India’s Position on the Crisis in Afghanistan

India’s Afghanistan policy is the hardest test case in Indian diplomacy, because it is not a relationship problem but a policy problem. New Delhi spent two decades and more than three billion dollars building schools, dams, roads and a parliament in a country whose present government it has declined to recognise, whose ideology it rejects, whose principal external patron was until recently India’s adversary — and which is now at war with that adversary.

• Every instrument India possesses in Afghanistan is soft; every route into Afghanistan runs through territory India does not control.
• The question is not what India feels about Afghanistan but what a state does when a crisis destroys the terms on which its investment was made.

The Afghan question as a recurring crisis, not a single event

It is tempting to read the Afghan crisis as a single event dated August 2021. That reading is too narrow. India has faced Afghanistan as a crisis four separate times since 1979, and the structure of the crisis has been almost identical on each occasion. A Kabul government congenial to India collapses; Pakistan’s leverage rises; India loses physical presence, intelligence access and the ability to influence outcomes; and India is then reduced to working through third parties — Moscow, Tehran, Washington — until the next turn of the wheel.

Crisis	What happened	India’s response	The outcome for India
1979-1989	Soviet invasion; Afghanistan becomes a Cold War theatre, ending three decades of warmth built on the Treaty of Friendship of 1950	India declined to condemn the invasion, in effect accepting the Soviet-installed order	Access preserved; reputational damage across the Islamic world and the West
1989-1996	Soviet withdrawal, Najibullah’s fall in April 1992, Mujahideen civil war	Support for the Rabbani government, then loss of purchase as it fragmented	First real eviction; Pakistan’s proxies dominant
1996-2001	Taliban capture Kabul; Islamic Emirate declared	Covert support for the Northern Alliance; about US$10 million of high-altitude warfare equipment, a field hospital at Farkhor in Tajikistan, and use of Tajik and Uzbek facilities	Total exclusion; the 1999 IC-814 hijacking to Kandahar is the low point
2021-	American withdrawal; Taliban return in August 2021	Evacuation, embassy closure, then engagement without recognition	Presence lost and partially rebuilt; outcome still open

• The pattern is the analytical core of the whole topic. India’s position in Afghanistan has never rested on Indian power in Afghanistan; it has rested on whoever happened to be holding Kabul finding India useful.
• Each collapse cost India more than the last, because each time India had invested more before the collapse — a few consulates in the 1980s, a development portfolio in the 1990s, a three-billion-dollar programme and four consulates by 2021.
• The single constant is Pakistan.
  • Between India and Afghanistan lies a state that denies India transit, sponsors Afghan factions and treats Indian presence in Kabul as encirclement.
  • No Indian Afghanistan policy has ever been able to route around this fact.
• The single variable is which outside power is dominant — the Soviet Union to 1989, Pakistan to 2001, the United States to 2021, and since 2021 no one at all.
  • The post-2021 period is the first in which Afghanistan has no external patron, and that absence is what has made Indian engagement possible.

India has never held a position in Afghanistan of its own making; it has held positions other powers permitted it to hold, and lost them when those powers left.

Why Afghanistan is a first-order Indian interest

Treating Afghanistan as a distant country India helps out of generosity misreads the relationship entirely. Afghanistan sits on the approaches to the Indian subcontinent, and the security logic is old.

• Geography and historical invasion routes.
  • Every land invasion of the subcontinent before the colonial period arrived through the Khyber and Bolan passes.
  • The strategic memory is not decorative; it explains why Indian planners treat the Hindu Kush as the outer edge of Indian security rather than as somebody else’s frontier.
• The terrorism vector.
  • Afghanistan under an unfriendly dispensation has functioned as training ground, safe haven and rear base for groups whose targets are Indian.
  • Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed have been reported by United Nations monitoring teams to maintain facilities in eastern Afghanistan, a claim the Taliban denies and which should be stated as a monitoring finding rather than as settled fact.
• The Kashmir link.
  • The transfer of fighters and techniques from the Afghan theatre to Kashmir after 1989 is the most consequential single effect Afghanistan has ever had on Indian security.
  • Ayesha Jalal has argued that pushing battle-hardened militants from Afghanistan across the Line of Control was a deliberate device to keep the Kashmir dispute in international view — a description of method, not merely of consequence.
• Access to Central Asia.
  • Afghanistan is the land bridge to the five Central Asian republics and to their uranium, gas and critical minerals.
  • Without Afghanistan, India’s Central Asia policy has no overland leg at all — a problem that belongs in full to India’s Central Asia file and is registered here only as the reason Afghan stability matters commercially.
• The second-front argument.
  • Indian strategic writing has long held that a friendly Kabul obliges Pakistan to garrison its western frontier, dispersing pressure from the east.
  • The 2025-26 Pakistan-Afghanistan war has demonstrated the argument’s force without India having to do anything to produce it.
• Minerals and the economics.
  • Afghanistan’s untapped mineral endowment — iron ore at Hajigak, copper, lithium and rare earths — has attracted Indian consortia before and was raised again in 2025.
  • None of it is extractable without security and transit, which is why the economic case has never yet driven the policy.

The asymmetry that defines the file

• For most external actors Afghanistan is a variable-sum game; for India and Pakistan it has been treated as zero-sum, each reading the other’s presence as its own loss.
• The consequence is that Indian gains in Kabul are automatically Pakistani losses in Islamabad’s own accounting, which guarantees Pakistani counteraction and makes every Indian project a target.
  • The bombings of the Indian embassy in Kabul on 7 July 2008, which killed 58 people, and on 8 October 2009, which killed 17, were the physical expression of that arithmetic.
• Iran, Russia, China and the Central Asian states share with India an interest in Afghan stability but not in Indian primacy, which is why regional formats have consistently produced agreed language and no agreed action.

