By Dr. Davood Moradian

Referring to the US’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan as “the greatest embarrassment in the history of the US" has become President Trump’s regular public outburst.[[1]] The prominent member of the European Parliament, Hannah Neumann, has recently characterised Afghanistan under the Taliban’s occupation as “hell”.[[2]] How would India characterise its version of Afghanistan’s debacle?

India’s decision to abstain from voting for a UN General Assembly resolution on the situation of Afghanistan in early July 2025 sheds light on India's evolving thinking on the post-2021 Afghanistan. India joined 12 other countries, including China, Russia and Iran, in abstaining from voting. India’s UN envoy P. Harish justified India’s decision on the grounds of the harsh language of the resolution against the Taliban.[[3]] 

Even the most imaginative novelist could not write such a far-fetched story in which India’s senior diplomat chose to defend the Taliban at the UN headquarters. Interestingly, the U.S. vetoed the resolution on the grounds of being too soft on the Taliban.

What drives India’s policy from fiercely opposing the Taliban to advocating for them on the international stage? In evolving the Great Game in Afghanistan, can India work alongside its arch enemies, Pakistan and China, in befriending the Taliban? If so, what leverage and constituency can India mobilise?

Answering these questions is better understood in the context of India’s relationship with Afghanistan prior to the Taliban’s return in August 2021.

Prior to the partition of the subcontinent, the history of India and Afghanistan was intertwined; in many respects, the two countries shared a singular civilisational and geopolitical space. There are more Persian manuscripts in Delhi’s libraries than in Tehran, Kabul, Dushanbe, and Bokhara combined.

The creation of Pakistan by retreating British colonial power created an open wound at the heart of the region. In its first war against the newly independent India, the Pakistani army mobilised Pashtun tribal fighters to attack India in 1948.[[4]] At the same time, the tribal agencies alongside Afghanistan and Pakistan borders became the source of decades-old animosities between the two countries when the Afghan government unilaterally annulled the Durand Line treaty, which was earlier signed by the Afghan government and the British Raj. In other words, the tribal agencies became a double-edged sword for Pakistan; on one hand, it served as a sanctuary to recruit and mobilise tribal militias against its external and domestic foes and at the same time, the area has become a source of permanent tension with its neighbours. Afghanistan and India’s civilizational affinity was further reinforced by geopolitical compulsion, which was managing their insecure but hegemonic neighbour, Pakistan. With the brief exception of 1997-2021, India and Afghanistan enjoyed amicable relations.

The Golden Era

The collapse of the Taliban’s regime in 2001 and the emergence of a Western-supported constitutional republic provided India with its golden era in Afghanistan. The US’s massive engagement and investment in Afghanistan created favourable conditions for India to cultivate a multifaceted relationship with all of Afghanistan’s key stakeholders. This culminated in the signing of Afghanistan-India’s Strategic Partnership Agreement  (AISPA) in 2011.[[5]] The AISPA envisaged institutionalisation of their respective relationships in three key areas: security/military, economic/development, and people-to-people relationships. However, there were fundamental differences between Kabul’s expectations and Delhi’s will and capacity. India aimed for a developmental partnership, coupled with significant “soft power“ elements; whereas Kabul’s strategic community looked at India as complementing Washington’s strategic relationship and ideally a replacement for Washington.

By late 2010, Kabul had already suspected Washington’s double game when the Taliban were allowed to open their office in Doha. Washington’s outreach to the Taliban in 2009 effectively put an end to the “Bonn Process ” and the emergence of the “Doha Creep”. The Bonn process refers to the UN-led conference in the German city of Bonn in December 2001, which established a political process for post-Taliban Afghanistan. The Doha Creep was the process that initially aimed to integrate the Taliban into the Bonn process, but ended up with the Taliban dismantling the Bonn process. 

The seed for the Taliban’s eventual return was sown within the Bonn process. Just weeks after U.S. military operations against the Taliban, the U.S. allowed the airlifting of hundreds of stranded Pakistani commandos, Taliban fighters, and Al-Qaeda members from Afghanistan in November 2021.[[6]] This was followed by imposing an imperial presidential system and bringing in the Islamist warlords and groups to put in charge of Afghanistan's democratisation experiment.   The Doha Creep was first initiated by the UK in 2005-2006[[7]] and gained traction after the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011.

Delhi shared Kabul’s suspicion and fear of the Doha creep; however, it refused to invest adequately in protecting Afghanistan’s nascent constitutional order against the looming Doha Creep. Instead, it remained focused on its “developmental” partnership and “soft power”  self-gratification. The highly advertised Afghanistan and India Strategic Partnership Council met only once in 2014, making the AISPA effectively a PR exercise.

Despite Kabul’s frustration with Delhi’s hesitancy and caution, Pakistan’s anti-India campaign, including targeting India’s diplomatic missions, did not deter India-Afghanistan’s bilateral relations from remaining enviable at different levels throughout this period. As a gesture of its affectionate relations with India, Afghanistan voluntarily gave up its chance to be elected to the UN Security Council in favour of India. Their blossoming bilateral relationship encouraged their political leaders and strategic thinkers to develop a shared vision for the region. Former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke of his dream for the region where  "one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore, and dinner in Kabul". In Afghanistan, the vision of “Nowruzistan” was promoted, in which the region restored its earlier connected, inclusive, pluralistic identity symbolised by the shared regional festival of Nowruz, which is celebrated in Northern India, Central Asia, Caucasus and West Asia.

