In a meeting that signalled an upgrade in India’s dealings with the Taliban, India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, met with Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, in January this year. It was the first high-level bilateral engagement between the two countries since the Taliban stormed to power in Afghanistan in 2021. Until this January, India’s relations with the Taliban government had been managed by an official at the subordinate level of joint secretary. Crucially, the high-level meeting occurred against the backdrop of deteriorating ties between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and of China’s expanding diplomatic footprint in Afghanistan.
As China increasingly engages the Taliban, it is creating pressures within New Delhi to formulate a viable Afghanistan policy for India that does not cede more space to China. Still lacking formal recognition from world governments and isolated from global institutions, the Taliban will find an India–China competition useful as it will help bring investment into Afghanistan and legitimacy to its government.
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, toppling a United States-backed republican administration, it re-established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, putting the country under the control of the group’s top religious leaders. Nearly four years later, the Taliban administration still operates as a caretaker government. Governments around the world have been reluctant to acknowledge the fundamentalist group as the legitimate power in Kabul due to concerns that it would reinstate ultra-conservative, discriminatory and extremist policies. These fears have proven justified, with the Taliban becoming increasingly repressive in its governance – particularly towards women, whom it has almost excised from public life.
In the past three and half years, global powers have had to rethink Afghanistan’s isolation and have slowly started reengaging with the Taliban. China made the quickest and most decisive move by formally accepting a Taliban envoy as the Afghan ambassador in Beijing. Its initial security concerns in Afghanistan were mainly related to threats emanating from militancy and separatism, and the flow of weapons across the Afghanistan–China border. Beijing’s increasing economic investment in Southasia, and particularly Pakistan, has embedded it deeper in the regional security complex, widening its security concerns to take in growing Chinese economic interests as well.