pakistan–Afghanistan Rupture and the Space It Opened

Pakistan spent three decades cultivating the Taliban on the theory that a Pashtun Islamist government in Kabul would be pliant, would settle the Durand Line question, and would give Pakistan depth against India. It got the government. It got none of the rest.

The TTP and the collapse of the sanctuary bargain

• The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan is the hinge of the rupture. It is ideologically close to the Afghan Taliban, fought alongside it, and was strengthened directly by its victory.
  • The Afghan Taliban’s return in 2021 released TTP prisoners, restored its sanctuaries and transformed its morale, and the ceasefire Pakistan negotiated in 2022 collapsed within months.
  • Kabul has refused to act against the TTP, arguing variously that it is Pakistan’s internal problem, that Afghan territory is not being used, and that the Taliban cannot fight men it fought beside.
  • Pakistan’s counter-demand — that Kabul suppress the TTP — asks the Afghan Taliban to do to fellow Pashtun Islamists exactly what it refused to do to al-Qaeda in 2001.
• The numbers are the argument.
  • The Global Terrorism Index of March 2026 ranked Pakistan first in the world for the first time, with 1,139 terrorism-related deaths in 2025, a 6 per cent increase.
  • The TTP alone conducted 595 attacks in 2025, up 24 per cent from 481 the previous year, and was responsible for 637 deaths — 56 per cent of Pakistan’s total.
  • Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan accounted for over 74 per cent of attacks, which locates the crisis precisely on the Afghan frontier.
  • The index’s own assessment is that the Afghan Taliban’s return gave the TTP the means and motivation to expand its reach — a finding that states the failure of strategic depth in the language of data.

From border closures to open war

• The escalation from friction to armed conflict runs across eighteen months and is best held as a sequence.
  • 9 October 2025 — explosions in Kabul, attributed by the Taliban to Pakistani strikes, during Muttaqi’s visit to India.
  • 11–15 October 2025 — the heaviest border fighting since 2021. Afghan claims of 58 Pakistani soldiers killed against Pakistan’s acknowledgement of 23; Pakistan claimed dozens of militants killed.
  • 12 October 2025 — Pakistan closed all border crossings, including Torkham and Chaman, stranding thousands of trucks.
  • 19 October 2025 — a Qatari-brokered ceasefire at Doha.
  • 6–8 November 2025 — a third round of talks at Istanbul, mediated by Turkey and Qatar, collapsed without agreement on the core issue of the TTP.
  • Early February 2026 — a suicide attack on a Shia mosque in Islamabad; large-scale displacement in the Tirah valley ahead of Pakistani operations.
  • 22 February 2026 — Pakistani air strikes on claimed TTP camps inside Afghanistan.
  • 26 February 2026 — Taliban offensive operations against Pakistani border positions along the Durand Line.
  • 27 February 2026 — Pakistan’s Defence Minister declared the country in “open war” with Afghanistan; strikes on Kabul, Kandahar and Paktia. The UN Secretary-General called for an immediate ceasefire.
• Two features of the sequence matter more than the casualty counts.
  • Mediation has repeatedly failed at the same point. Qatar and Turkey can produce ceasefires; neither can produce a TTP settlement, because Kabul will not deliver one.
  • Pakistan has struck the Afghan capital. A state that spent thirty years seeking depth in Afghanistan is now bombing it — the clearest possible measure of the doctrine’s failure.

