Islamabad, Pakistan – When the Taliban took over Kabul in August 2021, then-Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan famously said the Afghan group had “broken the shackles of slavery” as they returned to power for the first time since 2001.

Taliban’s ascension was seen as a boost to the regional influence of Pakistan, long regarded as the patron of the Afghan group in pursuit of “strategic depth” for Islamabad.

This doctrine reflected Pakistan’s military interest in maintaining a strategic hold over Afghanistan through the Taliban and using it as leverage against India, its traditional adversary.

Three years later, that calculation appears to have flopped, instead leaving Pakistan’s officials fuming at ties with Kabul even as the Taliban edges closer to an unlikely partner: India.

India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri met acting Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in Dubai last week, marking the highest-profile public engagement between New Delhi and the Taliban. That meeting followed a series of steps taken by both sides that suggest a dramatic break from a quarter century of animus and distrust rooted in Pakistan’s support of the Taliban.

If this shift leads to an expansion of Indian influence in Afghanistan, that could strain Islamabad-Kabul ties, warned Iftikhar Firdous, co-founder of The Khorasan Diary, a portal tracking regional security issues. “Ultimately, the Afghan people, reliant on Pakistan’s borders, will bear the brunt of this tug-of-war,” he told Al Jazeera.

Old friend, new partner

From the 1980s when it backed the mujahideen against the Soviet Union through the first two decades of the 21st century, Pakistan was a primary backer of the Taliban, many of whose leaders found shelter on Pakistani soil.

India, by contrast, viewed the group as a Pakistani proxy, shuttering its embassy in Kabul after the Taliban first came to power in Afghanistan in 1996. It blamed the Taliban and its current allies in the government, including the Haqqanis, for repeatedly attacking Indian diplomatic missions in Afghanistan — the embassy in 2008 and 2009, and the Indian consulates in Jalalabad in 2013, Herat in 2014 and Mazar-i-Sharif in 2015.

Yet, a decade later, those equations no longer stand.

December 2024 saw Pakistan and Afghanistan exchanging strikes on each other’s territories, as Pakistan faced its deadliest year of violence, particularly against its law enforcement, since 2016. Pakistan said it was targeting Afghan bases of the Pakistan Taliban armed group, known by the acronym TTP, which Islamabad accuses the Afghan Taliban of harbouring.

Meanwhile, India appeared to have recalibrated its approach, engaging diplomatically with Taliban officials.

The first significant meeting took place in Kabul in November 2024, when JP Singh, joint secretary of India’s Ministry of External Affairs overseeing the Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran desk, met acting Afghan Defence Minister Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob.

A week later, the Taliban nominated Ikramuddin Kamil as their envoy to New Delhi, even though India is yet to formally recognise the current rulers of Kabul.

And after last week’s meeting between Misri and Muttaqi, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs described India as a “significant regional and economic partner”.

‘Geography does not change’

Some Pakistani analysts say Islamabad has no reason to worry — at least yet.

Asif Durrani, a former Pakistani special representative to Afghanistan, said that Pakistan and Kabul share a relationship deeper than what New Delhi and Kabul share. “India left Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover and has now returned upon assessing mutual business opportunities. Both India and Afghanistan are sovereign nations free to forge ties,” Durrani told Al Jazeera. “Pakistan may not object unless these relations become inimical to its interests,” he added.

Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United Nations, United States, and the United Kingdom, echoed this sentiment.

“Landlocked Afghanistan depends principally on Pakistan for trade as well as transit trade. Geography does not change just because India now seeks closer ties with Kabul,” she told Al Jazeera.

But while Afghanistan’s geography hasn’t changed, much else has, in recent years.

While India has poured in more than $3bn in Afghanistan during the last two decades, the primary trade route for the Afghan government remains the Pakistani border, where tensions have been escalating, as Islamabad’s worries about TTP attacks have grown.

The TTP, founded in 2007, shares ideological roots with the Afghan Taliban and has waged a violent rebellion against Pakistan. Data from last year showed more than 600 attacks in Pakistan, resulting in about 1,600 deaths, including nearly 700 law enforcement personnel. Most of these attacks were claimed by the TTP.

Pakistan has held multiple meetings with Afghan authorities, including a visit by its special representative, Mohammad Sadiq, in December after a TTP attack killed 16 Pakistani soldiers.

However, during Sadiq’s visit, who is serving his second tenure in this role, Pakistan’s military launched air attacks in Bermal, a district bordering Pakistan. The Afghan government, which denies sheltering armed groups, stated that the strikes killed at least 46 people, including women and children. Merely days later, Afghan Taliban retaliated, saying they targeted “several points” in Pakistan.