Pakistan’s strategic depth, and how it inverted

The concept of strategic depth — a Pakistani military doctrine holding that a pliant Afghanistan gives Pakistan territorial fallback and eliminates a two-front threat — is the single idea that has done most to shape India’s Afghan problem. It also now stands refuted by events, and that refutation is the most interesting thing in the contemporary file.

• The doctrine’s origin is the Durand Line.
  • The 1893 boundary divides the Pashtun population between the two states; no Afghan government has ever accepted it as an international border.
  • Afghanistan was the only state to vote against Pakistan’s admission to the United Nations in 1947.
• Pashtunistan is the fear behind the doctrine.
  • Islamabad’s anxiety is not primarily about India in Kabul; it is that an Afghan state strong enough to press irredentist claims would threaten Pakistan’s own north-west.
  • Controlling Kabul was meant to settle the border question by controlling the party that disputes it.
• The instruments were the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s and the Taliban after 1994, cultivated through the Inter-Services Intelligence with Saudi and, in the first phase, American money.
• The doctrine worked for twenty-five years and then produced the exact opposite of depth.

Strategic depth as designed	Strategic depth as delivered
A pliant Kabul settling the Durand Line	A Kabul that publicly refuses the line, calling it imaginary
Afghanistan as territorial fallback	Afghanistan as the rear base of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan
Eliminating the second front	Creating a second front — Pakistan now fights on its western border
Denying India a foothold	India welcomed in Kabul precisely because Kabul is hostile to Islamabad
A grateful client	An ideological sibling with no loyalty to its former patron

• The mechanism of the inversion is the TTP.
  • The Taliban’s victory in 2021 released imprisoned Pakistani Taliban fighters, gave them sanctuary and put abandoned American weapons within reach.
  • Pakistan recorded its deadliest year in over a decade in 2025, with combat-related fatalities rising sharply, and several thousand terrorism incidents in the first seven months of 2026 on Pakistani official counts.
• The ideological point is sharper than the material one.
  • The Afghan Taliban regard the TTP as fellow Deobandi militants and co-religionists, not as an instrument to be switched off.
  • A patron who created a movement on ideological grounds cannot then demand that it act on transactional ones.
• For India this is a strategic windfall that India did not engineer.
  • The honest formulation is that Pakistan’s strategic space in Afghanistan has indeed shrunk, but it was shrunk by the Taliban, not by Indian capacity-building — a distinction the analysis must hold onto.

Strategic depth has delivered Pakistan a hostile Kabul, an insurgent western frontier and a two-front problem it invented the doctrine to avoid.

The twenty-year investment, 2001-2021

The American intervention after September 2001 gave India its first unobstructed opening in Kabul since 1992, and India used it in a highly characteristic way — by building things. The decision not to deploy troops, not to arm factions and not to seek a security role was deliberate, and it defined both the achievement and the vulnerability of the whole period.

• India announced US$100 million in reconstruction aid immediately after the Bonn Conference of December 2001, which installed Hamid Karzai at the head of an interim administration drawn largely from the Northern Alliance India had backed.
• The Preferential Trade Agreement of March 2003, signed during Karzai’s visit, gave 38 categories of Afghan exports duty concessions into the Indian market — an early attempt to make Afghanistan economically dependent on a route that did not run through Karachi.
• The Strategic Partnership Agreement of October 2011, signed during Karzai’s Delhi visit, was Afghanistan’s first such agreement with any country and created the legal frame for political, security and economic cooperation.
• Cumulative commitments crossed US$3 billion, making India the largest regional donor and among the largest bilateral donors overall to post-2001 Afghanistan.
• Afghanistan conferred its highest civilian honour, the Amir Amanullah Khan Award, on the Indian Prime Minister in 2016 — the ceremonial peak of a partnership that had five years left to run.

The portfolio and what each piece was for

Indian assistance was not a random scatter of goodwill projects. Each strand did a specific political job, and reading them that way is what distinguishes analysis from a list.

Project	What it was	The political purpose
Afghan Parliament building, Kabul	Opened December 2015, built by India	Underwriting the constitutional order the Taliban rejected
Salma Dam / Afghan-India Friendship Dam, Herat	42 MW and irrigation; inaugurated June 2016	Water and power in the west, near the Iranian corridor
Zaranj-Delaram highway, 218 km	Links the Iranian border to the Kandahar-Herat ring road	A trade route to the sea that bypasses Pakistan entirely
Pul-e-Khumri-Kabul transmission line, 220 kV	Carries Central Asian power to the capital	Making the capital’s electricity an Indian deliverable
Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health; Habibia High School	Restored health and education institutions in Kabul	Everyday visibility in Afghan urban life
Chimtala substation; Kandahar agricultural university; Kandahar cricket stadium	Utilities, training, sport	Breadth across regions and sectors
About 500 small development projects across all 34 provinces	Schools, clinics, wells, small dams, community works	Presence in every province, including Pashtun districts
ITEC training, ICCR scholarships, roughly 15,000 Afghan students in India	Human capacity	A generation of Afghan officials, doctors and engineers trained in India

• The Zaranj-Delaram highway is the emblematic project and the one that carries the most argument.
  • It was built by the Border Roads Organisation between 2005 and 2009 at a cost of about US$150 million, and six Indian nationals and 129 Afghans died building it under repeated attack.
  • Its purpose was to connect Afghanistan to the Iranian port of Chabahar and so to give a landlocked country a route to the sea that Pakistan could not close.
• The security component was deliberately minimal.
  • India supplied about 285 military vehicles and, in December 2015, four Mi-25 attack helicopters — its first transfer of lethal platforms and a very late one.
  • Training of Afghan officers took place in India rather than in Afghanistan.
• India also declined to send combat forces at any point, including when pressed.
  • Indian personnel in Afghanistan were engineers, doctors and diplomats guarded by Indo-Tibetan Border Police details, and even that presence was contested by repeated attacks.
• In November 2020, at the Geneva conference on Afghanistan, Jaishankar announced over 100 high-impact community development projects worth about US$80 million — the last major Indian commitment before the collapse.

