Pakistan’s fears over closer India-Taliban ties are influencing its approach to peace talks with Kabul, analysts say.
Islamabad, Pakistan – On October 28 after negotiators from Pakistan and Afghanistan hit a wall in talks to extend their fragile ceasefire after deadly border clashes, Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif blamed a third country that wasn’t even present during the dialogue: India.
In a television interview, Asif claimed that India had “penetrated” the Afghan Taliban leadership. That, he insisted, was the reason for the escalation in tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
He complimented the Taliban leadership at the talks in Istanbul. “But the people in Kabul pulling the strings and staging the puppet show are being controlled by Delhi,” Asif charged. “India wants to engage in a low-intensity war with Pakistan. To achieve this, they are using Kabul.”
The defence minister presented no evidence to back his claim that India was propping up the Taliban to challenge Pakistan. But his comments represent a growing attempt by Pakistan to portray its tensions with Afghanistan as the outcome of a growing friendship between the Taliban and India.
As Pakistani and Afghan troops were clashing along the border earlier in the month, Asif said the Taliban was “sitting in India’s lap”. Islamabad has accused the Taliban of allowing anti-Pakistan armed groups like the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to operate from Afghan soil and has claimed – again without public evidence – that India is behind the TTP.
The Taliban leadership has rejected the accusation that India has had any role in the crisis between Pakistan and Afghanistan and has denied any responsibility in the TTP’s repeated attacks on Pakistani soil.
Still, analysts said, the decision by Pakistani leaders like Asif to invoke India as an alleged shadowy villain pulling the strings of the Taliban underscores the deep unease in Islamabad over ties between New Delhi and Kabul. For Pakistan, wedged between Afghanistan to the west and India to the east, New Delhi’s expanding footprint in Kabul is a source of deep suspicion.
As Pakistani and Afghan negotiators prepare to meet in Istanbul on Thursday for the next round of talks that Qatar and Turkiye are mediating, India is increasingly the elephant in the room, analysts said.
Regional rivalries
When a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck northern Afghanistan on Monday, one of the first countries to offer aid was India.
Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar phoned his Taliban counterpart, Amir Khan Muttaqi, and New Delhi shipped 15 tonnes of food to quake-hit Balkh and Samangan provinces. Medical supplies, he said, would follow soon.
Jaishankar’s outreach came just a few days after Muttaqi completed a six-day visit to India, the first by an Afghan Taliban leader to New Delhi since the group seized power for a second time in Kabul in August 2021.
The visit also underscored a wider re-engagement between India and the Taliban in recent years, capped by New Delhi’s decision last month to reopen its embassy in Kabul.
The regional landscape is very different from four years ago when the Afghan Taliban returned to power. At that time, India had paused most of its diplomatic operations in Afghanistan while Pakistan’s influence in Kabul was widely seen as having increased.
For years, Pakistan had been the Taliban’s primary patron. India, for its part, long regarded the Taliban as a Pakistani proxy. It accused the group and its allies of repeatedly targeting Indian diplomatic posts in Kabul, Jalalabad, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif from 2001 to 2021 when the Taliban was out of power and was fighting US forces and the Afghan governments that Western troops supported.
Islamabad’s longstanding doctrine of “strategic depth” is rooted in the military’s desire to wield leverage in Afghanistan and blunt India’s influence in South Asia.
Since 2021, however, the Taliban have pursued a more conciliatory posture towards New Delhi.
C Raja Mohan, a former member of India’s National Security Advisory Board, recently wrote in his column for Foreign Policy magazine that India’s re-engagement with Kabul since 2021 has been “cautious, pragmatic and deliberately quiet”.
This shift, however, has unnerved Islamabad, especially as Pakistan now faces security threats on both its borders.
The Pahalgam attack in April, which killed at least 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir and for which India blamed Pakistan-based groups, became a flashpoint.
India’s retaliation two weeks later escalated tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals and resulted in a four-day conflict in May.
Five days after a ceasefire, Jaishankar called Muttaqi to express his appreciation for Afghanistan’s condemnation of the Pahalgam attack and to reiterate support for Afghan development.
“Underlined our traditional friendship with the Afghan people and continuing support for their development needs. Discussed ways and means of taking cooperation forward,” the Indian external affairs minister wrote on his X account.
After clashing with India in May, Pakistan also engaged in a weeklong fight with Afghanistan that took place while Muttaqi was visiting India.
The fighting eventually ended through a ceasefire, which was mediated by Qatar and Turkiye over two rounds of talks in Doha and Istanbul. But the peace remains tenuous at best.
Deeper anxieties
Yet some analysts argued Pakistan’s concerns reflect longstanding strategic anxieties rather than recent developments with Afghanistan.
Amina Khan of the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad said Pakistan had expected the Taliban not to create “space or vacuum” for India, an expectation that has not been met.
Khan noted that the recent visit by Muttaqi to India resulted in strong statements that were issued not only by the Afghan government but also Indian officials, which led to an increase in Pakistani apprehensions.