Refugees and trade as instruments of coercion

• Pakistan has used the two levers a host and transit state possesses, and both have hardened Afghan opinion rather than softened it.
  • The Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan announced on 3 October 2023 set a departure deadline of 31 October 2023 and began mass deportations; a renewed phase from March 2025 extended it to Afghan Citizen Card holders.
  • Around 1.7 million Afghans were returned between September 2023 and late 2025, into a country with no capacity to absorb them, and Iran’s parallel expulsions compounded the pressure.
  • The treatment of refugee flows as a regional security phenomenon belongs with the wider treatment of cross-border migration; the point here is its use as an instrument of state pressure.
• The border closures are economically devastating and politically counterproductive.
  • Afghanistan is landlocked and had historically routed the bulk of its trade through Karachi via Torkham and Chaman; closure severs the economy from the sea.
  • Perishable exports rot at the crossings, transit costs rise, and Afghan traders have concluded that Pakistani routes carry political risk that Iranian routes do not.
  • Deputy Prime Minister Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar has directed Afghan traders to reduce business with Pakistan, citing closures and the political misuse of trade routes — an instruction that converts a tactical grievance into a structural reorientation.
  • Every closure is an advertisement for Chabahar, which is why Pakistan’s coercion has been India’s most effective marketing.

The Durand Line as the unresolved core

• Beneath the TTP dispute sits a boundary Afghanistan has never accepted and Pakistan cannot renegotiate.
  • No Afghan government — monarchy, republic, communist, mujahideen, Taliban — has recognised the line, and the current one has been explicit in rejecting it and in objecting to Pakistani fencing along it.
  • The Taliban is a Pashtun-dominated movement, which makes acceptance of a line dividing Pashtuns costlier for it than it was for its predecessors, not cheaper.
  • Pakistan’s assumption that ideological affinity would override ethno-territorial nationalism was the central analytical error of the strategic-depth doctrine.
  • The Durand Line as a question of boundary law belongs with the treatment of South Asian border disputes; what belongs here is that it is the reason no TTP settlement is available.

Strategic depth has produced its opposite

• The doctrine promised Pakistan a secure rear. It has delivered the reverse on every count.
  • The rear is now the front. Pakistan’s most intense security problem is on its western border, not its eastern one.
  • The proxy has become a peer. Kabul negotiates as an equal, refuses instructions, and shelters the group attacking Pakistani forces.
  • Pakistan is fighting on two fronts — the position it built the doctrine to avoid — and did so within weeks of the Pahalgam attack and Operation Sindoor in May 2025.
  • The India card has been played and lost. Pakistan’s charge that the Taliban is an Indian proxy is a measure of how completely its own influence has evaporated.
• India’s gain since 2021 has been a by-product of Pakistani failure rather than of Indian action — the most important and least comfortable thing to say about it.

Pakistan sought strategic depth in Afghanistan and obtained a second front on its own western border; the space India now occupies in Kabul was vacated, not conquered.

India’s Strategic Options

The rupture on Pakistan’s western border presents India with an opening, and the temptation is to treat an opening as an invitation. The better framing is that India has a set of instruments of very unequal quality, and that its principal advantage is that it can afford to be patient while both its rivals cannot.

Connectivity: Chabahar and its sanctions problem

• Deepening trade and transit through Chabahar is the highest-value option and the one presently in most trouble.
  • The United States revoked the Chabahar exemption on 16 September 2025, effective from the end of that month, ending the carve-out granted in 2018 for Afghan reconstruction.
  • India secured a six-month waiver effective 29 October 2025, which expired on 26 April 2026 without renewal.
  • India made its final US$120 million equipment payment in February 2026 and then omitted Chabahar from the Union Budget for the first time in nearly a decade — a signal of holding rather than exit.
  • The Ministry of External Affairs’ position is that the matter is under discussion with both Tehran and Washington. India has not withdrawn and is unlikely to: the port’s value is strategic, and its cost is small relative to what abandoning it would concede.
• The options within the constraint are narrower than the rhetoric suggests.
  • Route Afghan-bound cargo through Chabahar wherever banking permits, accepting slower throughput and higher friction.
  • Press for a renewed exemption on explicitly humanitarian and Afghan-development grounds, which is the argument that carried in 2018 and is stronger now that Afghanistan’s alternative route is closed.
  • Keep the Nimruz dry port and Zaranj–Delaram spur functioning, since the land leg is the part India actually built.
  • Recognise that the constraint is American policy toward Iran, not Iranian or Afghan willingness — which means the correct Indian instrument is diplomacy in Washington, not investment in Chabahar.