Did soft power without hard power buy India anything?

This is the question the file turns on, and the honest answer requires arguing it in both directions before settling.

The case that it bought a great deal:

• Afghan public opinion toward India has been consistently and unusually warm, a fact no other external actor in Afghanistan can claim.
  • Two decades of visible, non-coercive projects produced a reservoir of goodwill that survived the collapse of the government those projects served.
• The goodwill outlived the regime.
  • When the Taliban’s acting foreign minister came to Delhi in October 2025, he did so calling India a “close friend”; the Taliban’s own officials publicly protect Indian-built assets and ask for more.
  • India is the only external power the Islamic Emirate has courted without first being courted.
• Trade has followed the goodwill in a way that is now measurable.
  • In 2025, Afghan exports to India reached about US$755 million against about US$505 million to Pakistan, making India Afghanistan’s largest export market for the first time — a direct product of Pakistan’s border closures and of a market Indian tariff concessions had already opened.
• India acquired standing in every regional format on Afghanistan — the Moscow Format, the regional security dialogues, the Security Council — which it would not have had as a mere onlooker.

The case that it bought very little:

• None of it prevented August 2021. A three-billion-dollar portfolio bought India no seat at Doha, no leverage over the Taliban’s advance and no capacity to protect its own personnel.
• Goodwill is not a policy instrument. It cannot be converted into transit rights, base access, intelligence cooperation or a veto over Pakistani action. Affection without capability is an asset that cannot be spent.
• India’s investment was in a state, not in a society or a movement, and when the state dissolved the investment’s political value dissolved with it.
  • The buildings survived; the constituency that valued them did not hold power.
• The projects made India a target without making India secure — the 2008 and 2009 embassy bombings and the attacks on the Jalalabad consulate in 2013 and the Herat consulate in 2014 cost Indian lives without altering the strategic balance.

The position this note takes: the investment was strategically sound and instrumentally under-equipped. It bought India the one thing that cannot be bought quickly — legitimacy with Afghans across factional lines — and that asset is precisely what made the 2025 re-entry possible when Pakistan’s asset base collapsed. But it did not and could not buy India protection against the collapse, because India built influence in a system whose survival depended entirely on a third party’s willingness to stay. The failure was not of soft power; it was of never having considered what soft power would be worth once the American guarantee was withdrawn.

August 2021: the collapse and India’s failure

The speed of the Afghan government’s disintegration surprised almost everyone, but India’s exposure was greater than most because its policy contained no fallback. When Kabul fell on 15 August 2021, India had an embassy, four consulates, hundreds of projects, no channel to the incoming authority and no plan for one.

• The consulates went first.
  • Jalalabad and Herat had already been effectively wound down before 2021; the Kandahar consulate was evacuated in July 2021 as the Taliban closed on the city, and Mazar-e-Sharif was closed on 10 August 2021.
  • Within days India’s entire physical presence in Afghanistan was gone.
• The embassy was evacuated on 17 August 2021, the ambassador and staff flown out on Indian Air Force aircraft. The buildings were subsequently searched and vehicles removed.
• Operation Devi Shakti was the codename given to the evacuation on 24 August 2021.
  • Indian Air Force C-17 and C-130J aircraft, with Air India flights staging through Dushanbe, brought out over 800 people in the initial phase, including Indian nationals and Afghan Sikhs and Hindus carrying the Guru Granth Sahib.
  • A new e-emergency visa category was created for Afghan nationals, though its subsequent administration drew criticism.
• India held the presidency of the UN Security Council in August 2021, and presided over the adoption of Resolution 2593 on 30 August 2021 — carried 13-0 with Russia and China abstaining — which demanded that Afghan territory not be used to threaten any country or to shelter or train terrorists, and called for safe passage for those wishing to leave.
  • It named no Taliban interlocutor and created no obligation the Taliban had accepted.

The diplomatic exclusion

• India was not a party to the Doha process.
  • The US-Taliban agreement of 29 February 2020, signed by Zalmay Khalilzad and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was negotiated without Indian participation, as were the intra-Afghan talks that followed from September 2020.
• The regional formats that mattered excluded India too. Russia’s Moscow-hosted consultations at various points convened the United States, China and Pakistan while leaving India out; India’s re-entry came late and largely because Washington pressed for it.
• India’s first public contact with the Taliban came only on 31 August 2021, when the Indian ambassador in Doha met the Taliban political office’s Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai — after the fall, not before it.
• The Delhi Regional Security Dialogue of 10 November 2021, chaired by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, brought together the national security advisers of Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
  • The Delhi Declaration called for an inclusive government, the protection of women, children and minorities, and an assurance against terrorism from Afghan soil.
  • China and Pakistan declined to attend — Pakistan’s national security adviser publicly calling India a spoiler.

What India had on 1 August 2021	What remained on 1 September 2021
Embassy in Kabul, consulates in Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif	No diplomatic presence
A partner government bound by a Strategic Partnership Agreement	A government in exile or in flight
Roughly 500 running projects across 34 provinces	Assets intact, supervision impossible
Standing in the Doha process	None, and none previously
Intelligence access through Afghan services	Access severed with the services
An articulated position against dealing with the Taliban	A position with no alternative behind it