Randhir Jaiswal, spokesperson for the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, in news briefings last month said that while India was closely monitoring the Pakistan-Afghanistan border tensions, it was Pakistan’s “old practice” to blame its neighbours for its internal failures.
“Pakistan is infuriated with Afghanistan exercising sovereignty over its own territories. India remains fully committed to the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of Afghanistan,” Jaiswal said on October 16.
Khan, though, said that ultimately, Pakistan needs to view its relationship with Afghanistan independent of ties with other nations.
“Pakistan has a bilateral relationship with Afghanistan, and that should be viewed in complete isolation,” she told Al Jazeera. “Similarly, despite the tensions and clashes, India-Pakistan ties should also be viewed independently without including the Afghan factor.”
Competing narratives
Pakistan has long accused India of supporting unrest in its southwestern province of Balochistan, where separatist groups such as the Baloch Liberation Army and Baloch Liberation Front have fought for secession.
Islamabad pointed to the arrest of former Indian navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav in March 2016 in Balochistan as proof of India’s meddling. New Delhi denied the allegations and called them baseless.
But the Pakistani government has also linked a recent rise in violence across Pakistan – especially in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, both of which share the country’s 2,600km-long (1,615-mile-long) border with Afghanistan – to armed groups operating from Afghan territory.
Islamabad, in particular, accused the Taliban of providing safe havens on Afghan soil to the TTP, which is often called the Pakistan Taliban and has claimed a series of deadly attacks on Pakistani soil in recent years. The TTP, which emerged in 2007, is distinct from the Afghan Taliban but shares ideological affinities.
This year, however, Pakistan’s official messaging has increasingly framed both Baloch separatists and the TTP as Indian-sponsored proxies, a rhetorical move intended to tie disparate threats to a single external adversary, analysts said.
Former Pakistani diplomat Asif Durrani told Al Jazeera that leaders of Baloch groups had “proudly acknowledged” Indian assistance and alleged New Delhi supported the TTP through intermediaries from 2001 to 2021. Pakistan has not offered any public proof to back its claims of Indian support for the TTP.
Now with ties with the Afghan Taliban improving, Durrani said India would “be able to manoeuvre in Afghanistan”.
“I don’t think they are necessarily dictating terms to [the] Afghan Taliban, but it is likely a case of quid pro quo where Indians will give aid to them in lieu of [the] Taliban looking the other way.”
Strategic suspicion
Ibraheem Bahiss, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, said Pakistan’s military establishment tends to view Afghanistan primarily through an Indian lens.
“The Pakistani security establishment does not see Afghanistan itself as an existential threat. But it is certainly compounded by the idea of a much larger and potent threat that is posed by India. And in that context, Afghanistan does become a much bigger concern for policymakers in Islamabad,” he told Al Jazeera.
Bahiss added, however, that it was hard for Pakistan to back its assertion that India was behind such diverse groups as the TTP and Baloch separatists.
“TTP share ideological, social and linguistic connections to the Afghan Taliban, but the Baloch groups are on the completely opposite end of the spectrum with their secular outlook,” he said.
“When you claim that India and the Taliban, two entities with a bitter history, are coming together to support two entirely disparate groups, that is not a very believable, cohesive narrative.”
Yet Islamabad treats the two relationships – with Kabul and with New Delhi – as mutually reinforcing threats.
Khan warned that recent statements by Kabul and New Delhi accusing Pakistan of supporting “terrorism” suggested an emerging, if tacit, convergence of interests, which she described as a “marriage of convenience”.
Risk of escalation
While Pakistan’s eastern border with India has been quiet since the May ceasefire, relations have been tense.
Both sides have traded claims of battlefield success, including conflicting assertions about aircraft losses, and ramped up their rhetoric.
Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh warned in October that any aggression in the Sir Creek area would be met with a “resounding response that will change both history and geography”.
The Sir Creek region is an almost 100km-long (62-mile-long) tidal estuary between Indian Gujarat’s Rann of Kutch and Pakistan that has long been disputed between the two neighbours.
On October 27, Singh told soldiers India must remain ready for a “warlike” situation, citing lessons from the May conflict.
Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, issued a counterwarning at a passing-out parade at Pakistan’s premier military academy on October 18.
“The onus of ensuing escalations, one that may ultimately bear catastrophic consequences for the entire region and beyond, will squarely lie with India,” he said. “Should a fresh wave of hostilities be triggered, Pakistan would respond much beyond the expectations of the initiators.”
Both countries have deployed forces in the Arabian Sea and are conducting major exercises.
Seema Ilahi Baloch, a former Pakistani ambassador who has participated in informal talks with Afghanistan, said the timing of India’s re-engagement with Kabul adds to Pakistan’s unease.
“The war of words between Pakistan and India will become stronger in the coming days, and any future clash cannot be ruled out,” she told Al Jazeera.
Source: Aljazeera
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