Development and humanitarian assistance

• This is the instrument India is best at, and the one with the highest return per rupee.
  • India retains name recognition across Afghan society that no other external actor possesses: the Parliament, the dam, the children’s hospital, the Kabul power supply and the scholarships are used daily by people who did not choose the government.
  • Assistance is politically cheap — it requires no recognition, offends no domestic constituency, and is welcomed by the Taliban precisely because it substitutes for the aid the West withdrew.
  • The obvious extensions are maintenance and completion of existing projects, restoration of the scholarship and training pipeline, health and telemedicine, agricultural value chains and cold storage, and hydropower, which the October 2025 joint outcomes named specifically.
• The limitation is that assistance buys goodwill, not compliance. No amount of wheat will change Taliban policy on girls’ education, and India should not pretend otherwise to itself.

Recognition in step, not alone

• India should move toward recognition with others, not ahead of them, and there is no reason to move first.
  • Recognition is worth most when it is traded for something specific, and its price falls the moment several states extend it.
  • Moving in concert with Russia, China, the Central Asian states and the Gulf distributes the reputational cost and avoids India carrying it alone.
  • Moving first would spend India’s only remaining card for a marginal gain over an arrangement that is already delivering.
• The practical sequence is the one India is already following: de facto engagement now, de jure status when the environment makes it cheap.

Multilateral cover

• Acting through regional formats rather than bilaterally is India’s answer to its geographic disadvantage.
  • The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation gives India a table shared with Russia, China, Iran and the Central Asian states, and the standing regional counter-terrorism structure gives it a vocabulary for the sanctuary question.
  • The Connect Central Asia policy and the India–Central Asia Dialogue give the Afghan corridor a purpose beyond Afghanistan itself, which is what makes the investment defensible when Kabul is unstable.
  • The Moscow Format is the forum in which India now sits with a Taliban delegation without conferring status, which is exactly the ambiguity India needs.
  • The Regional Cooperation Initiative convened from Kabul, in which India has participated alongside nine other states, is Afghan-originated and therefore carries a legitimacy the great-power formats do not.
  • The Delhi Regional Security Dialogue is India’s own instrument and should be revived; its weakness is that Pakistan and China stay away.
  • SAARC offers nothing here — it has not met at summit level since 2014, and it could not deliver Afghan transit even when it was functioning.
• The value of these platforms is not that they solve anything. It is that they normalise Indian presence in Afghan questions without requiring a physical position India cannot obtain.

The security guarantee

• India’s single non-negotiable interest is the assurance that Afghan soil will not be used against it, and it should be pursued as an operational arrangement rather than a declaration.
  • The Taliban has given the assurance verbally and has repeated it; the condemnation of the Pahalgam attack in April 2025 was the first time it did so in a case where Pakistan was the accused party.
  • What is missing is verification — intelligence exchange, a channel for specific cases, and a mechanism for raising named individuals and groups.
  • India’s realistic ask concerns anti-India groups operating from Afghan territory and the residual Islamic State–Khorasan Province presence, which threatens the Taliban as well and is therefore the item on which interests genuinely converge.
  • The counter-terrorism language of the October 2025 outcomes is the opening for this; converting language into machinery is the work.

Restraint: what India should not do

• The most important option is the one India should decline — becoming a party to the Pakistan–Afghanistan conflict.
  • India gains nothing from being seen to arm or encourage Kabul against Islamabad, and would hand Pakistan the narrative it has been asserting without evidence.
  • Being cast as a belligerent would convert an Afghan grievance against Pakistan into an Afghan calculation about India, which is a much weaker position.
  • The correct posture is what India has actually adopted: express concern at strikes on Afghan territory, affirm Afghan sovereignty, and let Pakistan’s conduct do the work.
• India should also avoid over-investing in a single Afghan faction, which is the error of 1979, 1996 and 2021 in three different forms.