The criticism India has to answer

• The central charge is that India had no channel because it had refused to build one.
  • For twenty years New Delhi treated the Taliban as an undifferentiated Pakistani proxy and declined the contacts that Russia, Iran, China and even the Gulf states maintained.
  • When the movement returned, India had to start from nothing while others resumed conversations.
• Avinash Paliwal, whose study of Indian decision-making on Afghanistan is the standard academic account, describes a long-running split inside the Indian establishment between “partisans”, who treated Pakistan-aligned Afghan factions as enemies to be contained absolutely, and “conciliators”, who favoured keeping lines open to whoever held or might hold power.
  • His argument is that partisan dominance repeatedly produced sub-optimal outcomes — including during the 1999 IC-814 hijacking — and that the caricature of the Taliban as a monolithic Pakistani instrument was analytically wrong as well as costly.
• Rakesh Sood has argued that India’s fundamental error in 2021 was abandonment — that a country which is part of the region, unlike the Western powers, cannot simply disengage, and that closing the mission surrendered ground India had spent two decades acquiring.
• Shyam Saran called the takeover an undoubted setback and warned against reading the movement’s public moderation as change, while noting that the Taliban had reasons of its own not to antagonise India.
• The defence of Indian caution is real and should be stated.
  • Engagement before August 2021 would have undercut the elected Afghan government India was supporting, would have been read in Kabul as betrayal, and would have conferred legitimacy on a movement then engaged in killing Afghan civilians.
  • India’s choice was not obviously wrong; it was simply not hedged.

The lesson of 2021 is not that India backed the wrong side but that it made no arrangement for being on the losing one.

Engagement without recognition: the architecture of India’s present position

Between August 2021 and January 2026 India moved, in careful increments, from having no contact with the Islamic Emirate to hosting its diplomat in New Delhi and flying its own flag again in Kabul — without at any point recognising it as the government of Afghanistan. This is the heart of the contemporary file, and the sequence matters as much as the outcome.

The ladder of contacts, 2021-2026

Date	Step	What it did and did not concede
31 August 2021	Indian ambassador meets Stanekzai in Doha	A channel, framed as being about Indian nationals
December 2021	1.6 tonnes of medicines routed through the WHO	Aid delivered through a multilateral body, not to a government
November 2021	Delhi Regional Security Dialogue	India as convenor of a regional position, Taliban not present
June 2022	Joint-secretary-led team visits Kabul; a technical team is stationed at the embassy	Physical presence restored; described as technical, not diplomatic
2022-2024	Wheat, medicines, vaccines, earthquake relief	Assistance to the Afghan people, a formula used consistently
January 2025	Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri meets acting foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in Dubai	Highest-level contact since 2021; held on third-country soil
May 2025	Jaishankar speaks to Muttaqi by telephone	First minister-to-minister contact; thanked Kabul for condemning the Pahalgam attack
9-16 October 2025	Muttaqi visits India	First Taliban ministerial visit; embassy upgrade announced
21 October 2025	Embassy upgrade formalised	India’s mission in Kabul restored to full embassy status
10 January 2026	Mufti Noor Ahmad Noor takes charge in New Delhi as chargé d’affaires	An Emirate-nominated diplomat accepted — but at chargé, not ambassadorial, rank

• Each rung was accompanied by language that kept the legal question open.
  • The MEA’s standard formulation throughout has been assistance to the people of Afghanistan and engagement on humanitarian, trade and security matters, never partnership with a government.
• The 7th Moscow Format consultations of 7 October 2025 are a useful marker of where India now sits:
  • India joined Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran and the Central Asian states in a common regional position, including opposition to any restored foreign military presence at Bagram.
  • India is inside the regional conversation again, on terms it does not set.
• At the Security Council in December 2025, India’s permanent representative P. Harish called for nuanced, incentive-based instruments that deliver sustainable benefits to Afghans rather than punitive ones — the clearest public statement of the Indian view that isolation has failed.

The chargé d’affaires distinction is the hinge

This is the point on which the entire Indian position rests, and it is routinely misunderstood.

• Recognition of a government is a legal act with consequences.
  • It settles who may bind the Afghan state in treaty, who controls its assets abroad, who occupies its seat at the United Nations, and whose acts India will treat as sovereign acts.
• An ambassador is accredited, a chargé d’affaires is not.
  • An ambassador requires agrément from the receiving state, presents letters of credence signed by one head of state and addressed to another, and is by that ceremony an acknowledgement that the sending authority is the government.
  • A chargé d’affaires en pied is accredited by one foreign ministry to another by a simple letter — a working relationship between offices, not a statement about sovereignty.
• India has accepted the second and withheld the first, deliberately.
  • Mufti Noor Ahmad Noor runs the Afghan embassy in New Delhi and has functional access to the Indian system; he has presented no credentials to the President of India, and no Indian ambassador has presented credentials in Kabul.
• The reciprocal move was made in the same register. India’s Kabul mission was “upgraded” and “restored,” not re-established through an exchange of recognitions.
• The consequence is that India has full working contact and zero legal commitment.
  • It can deliver aid, sign commercial arrangements, discuss security and receive assurances, while the question of who lawfully governs Afghanistan remains formally unanswered and reversible.

State	Step taken	Recognition
Russia	Accepted ambassador; formal recognition on 3 July 2025	Yes — the only UN member state to have recognised
China	Accredited a Taliban-appointed ambassador, January 2024	No formal recognition
UAE	Accepted a Taliban envoy as ambassador, August 2024	No formal recognition
Iran	Handed over the Tehran embassy to a chargé d’affaires, February 2023	No
India	Embassy restored October 2025; chargé d’affaires accepted January 2026	No
United Nations	Credentials decision repeatedly deferred since December 2021	Seat still held by the former Republic’s nominee

• The Russian contrast is instructive.
  • Moscow’s recognition in July 2025 bought it visibility and first-mover credit but conferred no observable advantage in access, contracts or security cooperation that India has not obtained without it.
  • Recognition, on the evidence so far, is a currency with a very poor exchange rate.