Lodhi pointed to Sadiq’s reappointment as special representative as a sign of efforts to repair ties. “Pakistan and Afghanistan are diplomatically re-engaging to reset relations after a year of intense tensions. Improved relations are a strategic imperative for both nations,” she said.

But the meeting between Misri and Muttaqi last week also included a conversation on a subject that some experts say could be another layer of complexity to Pakistan’s ties with the Afghan Taliban: development of Iran’s Chabahar port by India.

The Chabahar factor

The Afghan Foreign Ministry, in its statement on the meeting between Muttaqi and Misri, said they spoke about enhancing trade using Chabahar port, which can help otherwise landlocked Afghanistan bypass Pakistan to receive and send goods.

Chabahar is in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province, just across the border from Pakistan’s Balochistan province — a resource-rich part of the country where Islamabad has long battled separatist groups. Many of these rebels have sought refuge in Iran.

Iran launched air raids on Pakistani soil in January 2024, targeting alleged hideouts of anti-Tehran armed groups that have found shelter in Balochistan. Pakistan also retaliated with its strikes.

While tensions between Iran and Pakistan following those strikes eased, Islamabad has long accused New Delhi of fomenting the Baloch nationalist movement.

Pakistan has cited the 2016 arrest of Kulbhushan Yadav, alleged by Islamabad to be an Indian spy operating in Balochistan. India denies the charges, claiming Yadav was abducted from Iran.

“Indian involvement in Balochistan and its support for separatists is a longstanding Pakistani narrative, underscored by Yadav’s capture,” Firdous said.

Against that backdrop, “references to Chabahar port and its involvement in Afghan-Indian trade will be seen by Pakistan as interventionist,” the Peshawar-based analyst added.

The meeting in Dubai between Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and Amir Khan Muttaqi, acting foreign minister of the Taliban, on Wednesday this week has confirmed India’s intentions to raise its influence with the Afghan leadership, analysts say.

India has been gradually upping relations with the Taliban over the past year but this latest meeting marked the first high-level engagement of its kind.

India has invested more than $3bn in aid and reconstruction work in Afghanistan in the past 20 years and a statement from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs laid out the usual talking points: regional developments, trade and humanitarian cooperation plus an agreement to resume developmental projects and to support the health sector and refugees in Afghanistan.

However, it was what was left unsaid in that statement – but which was evident from the timing and agenda of this meeting – that signalled a shift in the geopolitical realities of the region.

For one, the meeting comes just days after India issued a condemnation of Pakistan’s air attacks on Afghanistan which have reportedly killed at least 46 people in the last month.

It also comes on the heels of the Taliban’s appointment of an acting consul in the Afghan consulate in Mumbai, in November last year.

While the Indian government did not comment on the appointment, the timing coincided with a visit by India’s joint secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs to Kabul the same month.

The Taliban’s deployment to Mumbai of Ikramuddin Kamil, a former Afghan student in India-turned Taliban diplomat, places India on a growing list of countries, including Russia, China, Turkiye, Iran and Uzbekistan, which have allowed the Taliban to take over operations in Afghan embassies. Earlier, in 2022, India also sent a small technical team to partially reopen its embassy in Kabul.

A strategic shift?

These recent events signal a deepening of ties between New Delhi and Kabul, observers say.

But the move may not be the strategic shift it appears, said Kabir Taneja, deputy director and fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think tank. “It is just a natural progression of what has been India’s cautious and protracted approach to the Taliban’s reality in Kabul since 2021,” he said. “Much like other neighbours, for India as well the Taliban is a reality, and ignoring Afghanistan and the Afghan people is not an option.”

Raghav Sharma, associate professor at the Jindal School of International Affairs in New Delhi, agreed. “I think this is a continuation of the earlier policy where we are sort of engaging with the Taliban, but we don’t really want to acknowledge the depth of our engagement,” he said, noting that policy has seldom emerged from such dialogues.

“When it comes to diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, we have remained on the periphery,” he added, referring to a study by the Washington Institute, a US think tank that analysed international engagement with the Taliban. The study found that countries including Qatar, China and Turkiye are leading the way in developing relations with the Taliban, with Pakistan at number five in terms of influence.

“India is not even there on the list,” Sharma said.

“For the longest time, India has been saying that Afghanistan is a country of strategic importance, and we have had historical ties, but then you’ve got to walk the talk,” Sharma added. “After the fall of the republic government, we put Afghanistan in a cold storage, only addressing it when we needed, on an ad hoc basis.”