The risks, honestly stated

• The Taliban’s record on women and girls is a real cost, not a presentational one.
  • Secondary and higher education for girls remains barred; employment, movement and public presence are restricted; the government is not inclusive by any definition India has used.
  • India’s own stated position on inclusive government and the rights of women and minorities sits uncomfortably beside an embassy upgrade, and pretending the tension does not exist is worse than acknowledging it.
  • The defensible answer is that engagement is the only posture from which India can raise these questions, and that absence in 2021–22 achieved nothing for Afghan women.
• Reversal is possible and should be planned for.
  • The Taliban is not monolithic; a Kandahar–Kabul divergence between the clerical leadership and the pragmatists who run foreign policy could remove India’s interlocutors overnight.
  • A Pakistan–Afghanistan settlement, however unlikely, would reduce Kabul’s need for India immediately.
  • Islamic State–Khorasan Province could destabilise the arrangement from outside it, and Indian personnel and projects are plausible targets.
• The largest analytical risk is over-reading a tactical convergence as a strategic alignment.
  • India and the Taliban converge on one variable — distance from Pakistan. They diverge on ideology, on the treatment of women, on the status of minorities and on the international order.
  • The Taliban is engaging India for the same reason it engages Russia, China, Iran and the Gulf: to reduce dependence on any one patron, which is the lesson it drew from Pakistan.
  • India is therefore one of several hedges, not a chosen partner, and a policy built on the opposite assumption would be repeating the mistake Pakistan made.

India’s advantage in Afghanistan is not that Kabul has chosen it but that Kabul is choosing not to depend on anyone — and India is the cheapest way to diversify.

The Other Stakeholders

Afghanistan’s external relationships are best read as five distinct calculations, only one of which is primarily about India.

Actor	Core interest	Position in 2026	What it means for India
United States	Counter-terrorism at minimum cost; containing China and Russia; denying Iran a free hand; minerals and the narcotics economy, which shrank under the first Taliban government and expanded under the occupation	Withdrew August 2021; relies on an over-the-horizon posture; the state-building project has been abandoned, not paused; periodic interest in Bagram meets regional objection	The security umbrella India relied on is gone; American sanctions policy toward Iran is now India’s principal Chabahar constraint
Russia	Central Asia as its soft underbelly; preventing militancy reaching the Caucasus and the Ferghana; keeping its transit monopoly on Central Asian energy	First and only state to recognise the Islamic Emirate, 3 July 2025; hosts the Moscow Format	A convergent partner — Russia’s recognition creates the precedent India can follow without leading
China	Xinjiang and the Uyghur question — that Afghanistan not host the ETIM/TIP; minerals, above all Mes Aynak copper; extending BRI and CPEC westward	Accredited a Taliban-appointed ambassador in January 2024, ahead of everyone; heavy on mining commitments, light on delivery	China’s regional strategy is treated with that subject; the specific Afghan point is that India competes on delivery and goodwill, not on capital
Iran	Shia–Sunni management and the Hazara community; influence in Herat; the Helmand river; a very large refugee burden	Accepted a Taliban chargé d’affaires from February 2023; the 1973 Helmand Treaty allocated Iran 22 cumecs (about 820 million m³ a year) and Tehran reports receiving a fraction of it; border clashes in May 2023	India’s indispensable partner for access — Chabahar is Iranian, and India’s Afghan policy runs through Iranian territory and American sanctions on it
Pakistan	Strategic depth; a Kabul that is not pro-India; settlement or suppression of the Durand Line and Pashtun question; suppression of the TTP	Has moved from patron to belligerent; “open war” declared 27 February 2026; borders closed; expulsions continuing	Pakistan’s failure is the entire source of India’s current opening, which is why India’s best policy is to do nothing that reverses it

• Two cross-cutting observations complete the picture.
  • No external actor has achieved what it wanted. The United States left, Pakistan lost its proxy, China’s mines are barely producing, Iran’s water dispute is worse, and Russia’s recognition has bought little. Afghanistan remains, as it has been called, a graveyard of empires and of expectations.
  • The Taliban’s own strategy is diversification, and it has been effective. Delhi, Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Ankara are each given enough to stay engaged and none enough to acquire control.