What recognition would cost and what it would buy

Recognition would buy	Recognition would cost
Treaty capacity — enforceable transit, trade and investment agreements	Endorsement of the exclusion of women from education and employment
Consular and legal certainty for Indian firms and workers	Alignment against the ICC arrest warrants issued in July 2025 against the Taliban’s supreme leader and chief justice for gender persecution
Access to Afghan state assets and banking channels	A precedent for recognising governments established by force
Firmer footing against Chinese and Russian positioning	Loss of the leverage that withheld recognition itself constitutes
Removal of ambiguity that deters commercial actors	Domestic political criticism and reputational cost with Western partners

• The decisive argument against recognising is that the ambiguity is the leverage.
  • The Islamic Emirate wants recognition badly; the moment India grants it, the strongest inducement India possesses is spent and nothing remains to trade for behaviour on terrorism, minorities or transit.
• The decisive argument for recognising eventually is that ambiguity has a ceiling.
  • Firms will not invest, banks will not clear payments and treaties cannot be enforced against a counterparty India does not acknowledge.
  • A policy of indefinite non-recognition converts India into a donor rather than a partner.
• India’s actual position is to hold the ambiguity as long as it pays and to move only when the price is right — which is why the calibrated ladder above matters more than any declaration.

India has bought every practical benefit of recognition without paying its political price, and the day that stops working is the day the policy has to change.

Humanitarian assistance and the problem of the route

Aid was the instrument India could use when no other was available, and the story of how it physically reached Afghanistan is a compressed lesson in India’s geographic predicament.

• India pledged development assistance worth ₹200 crore in February 2023, the first substantial post-collapse commitment, and has sustained the line since.
• The scale is modest but sustained: more than 47,500 metric tonnes of wheat, around 1.5 million doses of COVID vaccine, 60 million doses of polio vaccine, tonnes of essential medicines, winter clothing, and relief consignments after the earthquakes of June 2022 and later.
• The wheat was routed through the World Food Programme, which mattered legally as well as logistically — a UN agency distributing Indian grain is assistance to a population, not a transfer to a regime.
• Pakistan’s transit denial is the structural fact.
  • Islamabad refused, then permitted on restrictive terms, then obstructed the overland movement of Indian wheat through Wagah and the Torkham crossing.
  • Consignments that should have taken days took months, and the permission was framed each time as an exceptional favour rather than a right.
• Chabahar was the answer to that denial, and the wheat is the clearest justification the port has ever had.
  • 20,000 tonnes of wheat were routed through Chabahar from March 2023,
  • and over the life of the corridor the port has been the route for successive Indian wheat and pulse consignments to Afghanistan — an argument that belongs to India’s Iran file but whose Afghan consequence is registered here.
• The air route came last and works best.
  • An air freight corridor to Kabul first operated from 2017; it was revived in late 2025 with Kabul-Delhi and Kabul-Amritsar cargo services, cutting transit from about ten days by road to four hours and largely removing Pakistan from the equation.

The post-2025 project pipeline

The October 2025 visit converted engagement into a work programme, and the content of that programme is deliberately chosen.

• Jaishankar framed the October 2025 outcomes in the vocabulary of mutual benefit rather than of patronage, which is the register India has used throughout.

“Closer cooperation between us contributes to your national development as well as regional stability.”

— S. Jaishankar

• Six new development projects were announced, concentrated in health, food security and institutional capacity — the categories least likely to be read as political.
• The health package includes a thalassemia centre, a modern diagnostic centre, an oncology centre and a trauma centre in Kabul, a 30-bed hospital at Bagrami, replacement of the heating system at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health, and five maternity clinics across Paktika, Khost and Paktia — provinces on the Pakistan frontier.
• Twenty ambulances were gifted, five handed over symbolically during the visit; e-scholarships for Afghan students were renewed in the low thousands; and India offered material support for housing Afghans forcibly repatriated from Pakistan, which is a pointed choice of beneficiary.
• Commercial follow-through has been faster than expected:
  • a pharmaceutical memorandum between Afghanistan’s Raoufi International Group and Zydus Lifesciences in November 2025;
  • a laboratory and customs-equipment contract with an Indian firm in May 2026;
  • and an institutional memorandum between the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and ASSOCHAM in June 2026.
  • Kabul has separately invited Indian companies into mining and minerals.
• The budget line tells the same story quietly.
  • After being cut sharply post-2021, India’s Afghanistan allocation was raised by ₹50 crore to ₹150 crore in the Union Budget for 2026-27 — small in absolute terms, unambiguous as a signal, and the first sustained increase since the collapse.

The security calculus

Everything India does in Afghanistan is ultimately underwritten by a single question: does an Islamic Emirate in Kabul make India less safe or more? The answer is genuinely mixed and must be given as such.

What India needs, and what it has been told

• The requirement is narrow and unchanged: that Afghan territory not be used by groups whose targets are Indian.
  • India does not need a friendly Afghanistan, an inclusive Afghanistan or a democratic Afghanistan to be secure; it needs a non-permissive one.
• The Taliban has given the assurance publicly and repeatedly, most visibly during Muttaqi’s Delhi visit, when he stated that Afghanistan would not permit any group or individual to use Afghan territory against India.
• Kabul condemned the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025 and, in the days of India-Pakistan exchange that followed, rejected Pakistani claims about Indian missiles landing on Afghan soil.
  • This was the single most consequential Taliban gesture toward India to date, and it was made at direct cost to Kabul’s relations with Islamabad.
• The assurance is not verifiable and India has not treated it as if it were.
  • United Nations monitoring reports have continued to describe a presence of Pakistan-origin groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed elements, at facilities in eastern Afghanistan; the Taliban denies this.
  • India’s own public position has been to press the point without accusing its interlocutor.

