Making sense of New Delhi’s Taliban interactions

The success and fate of the Pakistan-led coalition in toppling the United States-backed constitutional order in Afghanistan has brought unexpected developments. While a growing number of Taliban’s western and regional lobbyists are distancing themselves from their victory, India pulled a hare from its diplomatic hat by sending a senior diplomatic delegation to Taliban-held Kabul. The visit was the culmination of months of calm diplomacy and gesture in Delhi. In 2021, just hours after the Taliban takeover, India was the first country to immediately ban all Afghans coming to India, including students and patients with valid Indian visas. In a significant but not widely covered decision, India opted to stay away from the UN Security Council’s call for the Taliban to open girls’ schools and continue to remain silent about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

India’s apparent re-orientation can be described and understood as an example of the superficiality of “values” and “feelings” in the Hobbesian world of real politics, national interest, and international politics. India’s neutral stance on Russia’s entanglement in Ukraine reveals the Indian version of an “India first” foreign policy.

However, Delhi’s flirtation with the Taliban raises several pertinent questions: What are India’s major strategic interests in Afghanistan? How could a possible Indo-Taliban rapprochement advance such interests? Does the Taliban have the intention and/or ability to deliver on their promise and vice versa? How will India engage with anti-Taliban constituencies? How will India’s aspiration to become a global power be fulfilled by allying with an unacceptable regime like the Taliban?

India on target of alliance

Afghanistan is a security-focused concern, in particular, the nexus of Islamic extremism, illegal drugs and proxy war. India is the primary target of this alliance. The Taliban victory realized two important ideological and strategic goals of the militant Islamists and their Pakistani patrons: to establish a “pure Islamic government” in the heart of Asia and to gain “strategic depth” of Pakistan. Two concepts are essential pre-conditions for achieving another long-standing vision of Islamists, Ghazwa-e-Hind.

There are both historical precedents and existing infrastructure to support a nexus of religious fanatics, tribal warriors and royal ambitions. Mahmud Ghaznavi was the first to recruit tribal warriors from the present-day Afghanistan/Pakistan border region who invaded and plundered India 1,000 years ago. The British applied a similar strategy in the early 20th century to weaken and eventually topple the progressive king of Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan. In its first war against India in 1948, Pakistan mobilized a tribal army to attack India.

The central pillar of the West’s anti-Soviet strategy in Afghanistan was funding and support to the Mujahideen through a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-led operation called “Operation Cyclone”. Pakistan’s geo-strategic vision for Afghanistan is to create a “Greater Waziristan”, ruled by a separate, brutal and dogmatic Taliban regime funded by UN/Western humanitarian aid. In turn, Greater Waziristan would become a major center for the production, training and shelter of various brands of “tribal/Islamic warriors” for different markets. More than 6,000 religious madrassas in Afghanistan will be merged with 40,000 in Pakistan to create the world’s largest network of terrorism-inspired educational institutions.

wishful thinking

New Delhi is also hopeful of capitalizing on the personal animosity of some Taliban commanders against Pakistan and hence its wishful thinking of creating an India-friendly faction within the Taliban. Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment has shown its brutal and skillful approach in dealing with dissidents, “out of control” and “outdated” proxies. The fate of Pakistani politicians such as Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, Imran Khan or Pakistan’s Afghan representatives such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, the former supreme leader of the Taliban, showed Pakistan’s zealous determination to maintain its monopoly behind its veils. The anti-Muslim leanings of India’s ruling party have also provided additional ammunition to the advocates of “Gazwa-e-Hind”.

Ground facts are often cited to justify genuine foreign policy; A justification by those advocating affiliation with the Taliban. There are other facts that should be taken into account. America’s peace deal with the Taliban ended America’s half-baked and confused hostility with the Taliban. However, this did not end the other drivers of the Afghan conflict. The following social media trends reveal the full picture of the grieving struggle among Afghan users: Ban Pakistan; Let Afghan girls learn; stop the Hazara massacre; stop the genocide; Partition Afghanistan. The Taliban have driven all non-Taliban Pashtuns out of public spaces, as evidenced by the house arrest of former President Hamid Karzai; There is also systematic violation of the human rights of non-Pashtun communities which is a crime against humanity, and ethnic cleansing which borders on genocide. For the first time, the division of the country into Pashtun-majority and Persian-majority states has, unfortunately, become a political discourse between Persian constituencies.

The illusion of ‘India First’

An “India First” policy appears to be in sync with the Taliban in Delhi. If so, it would destroy a central pillar of India’s foreign and security policy, dismantling the region’s “terrorist infrastructure”. The Taliban victory is the best product of this infrastructure. It will defy the logic of being critical of a production system as well when adopting its premium product. India cannot behave as a bandwagon, transactional, opportunistic vendor as a “civilizational state” and as a persuasive global power.

Despite India’s strategic hesitation and caution during the past two decades in Afghanistan, it achieved two important criteria of being an ideal and reliable partner. Many Afghans saw India as an example of a developing country that faced the many challenges of building and maintaining a functioning democratic polity. More importantly, unlike many double-faced actors, India was seen as an honest friend of Afghanistan. Even for an “interest”-based foreign policy, it is counterproductive to lose Afghan trust and goodwill towards India by adopting a policy doomed to failure on many grounds.

Since August 15, 2021, Afghanistan has descended from a Pax Americana experiment to the ambition of a “Pax Pakistan”. The prospects of peace and stability in Afghanistan are not possible under PACS Pakistan Dominion as Pakistan itself is grappling with many internal and external challenges. Afghanistan requires a strong UN mandate, including a UN-led political transition process supported by a UN peacekeeping/making force. India can extend its support to such efforts as are worthy of its character, ambition and needs of Afghanistan.

Dawood Moradian is the director of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS). He has previously served in the office of President Hamid Karzai and as Chief Policy Adviser in Afghanistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has taught at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and the American University of Afghanistan