Indian reluctance lingers

One positive move which may come out of all this, Taneja said, is the prospect of visas for Afghans. “The main takeaway from Misri-Muttaqi engagement is that India may be close to restarting a tranche of visas for Afghans, specifically in trade, health tourism and education,” he said.

India was criticised for suspending Afghan visas, including medical and student visas, in the aftermath of the Taliban takeover in 2021. It has issued very few visas to Afghans since then. “It is high time New Delhi came around to do this,” Taneja said. “It will bring relief to many Afghan citizens who had used India as their preferred choice for attaining higher education, medical attention, and so on.”

Sharma said he was less hopeful that more visas will be issued, because of security concerns. “At the end of the day, the Taliban are an ideological movement, and their resurgence to power has resulted in an uptick of radicalisation which is going to be a challenge,” he said.

India needs to remain involved in the region, too. “It believes that by keeping the channel open to the Taliban, they’ll be able to engage them at least on some issues that matter to India. Will the Taliban be able to deliver is another question because what are the leverages that we have vis-a-vis the Taliban?” he added.

The meeting was needed by the Taliban more than by India, Sharma said. With the group engaged in military clashes with Pakistan, a former ally of the Taliban, it is eager to demonstrate that it has a wider ambit of options available.

“They [the Taliban] want to show [autonomy] to Pakistan particularly. But also it helps them play against the larger propaganda that they have no strategic autonomy, they have no agency and that they are merely stooges of Pakistan,” he said, referring to the Taliban’s portrayal in the international arena that analysts say has been influenced by the Pakistani military establishment.

Cautious steps or just a lack of strategy?

There are other reasons India may be reluctant to go further with the Taliban. Closer ties could put “the world’s largest democracy” in an ethical quagmire, say analysts.

“India has long tried to market and position itself as the largest democracy in the world, but has failed to even condemn the banning of girls’ education in Afghanistan. There has been absolute pin-drop silence on these issues. So what signal are we sending to the population back home?” Sharma asked.

India has maintained a strong presence in Afghanistan and was one of the first countries to send a diplomatic mission after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. However, despite significant interests in the region, India has lacked a coherent policy on the country.

“Any manoeuvres that India wanted to make, it has always done that in alignment with other powers with whom we found a convergence of interest. That’s largely been Iran and Russia in the past, and then the Americans,” Sharma said. Following the collapse of the US-backed republic government, India found itself in a new situation.

As many countries around the world quickly moved to adjust to the new reality, India put Afghanistan into “cold storage”, Sharma repeated. Even the US, he said, “has been working with the Taliban on a counterterrorism to deal with the ISKP”. The ISKP (Islamic State of Khorasan Province) is a regional branch of ISIL (ISIS) and has been known to operate within Afghanistan.

At the same time, “countries like Iran that enabled and facilitated the Taliban, even Pakistan, have kept channels of communication open to the opposition,” Sharma added. “Iran hosts opposition figures like Ismael Khan. The Tajik government which was very critical initially of the Taliban is not so any more but continues to host the opposition.”

‘Putting all our eggs in the Taliban basket’

Now, stakeholders in the region are assessing what the incoming Trump administration in the United States could mean for the Taliban.

“Afghanistan has dropped from the political consciousness in Washington, DC,” Taneja said. While the country remains relevant on the security front, it “will not supersede more immediate issues such as Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine”.

What happens next is hard to say, he added. “Trump’s strategies are akin to predicting weather on a daily basis. However, any Taliban opposition which is trying to gain strength may find a more approachable ear under Trump than they ever did under Biden.”

Ultimately, despite being the strongest power in the region, India has failed to engage with diverse players in Afghanistan, isolating its interests in the long run. “Initially, we made a mistake of putting all our eggs in the [Hamid] Karzai [former Afghan president] basket and then the [Ashraf] Ghani basket. We did in Bangladesh too and threw all our support for Sheikh Hasina.”

Repairing this could take time as India may also lack crucial understanding of Afghan society, Sharma said.

“It is not just about cultivating ties at the political level, it’s also understanding about how certain sociopolitical setups operate. I don’t think India has that understanding which is ironic because we are close to them geographically [and] culturally. Yet we’ve invested very little in terms of trying to understand the society,” he said.

“I believe we are repeating that same mistake, and putting all our eggs in the Taliban basket,” Taneja said, warning that Afghanistan’s political climate has always been very volatile.

“Ground shifts very rapidly,” he added.