The four threat streams and who they threaten

Actor	Relationship to the Taliban	The threat to India
Al-Qaeda	Historic alliance, degraded, sheltered	Low direct threat; high symbolic and legal cost to Kabul
Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed	Pakistan-directed; tolerated rather than sponsored	The direct India-facing threat, and the one the Taliban is least able to eliminate
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan	Ideological siblings; sheltered	No threat to India; the principal threat to Pakistan
Islamic State Khorasan Province	Declared enemy of the Taliban	Threat to India, and simultaneously the basis of convergence with Iran, Russia and China

• ISKP is the file’s convergence point.
  • It has attacked Iran, Russia, Central Asian states and the Taliban itself, has an explicitly transnational programme, and is the one Afghan security problem on which India, Iran, Russia, China and the Islamic Emirate all want the same outcome.
  • Its attacks in Kabul and Islamabad in early 2026 showed continued capacity for spectacular operations even after a period of lower international profile.
• The counter-terrorism argument for engagement follows directly.
  • A Kabul authority that is fighting ISKP, denying the Pakistani army its western sanctuary and seeking Indian goodwill is a better counter-terrorism partner than an isolated Kabul with nothing to lose.
  • This is the case Indian officials make in private and increasingly in public.
• The counter-argument is that the Taliban’s willingness is not the same as its capability.
  • Even a sincere Emirate cannot police every valley, and even a capable one has ideological limits on what it will do to fellow jihadists.
  • India’s security therefore depends on a promise it cannot audit from a state it does not recognise.

The Kashmir dimension, stated carefully

• The historical link is established: the drawdown of the Afghan jihad after 1989 fed men, weapons and doctrine into Kashmir, and the 1999 hijacking to Kandahar ended in the release of militants who went on to lead groups still active.
• The expectation that a triumphant jihadism would produce an onslaught of terrorism in India was near-universal in New Delhi in 2021, and it has not so far materialised in the form predicted.
  • Cross-border militancy in Kashmir has continued and produced atrocities including Pahalgam, but there has been no demonstrated redirection of Afghan-based fighters into the Valley on the 1990s model.
• The reason is instructive rather than reassuring.
  • The fighters who were released in 2021 went to Pakistan, not to India, because the TTP’s war is with Rawalpindi.
  • The jihadist surplus of the Taliban’s victory has been absorbed by Pakistan’s own frontier.
  • That is a fortunate outcome for India, not a designed one, and it can change.

The Pakistan-Afghanistan rupture of 2025-26

The war between Pakistan and the Islamic Emirate is the largest change in India’s Afghan environment since 2021, and it happened without India doing anything to bring it about. It has to be described accurately, because its details are what make the analytical point.

Date	Event
October 2025	Deadliest cross-border clashes in years; Pakistani strikes inside Afghanistan; a Qatar-mediated ceasefire agreed in Doha
6-8 November 2025	Talks in Istanbul collapse without agreement; low-level skirmishing resumes
11 February 2026	Pakistan’s defence minister warns of action if the TTP is not restrained before Ramadan
21-22 February 2026	Pakistani air strikes on Nangarhar, Paktika and Khost; UNAMA confirms civilian deaths
24-26 February 2026	Ground clashes at multiple border points; the Taliban claims captured Pakistani posts
27 February 2026	Pakistan’s defence minister declares “open war”; strikes on Kabul follow
1 March 2026	Pakistani air strikes on Kabul and Bagram
16 March 2026	Strike on the Omid addiction treatment hospital in Kabul; UN investigators later confirm at least 269 civilian deaths, with Afghan claims far higher and Pakistani denial of the target
19-24 March 2026	Eid pause at the request of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey
3 April 2026	China-mediated talks at Urumqi; no formal agreement to end hostilities
Late April 2026	Ceasefire breaks down again over incidents in Kunar and at Spin Boldak
Through August 2026	Fighting recurrent rather than continuous; no settlement; roughly 115,000 Afghans and thousands of Pakistanis displaced

• The proximate cause is the TTP; the underlying cause is the Durand Line.
  • Pakistan demands that Kabul suppress the Pakistani Taliban; Kabul denies harbouring it and refuses to accept a border it has never accepted.
  • Neither demand can be met without the other side conceding its founding position.
• Pakistan’s mass deportation of Afghan refugees under its repatriation drives since 2023, which has pushed very large numbers of Afghans across the frontier into a country that cannot absorb them, has removed whatever residual goodwill Pakistan retained in Afghan society.
• Mediation has been crowded and ineffective.
  • Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and China have all brokered pauses; none has produced terms.
  • That five external actors can stop the fighting and none can end it is the measure of how structural the dispute is.

India’s posture during the war

India has done three things and refused a fourth.

• It has condemned the Pakistani strikes in unusually strong language, framing them as violations of Afghan sovereignty rather than as an India-Pakistan matter.

“Pakistan is infuriated with Afghanistan exercising sovereignty over its own territories. Pakistan seems to think that it has the right to practice cross-border terrorism with impunity.”

— Randhir Jaiswal

• It has kept aid flowing during the fighting, including medical consignments to Kabul in March 2026 after the hospital strike — assistance timed to be visible.
• It has deepened the diplomatic relationship on schedule, accepting the chargé d’affaires in January 2026 while the war was under way, which is itself a statement.
• It has not offered Kabul any security relationship, and Kabul has not asked for one publicly.
  • India has supplied no weapons, no training and no intelligence partnership that either side has acknowledged.
  • The restraint is deliberate: an Indian security role would validate Pakistan’s entire strategic-depth narrative and put Indian assets in range of a war India is not fighting.
• India condemned the strike on the hospital in unusually direct language, with the Ministry of External Affairs describing it as indefensible on any ground of faith, law or morality, and medical consignments followed to Kabul within days.
• The gain for India is real and cheap.
  • Pakistan is fighting on two frontiers, its Afghan policy is in ruins, Afghan trade has redirected toward India, and India’s standing in Kabul rests on having said the obvious thing at the right moment.
  • India acquired the position it spent twenty years and three billion dollars failing to acquire, by saying almost nothing.
• The limits are equally real.
  • India cannot protect Afghanistan, cannot supply it, cannot reach it except through Iranian ports and Afghan airspace, and would be the first casualty of any Afghan-Pakistani reconciliation.
  • A position that depends on somebody else’s quarrel lasts exactly as long as the quarrel.

