Pakistan’s reported air strikes on Kabul last night, coinciding with Acting Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi’s visit to India, seem intended to send a signal to both New Delhi and Kabul.
While several Pakistani media outlets rushed to claim that the chief of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) was among those targeted, there is still no confirmation. What is certain, however, is that Pakistan’s TTP problem is far from over.
In the shadow of these developments, India’s engagement with Taliban-controlled Afghanistan stands out for its quiet persistence. Since the fall of the Ashraf Ghani government and the chaotic US withdrawal, New Delhi has consciously blurred its erstwhile ‘red lines’ regarding engagement with the Taliban regime. Over the past year alone, there have been visible attempts to ramp up contact, showing an evolution from guarded detachment to cautious pragmatism.
This shift gains sharper relevance when juxtaposed with the steady deterioration in Pakistan-Afghanistan relations. Rawalpindi’s attempt to build a united Islamic front against India has faltered in recent years, exposing the limits of Pakistan’s influence over the Taliban it once nurtured.
For the Taliban, eager for recognition and legitimacy, regional diplomacy has become essential. As Afghanistan re-emerges as a theatre of competing geopolitical and economic ambitions, every major power—China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan—seeks to maintain strategic depth there. The United States, too, is showing renewed interest, with Donald Trump’s inclination to revive the Bagram base, a proposition that New Delhi and others have opposed.
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Why Afghanistan matters
Afghanistan holds enduring significance for India on at least three broad counts.
First, as a counterbalance to China’s growing presence in the region. Beijing’s push to entrench a ‘China-Pakistan-Afghanistan’ trilateral framework, and its efforts to fold Kabul into the broader China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), represent a direct challenge to India’s connectivity strategy. By diverting Afghanistan’s maritime trade from Karachi to Gwadar, China aims to deepen Afghan dependence on Pakistan’s infrastructure, undercutting India’s long-standing attempts to offer Kabul alternative routes through Chabahar port and the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC).
Despite sanctions-related complications and shifting US waivers, Chabahar remains central to India’s vision of integrating Afghanistan into a wider web of connectivity. While India lacks China’s financial and strategic heft, it benefits from the Taliban’s desire to hedge against overreliance on Pakistan. In this equation, India’s continued engagement with Moscow and Tehran matters.
Second, engagement with Kabul serves as an instrument to blunt Pakistan’s attempts to internationalise the Kashmir issue or foment terrorism in the region. Maintaining a degree of strategic depth in Afghanistan—even through cautious diplomacy—offers India both intelligence leverage and regional relevance.
Third, landlocked Afghanistan is India’s gateway to energy-rich Central Asia. Access to these markets is vital for India’s long-term energy security and economic ambitions, reflected in the push for the INSTC route through the Central Asian region. Without an Afghan land bridge, India’s continental strategy remains incomplete.
These are the obvious imperatives. Yet beneath them lies a deeper analytical challenge: how should India interpret and respond to a continually unstable Pakistan and a region defined by competing, overlapping alignments?
Pakistan’s instability and China’s balancing act
Pakistan’s internal contradictions—the Pashtun and Baloch questions foremost among them—will continue to fester, but are unlikely to lead to outright state fragmentation. Both issues intersect directly with China’s strategic interests.
Beijing has invested heavily in stabilising these fault lines, knowing that instability in Pakistan’s border regions endangers the CPEC and the safety of Chinese personnel. Pakistan’s deep economic and military dependence on China ensures that, in the long run, the unification of Pashtun populations on either side of the Durand Line will remain incomplete.
Similarly, the Baloch insurgency straddles the Iran-Pakistan border, a frontier nearly 900 kilometres long. Despite recent cross-border strikes between Tehran and Islamabad, the two have since signed ambitious trade and defence agreements, again shaped by Chinese economic influence in both capitals.
Iran, increasingly cornered by Israel’s intensifying rampage against its proxy network and by a distracted Russia bogged down in Ukraine, finds itself relying more heavily on Chinese investments and weapons. Delhi’s strategic establishment must recognise that when the next Iran-Israel confrontation unfolds, China is likely to emerge as a quiet but decisive player behind the scenes.
For Beijing, Afghanistan’s stability is not merely a matter of influence and trade—it is also a security imperative. The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) poses a direct threat to Xinjiang, making the maintenance of strategic depth in Afghanistan a non-negotiable objective.
