A Deal with the Devil? India’s High-Stakes Bet on the Taliban
The photograph that shocked Kabul in 1996 remains burned into collective memory—former President Mohammed Najibullah’s tortured body hanging from a lamp-post, the Taliban’s brutal announcement of their arrival. For Indians who had supported Afghanistan’s democratic forces, this image represented everything they feared and opposed. Yet nearly three decades later, India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar sat across the table from Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in New Delhi, discussing development projects and diplomatic cooperation. The irony is not lost on anyone.
Muttaqi’s week-long visit to India, ending on October 16th, marks a dramatic shift in South Asian geopolitics. This was the first time a Taliban minister has officially visited India, and the symbolism cannot be overstated. India announced it will upgrade its technical office in Kabul to a full embassy. Jaishankar handed over five ambulances as a goodwill gesture. Both sides spoke of working together on healthcare, infrastructure, and skill development. On paper, it sounds like a diplomatic success story. In reality, it represents India’s reluctant acceptance of a bitter truth—sometimes in international relations, you must talk to those you despise because ignoring them becomes more dangerous than engaging them.
The question that haunts this new relationship is simple: why now? Why, after years of treating the Taliban as Pakistan’s puppet organization, has India suddenly decided they are worth talking to? The answer lies not in any change of heart in New Delhi, but in the cold calculations of geopolitical necessity. India’s old allies in Afghanistan—the Northern Alliance led by figures like Burhanuddin Rabbani and the legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjsher—are shadows of their former strength. The Taliban controls Afghanistan with an iron grip, armed with billions of dollars worth of American weapons abandoned in the chaotic 2021 withdrawal. The regime is not going anywhere, and pretending otherwise serves no one’s interests, least of all India’s.
Yet India’s approach to the Taliban over the past decades reveals a troubling pattern of diplomatic blindness. Writing in The Diplomat, former Indian Army officer Ajai Shukla observed that the fact that India had to evacuate most of its embassy staff from a country where Afghans deeply respect Indians represents a fundamental failure of Indian diplomacy. For years, Shukla notes, the mandarins on Raisina Hill refused to engage with the Taliban, not even for basic dialogue. The reasoning was straightforward—the Taliban was seen as controlled by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, making conversations with them as pointless as talking directly to the ISI.
This perspective, while understandable given Pakistan’s historical support for the Taliban, ignored crucial realities on the ground. In a revealing conversation reported by The Diplomat in June 2011, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, asked with genuine bewilderment: “Why doesn’t India want to talk to us? New Delhi has always ignored us, yet we still wish to build friendly ties with India. But India keeps us away, treating us like outsiders and refusing to hold talks.” When The Diplomat’s correspondent explained that India viewed the Taliban as Pakistani puppets, Zaeef responded with characteristic Pashtun pride: “We are Pashtuns, not Pakistani puppets. We don’t respect the arrogant Punjabi rulers of Pakistan. When we make decisions, it’s for our country and our tribes, not for Pakistan. We may be strict Muslims, but we are Afghan nationalists, not Pakistani tools.”
Zaeef concluded that conversation by telling The Diplomat: “All Afghans—Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Pashtuns—love India and Indians. Do you really think the Taliban can go against such strong public feelings?” These words should have been a wake-up call for Indian policymakers. The Taliban, for all their brutal medieval governance and repressive religious ideology, are first and foremost Afghan nationalists with their own agenda. They have fought the Soviets, the Americans, and even periodically clashed with Pakistani interests when those interests conflicted with their vision for Afghanistan. Treating them as mere extensions of Rawalpindi’s strategic objectives was always an oversimplification, and one that cost India years of potential influence in a country where ordinary people harbor genuine affection for Indians.