The Mecca architecture and the constraint it imposes

• The Saudi Arabia-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement, signed at Riyadh on 17 September 2025, provides that aggression against either is aggression against both.
• The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed on 7 August 2026 by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif, extends the principle to three states: an armed attack on any one is an attack on all.
  • It contains no nuclear guarantee, and claims that it extends a Pakistani nuclear umbrella are speculation.
• The relevance to Afghanistan is that it changes the arithmetic of Pakistani risk.
  • A Pakistan with treaty backing from two significant Muslim powers is less deterrable, better resourced and more confident in cross-border operations than the Pakistan of 2021.
• It also complicates India’s regional balancing.
  • India’s closest Gulf partner is now in a collective-defence treaty with India’s adversary, alongside a Turkey aligned with Islamabad.
  • Any Indian calculation about supporting Kabul against Pakistan must now be made with that architecture in view — which is another reason the security abstinence described above is not timidity but arithmetic.

Global South solidarity or compulsion?

Whether India’s Afghanistan policy is driven by a vision of the Global South or by compulsion is a sharper question than it first looks, because both descriptions are accurate and they are not easily reconciled.

The case for solidarity

• India’s Afghan programme was built in the idiom of South-South development cooperation, not of donor conditionality: demand-driven projects requested by the Afghan side, no policy conditions attached, no structural adjustment, no procurement tied to Indian firms in the way Western and Chinese lending typically is.
• The distribution of projects supports the claim.
  • Around 500 small community projects spread across all 34 provinces, chosen by local authorities and often costing a few lakhs each, is not the profile of a great power buying influence; it is the profile of a development partner deferring to local priorities.
• Capacity-building was the largest and least visible component — training slots, scholarships, hospital residencies, agricultural extension. Investment in people who then govern their own country is the defining claim of the Indian development model.
• India kept the aid flowing after 2021 when it had every political reason to stop. Wheat and vaccines delivered to a country whose government India refuses to recognise is difficult to explain as pure interest calculation.

The case for compulsion

• The security rationale is explicit in every Indian official document: preventing Afghanistan becoming a haven for anti-India terrorism. Solidarity does not require dams on the Iranian border or highways that bypass Karachi.
• The geography of the portfolio is strategic. Zaranj-Delaram serves Chabahar; Salma Dam sits in the west; the transmission line makes Kabul’s power Indian-supplied. These are choices about leverage, not about need.
• Development was the only instrument available, not the preferred one.
  • Indian strategists argued throughout for a harder posture and were overruled by geography, not by principle.
  • A country that supplies four helicopters after fourteen years of asking is not choosing softness; it is rationing what it can deliver.
• The timing of Indian generosity tracks Indian anxiety about Pakistan, not Afghan need. Assistance surged when Pakistan’s position strengthened and was recalibrated when it weakened.

Resolving it

• The honest answer is that the vocabulary is solidarity and the driver is compulsion, and that the combination is not hypocrisy but the ordinary condition of middle-power statecraft.
  • India could not do hard power in Afghanistan; it could do development; and it found in the language of South-South partnership a genuine and accurate description of what it was doing anyway.
• What makes the Indian claim more than rhetoric is that the beneficiaries treat it as real.
  • Afghan opinion has distinguished consistently between Indian assistance and everybody else’s, and that distinction is the asset India is now spending.
• What makes the compulsion argument decisive is the counterfactual.
  • Had Pakistan not existed, India would have had a small, warm, low-priority relationship with Afghanistan, of roughly the shape it has with Mongolia.
  • The size of the programme is explained by the threat, not by the affinity.

Debates and critical assessment

Is engagement realism or capitulation?

• The realist defence is that states deal with the authorities that exist.
  • Afghanistan has one government, that government controls the territory, and refusing to talk to it produces no change in Afghan behaviour while ceding the field to China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan.
  • Non-recognition is a position about legality; non-engagement is a decision to be irrelevant, and India has separated the two.
• The critique is that engagement without conditions rewards a movement that took power by force and rules by decree, and that India’s abstention from any public criticism amounts to endorsement by silence.
  • Happymon Jacob has read the shift as evidence of a broader turn in Indian foreign policy toward interest over ethics — the same instinct visible in Delhi’s handling of Myanmar’s junta and of the Ukraine war — and has argued that India would not have moved this far this fast were Pakistan not the real object of the exercise.
• The strongest version of the critique is not moral but practical: that India has bid for a relationship whose value depends entirely on Pakistan-Taliban hostility continuing, and has therefore made its Afghan policy a derivative of somebody else’s quarrel for the fourth time in fifty years.
• The strongest version of the defence is that India has conceded nothing that cannot be withdrawn.
  • No treaty binds India, no recognition has been extended, no security guarantee has been given, and the entire relationship can be wound back to a technical mission in a week.
  • Reversibility is the discipline that makes this engagement realism rather than capitulation.

The women’s-rights problem

• The Islamic Emirate has excluded women from secondary and higher education, from most employment, from unaccompanied travel and increasingly from public space.
  • The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in July 2025 against supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani for the crime against humanity of gender persecution.
• India has said almost nothing. The Delhi Declaration of 2021 referred to the protection of women, children and minorities; since 2024 that language has largely disappeared from Indian statements about Afghanistan.
• The exclusion of women journalists from Muttaqi’s first Delhi press conference in October 2025, later corrected at a second event, made the cost visible at home.
  • A democracy hosting a government that bans girls from school will be asked to explain itself, and India’s answer has been to change the subject.
• The defence offered is that leverage requires access and that public criticism from India would achieve nothing that Western condemnation has not already failed to achieve.
  • It is a serious argument. It is also exactly the argument every state makes for silence, and it has no stopping rule.
• The sharpest form of the dilemma is that engagement was justified as humanitarian and the humanitarian case is strongest for the population the regime most harms.
  • India’s maternity clinics and scholarships for Afghan women are the partial answer; they do not resolve the contradiction.