Russia’s interests overlap with China’s in this regard, though its engagement with the Taliban through the Moscow Format offers India a diplomatic cushion. The question, however, is how far the deepening Moscow-Beijing partnership might, over time, constrain India’s manoeuvrability.
A region in strategic flux
Other regional dynamics add layers of complexity. The US designation of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) as a terrorist organisation, for instance, plays into Pakistan’s narrative. Meanwhile, the region’s shadow economy—fuelled by opium, amphetamine precursors, Iranian diesel, Russian arms, and human trafficking—continues to thrive, largely untouched by the grand geopolitics swirling above it.
Turkey, too, has become an increasingly active player. Since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came to power in 2002, Ankara has sought to use Afghanistan as a strategic lever to expand its autonomy in global politics. Following the US withdrawal, Turkey—like China—moved swiftly to fill parts of the vacuum.
In June this year, Amir Khan Muttaqi met Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on the sidelines of the OIC foreign ministers’ meeting in Istanbul, signalling growing cooperation. Ankara shares with Beijing a concern over ISKP’s expanding reach. The group’s strong links with Central Asian radical networks have made Turkey—a transit hub for migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan—particularly vulnerable. Some Turkish cities, notably Istanbul’s Başakşehir district, have even become centres for these migrant communities and, by extension, for potential radicalisation.
All this underscores the same reality: the old scramble for influence and strategic depth in Afghanistan is gaining new grounds.
Traditionally, Iran and Russia have represented relatively friendly alignments for India, while China, Pakistan, and Turkey have posed varying degrees of hostility. But the emerging geopolitics of the region is far less bifurcated. Cross-cutting interests, overlapping agendas, and situational alignments have replaced clear blocs. This fluidity is both an opportunity and a constraint for India.
Beyond multi-alignment: the case for compartmentalisation
In this environment, India’s challenge is not one of relevance but of clarity. New Delhi must retain its strategic resilience—an ability to hedge, adapt, and recalibrate without losing coherence.
India has often been described as a practitioner of “multi-alignment”—a foreign policy of engaging all sides without committing exclusively to any. Yet multi-alignment, though elegant in theory, risks becoming an end in itself rather than a means. It can easily devolve into a posture of cautious ambiguity rather than active strategy.
What India needs, therefore, is compartmentalisation—a more disciplined approach to managing multiple and even contradictory relationships. Compartmentalisation involves “subtracting issues from a comprehensive negotiation” and treating them as separate domains. It allows policymakers to cooperate on shared challenges without broader concessions, to manage contradictions without paralysis or delayed responding.
Successful compartmentalisation requires identifying not just multiple interests but also their hierarchy and differentiation. The current world order defies clear demarcations: there are no stable power blocs, no unambiguous security guarantors. The United States, by design, no longer seeks to play that role—and no other power can yet replace it.
India’s foreign policy must therefore evolve from reactive balancing to structured agility—the capacity to engage competitors and partners alike through clearly defined issue-based frameworks.
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Rethinking India’s strategic vocabulary
The interconnected theatres of today—spanning the Indo-Pacific, Central Asia, and the Middle East—bear little resemblance to the world India navigated during the Cold War, or even the early years of post-Cold War unipolarity. The anticipated contours of a multipolar order fail to capture the chaotic simultaneity of crises and alignments that define our times.
For India, anodyne multi-alignment is no longer enough. It must be refined, calibrated, and compartmentalised—anchored in a clearer understanding of what to prioritise, when to engage, and where to draw limits.
Afghanistan, in this calculus, is not just a theatre of competition but a testing ground for India’s ability to pursue such re-worked foreign policy. The ultimate goal is not merely to keep options open, but to benefit from the options available—to turn strategic uncertainty into strategic leverage.
In sum, India’s engagement with Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is, on balance, a positive. It keeps channels open, counters rival influence, and sustains regional relevance. But this engagement operates within tight constraints: overlapping rivalries, internal Afghan volatility, and a fluid international order.
To navigate this landscape, India must move from the rhetoric of multi-alignment to the practice of compartmentalisation—managing contradictions with precision, and advancing its interests through a more coherent, issue-driven diplomacy. In a world where every alignment is partial and every partnership transactional, that may be the only sustainable strategy for a nation of India’s scale and ambition.
Swasti Rao is a Consulting Editor (International and Strategic Affairs) at ThePrint. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)