How Scholars Read India’s Afghanistan Policy

• Avinash Paliwal offers the most complete account, and its central move is to locate the explanation inside India rather than outside it.
  • He argues that the foreign-policy behaviour of relatively weak states is not determined by systemic and regional pressures alone but shaped decisively by domestic contestation.
  • He divides the Indian establishment into “partisans” — who favoured containing Pakistan-aligned Afghan factions and treating them as adversaries to be suppressed — and “conciliators”, who favoured keeping channels open to all Afghan actors, including those India publicly opposed.
  • The value of the framework is predictive: India’s policy has oscillated between the two, and the post-2021 engagement is the clearest conciliator victory in the record.
  • His second claim matters as much: Afghan politics realigns in response to Indian and Pakistani policy, so Afghanistan is an actor rather than an arena — which is precisely what 2021–2026 demonstrated.
• Harsh V. Pant frames the Indian interest in developmental rather than military terms.
  • His formulation is that India has a fundamental interest in a stable and economically integrated Afghanistan, which is why the Preferential Trade Agreement and the connectivity investments matter more than any security arrangement India could realistically build.
  • On the post-2021 question he argues for engagement without illusion — maintaining presence and humanitarian leverage while continuing to hold the Taliban to account on women and minorities, and recognising that abstention cedes the field to China, Russia and Pakistan.
• Ayesha Jalal supplies the mechanism by which Afghan events became Indian security problems, locating the transfer of Afghan-hardened militants to Kashmir as a deliberate strategy of internationalising the dispute rather than an unintended spillover.
• J.N. Dixit supplies the doctrine of the exclusion years — resistance to coercive extremism in concert with like-minded states, tied explicitly to Eurasian energy and economic opportunity.
• C. Raja Mohan reads Afghanistan through India’s extended neighbourhood — the proposition that India’s security perimeter runs beyond South Asia into Central and West Asia, and that Afghanistan is where the two meet.
  • On the post-2021 turn his emphasis is that India must deal with the world as it is, which is the intellectual case for engaging a government one does not endorse.
• Shanthie Mariet D’Souza is the most persistent critic of Indian complacency, arguing that the policy has been long on symbolism and short on strategy.
  • It was over-reliant on goodwill and reconstruction and slow to build the political and intelligence relationships that survive a change of regime; the speed of the 2021 collapse is her evidence.

Conclusion

India’s Afghanistan policy has completed a transition nobody in Delhi would have chosen. The old policy needed a friendly government in Kabul, and its cost was that India was hostage to whichever Afghan faction it had backed — in 1979, in 1996 and again in 2021. The new policy needs only that Kabul find India useful, and a great deal has been built on that thinner foundation without any certificate of recognition.

• The three claims worth carrying from the whole record are these.
  • The Durand Line, not Indian diplomacy, is what made Kabul a partner — in 1947, and again in 2026. India’s most reliable asset in Afghanistan has always been the quarrel between its two neighbours.
  • Pakistan’s strategic-depth doctrine has produced the exact opposite of depth, and the evidence is a Pakistani air force bombing the capital it spent thirty years trying to control.
  • India’s gains are real but derivative. They were vacated rather than won, they rest on a single convergent interest, and they are reversible — which is an argument for consolidating them quickly and for claiming very little about them.
• The honest summary is that India has more influence in Kabul than at any time since 2021 and less control than at any time since 2001 — a better trade than it looks.