The humanitarian-versus-recognition dilemma

The dilemma	How India has managed it
Aid delivered to a state strengthens its government	Route through UN agencies; describe assistance as being for the people of Afghanistan
Withholding aid punishes a population, not a regime	Sustain deliveries continuously since 2021, including during the 2026 war
Project work requires official counterparts	Confine projects to health, food and education, where the counterpart is technical
Presence implies acceptance	Keep the mission at chargé level and avoid all ceremonial recognition
Commercial engagement legitimises	Let private firms lead, with the state absent from the contract

• The management is skilful and it is not a solution.
  • Every additional rung on the ladder makes the next one harder to refuse, and the gap between what India does in Afghanistan and what India says about Afghanistan widens with each step.

Competition with China and Russia

• China moved first and most formally, accrediting a Taliban-appointed ambassador in January 2024, pursuing mining concessions and holding out the prospect of extending the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor into Afghanistan — a project the Pakistan-Afghanistan war has now stalled indefinitely.
• Russia moved furthest, recognising the government outright in July 2025, and has traded on that status in the Moscow Format.
• India’s advantage is neither speed nor formality but reputation.
  • Afghan opinion of Chinese and Russian intentions is instrumental; opinion of Indian intentions is not.
  • India is the only external actor in Afghanistan whose past presence Afghans remember as beneficial, and that is the sole competitive asset it holds.
• India’s disadvantage is capital and access.
  • China can finance extraction, Russia can supply fuel and grain overland, and both have land or short-sea routes India lacks.
  • India’s engagement will remain smaller than its goodwill for as long as its logistics run through Iranian ports.

The binding constraint: no land access

• Every element of India’s Afghanistan policy is limited by the same fact.
  • Pakistan denies transit. The alternatives are the sea-and-road route through Chabahar, which is subject to American sanctions decisions India does not control, and air cargo, which is fast, reliable and far too small to carry a real economic relationship.
• The 2026 degradation of the Iranian corridor made this acute.
  • With the Iranian route disrupted, India’s only dependable line to Kabul in 2026 was the air corridor — an extraordinary position for a country that is Afghanistan’s largest export market.
• The strategic consequence is that India can be generous but cannot be indispensable.
  • Volume matters in a country that imports nearly everything, and India cannot deliver volume.
  • Influence in Afghanistan is finally a function of tonnage, and tonnage is a function of geography.

What a workable Indian Afghanistan policy would require

• Keep recognition in reserve and spend it once, against something specific and verifiable — a security understanding, a transit guarantee, or a change in the treatment of Afghan women — rather than as a gesture of goodwill.
• Institutionalise the channel so it survives the quarrel that created it.
  • A relationship that exists only because Kabul is angry with Islamabad will not outlive a Pakistan-Taliban settlement; a relationship built on trade volumes, student numbers and health infrastructure might.
• Solve the route before scaling the relationship. Without dependable, sanction-proof transit, every expansion of the Indian commitment increases exposure without increasing leverage.
• Build Afghan constituencies rather than Afghan governments. The lesson of 2021 is that India’s investment in institutions vanished with the institutions; its investment in people did not.
• Say the difficult thing occasionally. A policy that cannot afford a single sentence about girls’ education is not leverage; it is dependence dressed up as pragmatism.
• Plan for the fifth crisis.
  • The Islamic Emirate is not a stable end-state: it faces ISKP, the National Resistance Front, internal factionalism between Kandahar and the Haqqani network, a collapsing economy and a war on its eastern border.
  • The pattern this note began with says that Kabul will change hands again, and Indian policy has never yet been designed for that eventuality in advance.

Where the scholars stand

Scholar	The position
Avinash Paliwal	Indian policy has swung between partisans and conciliators; treating the Taliban as a Pakistani monolith was analytically wrong and repeatedly costly
Rakesh Sood	India is part of the region and cannot disengage; the 2021 withdrawal surrendered assets built over two decades
Shyam Saran	The takeover was an unambiguous setback; the movement’s moderation is presentational, but it has its own reasons not to antagonise India
Vivek Katju	Has pressed the treatment of women as a question India cannot indefinitely evade while deepening official contact
Shivshankar Menon	India’s real problem is that its neighbourhood policy has too few instruments and too much reliance on others’ presence for its own access
C. Raja Mohan	Engagement is the realist course; the constraint on India is capability and geography, not intent
Happymon Jacob	The shift reflects a turn toward interest over ethics, and would not have happened at this pace without Pakistan as the object
Harsh V. Pant	India’s core interest is a stable, economically integrated Afghanistan, which is why trade concessions and connectivity have been the through-line of the policy

Conclusion

India’s position on the crisis in Afghanistan is the most instructive case in Indian foreign policy of what a state does when its interests exceed its instruments. It has been consistent about ends — a Kabul that does not host anti-India terrorism, a route to Central Asia, the exclusion of Pakistani monopoly — and highly adaptive about means, moving from covert support in the 1990s, to development partnership in the 2000s, to evacuation in 2021, to calibrated engagement without recognition today.

• The current position is the best India has held since 2001 and it was acquired almost free, because Pakistan’s own doctrine destroyed the arrangement that had excluded India.
• That is a windfall, not an achievement, and treating it as an achievement is the error most likely to produce the fifth crisis unprepared.
• The durable lesson is that India’s Afghan position has always been derivative, dependent on some other power’s presence or absence, and that the task is to build one that is not.
• The durable asset is Afghan public regard, which no rival possesses and which two decades of visible, unconditional work created.
• The durable constraint is geography, which no amount of goodwill alters and which only Chabahar, the air corridor and a settlement with Pakistan could relieve.
• The open question is recognition — whether India spends its leverage or holds it until it depreciates.