The current situation in Afghanistan under Taliban rule since 2021 is undeniably grim. The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice once again enforces its harsh interpretation of Shariah law. Public beatings and executions have returned. Music is banned. Women are essentially imprisoned in their homes, denied education and basic freedoms. This is the same dark period that Afghans endured from 1996 to 2001, when the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate turned the country into an isolated, repressive theocracy. India is right to view this regime with deep concern and moral opposition.
But morality and strategy do not always align neatly in international relations. India’s primary security concern is ensuring that Afghan territory is not used by terrorist groups to launch attacks against India. This is not an abstract worry—the Taliban’s previous alliance with groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba directly threatened Indian security. Getting clear commitments from the current Taliban government that Afghan soil will not be used for anti-India terrorism is a concrete security necessity that transcends ideological preferences.
The diplomatic groundwork for Muttaqi’s October visit took months of careful preparation. In January 2025, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri met with Muttaqi in Dubai, the highest-level contact between the two sides since 2021. In May, Jaishankar and Muttaqi spoke by phone after the Taliban government condemned a terrorist attack in Pahalgam. These incremental steps built the trust necessary for a ministerial-level visit to New Delhi, something unthinkable just a few years ago.
India has been careful to emphasize that increased engagement does not mean official recognition of the Taliban government. This distinction matters both domestically and internationally. New Delhi is not endorsing the Taliban’s ideology or governance methods. Rather, it is acknowledging reality and pursuing India’s national interests within that reality. Other countries in the region, from Russia to China to the Central Asian republics, have made similar calculations, maintaining working relationships with Kabul while withholding formal recognition.
The path forward will not be easy or straightforward. These are not natural partners meeting from positions of mutual respect and shared values. India is engaging with a regime it finds morally repugnant out of hard strategic necessity. The Taliban, for their part, likely view India’s renewed interest through their own lens of suspicion and past grievances. Trust will be minimal, and progress measured in small, careful steps.
Yet as Mullah Zaeef told The Diplomat all those years ago, there is a foundation to build on—the cultural affinity and deep reservoir of goodwill that ordinary Afghans feel toward India. This is a strategic asset that New Delhi can no longer afford to ignore or squander.
The alternative to talking is continued isolation and irrelevance in a neighboring country of immense strategic importance. Afghanistan sits at the crossroads of South and Central Asia, sharing borders with Pakistan, Iran, China, and the Central Asian republics. India cannot afford to have zero influence in Kabul while rivals like Pakistan and China expand their footprints. Ordinary Afghans are exhausted by decades of war. They deserve peace, even if that peace comes under a government many find oppressive.
Diplomacy is often about engaging with unpleasant realities rather than waiting for ideal circumstances that may never arrive. India’s decision to upgrade its presence in Kabul and conduct direct ministerial talks with the Taliban reflects a mature, if belated, recognition of this truth. The mandarins on Raisina Hill have finally accepted what should have been obvious years ago—in Afghanistan’s complex geopolitical landscape, refusing to talk achieves nothing except self-imposed irrelevance.
The ambulances handed over by Jaishankar are symbolic of what this relationship might become—practical cooperation on humanitarian issues and development projects, carefully managed to serve India’s security interests while maintaining moral distance from the Taliban’s repressive domestic policies. It is not friendship. It is not endorsement. It is cold-blooded strategic necessity dressed in the language of diplomatic engagement.
Whether this pragmatic shift comes too late to rebuild the influence India once had in Afghanistan remains to be seen. The Taliban now controls the country with military strength India’s old allies cannot match. The weapons and leverage India might have used to shape events are largely gone. What remains is the option to engage or to continue shouting from the sidelines while others shape Afghanistan’s future.
India has chosen engagement, however reluctantly. It is the right choice, even if it means sitting across from those whose hands are stained with the blood of friends and allies. In the brutal arithmetic of international relations, sometimes the enemy you talk to is better than the enemy you ignore. For India and Afghanistan, this uncomfortable truth may be the foundation of a new, pragmatic relationship built not on trust or affection, but on the hard realities of geography, security, and mutual necessity.
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