On August 15, 2021, the Bonn process and the vision of Nowruzistan were buried under the victorious Taliban’s feet. The Doha Creep gave birth to the “Kandahar Caliphate”.

The Kandahar Caliphate

The Taliban were referring to their victory, similar to the Prophet Mohammed’s conquest of Mecca from the pagans and the Mujahideen’s defeat of the Soviet backed secular Afghan government a decade earlier. Unlike naive Western analysts and Taliban’s Pashtun apologists, for the Taliban and their global Islamist brethren, their victory was interpreted as a divine triumph, not a mere civil war resolution. The Taliban soon began the process of restructuring and transforming both the Afghan state and society.[[8]] Kandahar became the seat of the newly created Islamic Emirate of the Taliban, reducing Kabul to the administrative toll of the Supreme Leader. The Emir’s decrees have replaced Afghanistan’s flawed constitution. All administrative, judicial, and military appointments are made by the Emir, who remains invisible and inaccessible even to the Taliban’s so-called ministers. The Pashtun misogynistic proverb, “the place of a woman is either at home or in the grave,” has become the guiding policy of the Taliban. For the first time in human history, Afghan women are barred from almost all public spaces, such as secondary schools, universities, public parks, beauty parlours, government offices, and media appearances. Afghanistan is now recognised as the world's first gender apartheid by a growing number of legal scholars and human rights organisations. [[9]]

Taliban-occupied Afghanistan has become the Islamist version of North Korea in terms of political oppression, humanitarian crises, international isolation and China's stooge. The Islamic Emirate of the Taliban has also become both the inspirational model and the physical hub for more than twenty transnational terrorist organisations, as regularly reported by the UN.[[10]] Afghanistan will soon become the world's largest host of Maddaris thanks to the Taliban's massive Maddarasa building campaign.[[11]] The Taliban are transforming Afghanistan into the Great Waziristan, where the nexus of drugs,  criminality, misogyny, Jihadist madrasas, terrorist  camps and foreign spooks reign. Afghanistan has become the first and only country in the world where the internet is considered to be shut down due to public pressure on the grounds of political and cultural control.

Delhi’s Capitulation to the Kandahar Caliphate

Plato, in his masterpiece on political philosophy, addressed the three foundational principles and concepts of Security, Interest, and Honour. He linked these concepts to his conception of an ideal state and the tripartite nature of the soul. While there are many examples and benchmarks for "security" and "interest" in politics and international relations, there are few, if any, regarding the concept of "honour".

In the summer of 2021, thousands of individuals and many organisations and nations were confronted by the task of honouring their promise to their allies who were suddenly caught in the Taliban’s occupied Afghanistan. The scene of Kabul airport during the latter part of August 2021 became a global symbol of Afghans' desperation and helplessness to escape the Taliban. It was also the scene of an extraordinary global effort to mobilise and evacuate stranded Afghans and even dogs and cats. Among these global efforts, India became the only country to shut its doors to all Afghans.

The female member of the Afghan Parliament was denied entry to India in late August 2021, despite having valid travel documents.[[12]] Thereafter, India issued a blanket ban on all Afghans travelling to India, including students, patients, businessmen, journalists, civil society activists and politicians. Indian government officials also suddenly cut all their communications with their Afghan counterparts. Effectively, Afghans became 'persona non grata' for the Indian bureaucracy, immigration, and diplomacy. It was both unprecedented and inhuman. Even Afghanistan’s problematic neighbours, Iran and Pakistan, opened their borders to thousands of fleeing Afghans, including members of the Afghan military and security personnel. From nearly eight million Afghans who fled the Taliban's reign of terror, oppression, and poverty,[[13]] India refused to accept anyone, including former senior Afghan officials.

Banning Afghans from entering India was extended through ensuing years, except for members of the Taliban. India rapidly shifted its anti-Taliban strategy towards courting them directly and via third parties. The Taliban, in their desperation to lessen their diplomatic isolation, allowed India to reopen their diplomatic mission under the disguise of a technical team. The so-called technical team soon elevated into a security-intelligence team to establish working relationships with the Taliban’s notorious security apparatus.  India also started issuing visas to Taliban officials and their relatives. Opportunistically, India has recently promised to lift visa ban to non-Taliban Afghan applicants during its desperate attempt to entice the Taliban to condemn the Pahalgham attack.[[14]]  In the "Great Waziristan", India's spooks are its main players to compete with their rivals over courting the Taliban.

Notwithstanding a handful of individuals, many of India's research organisations, universities, parliamentarians, media outlets, women rights groups, civil society activists, and former officials follow the official lines in keeping their distance from Afghanistan's democratic constituencies. It was reported that a prominent Indian think tank invited a senior Afghan leader to attend a conference and asked for a letter of authorisation from the Taliban to facilitate his participation.

India's officials congratulate themselves on pulling rabbits out of their hat and sleeves in befriending the Taliban; a demonstration of Delhi's skill in realpolitik and diplomatic coup. The occasional clash between the Taliban fighters and Pakistani troops has certainly reinforced the impression that Delhi has returned to the game of encirclement of Pakistan via its new Afghan proxies. If there were a prize for historical and geopolitical naivety, India’s Taliban bond could receive the top spot. This is equivalent to the ill-thought decision to remove the Taj Mahal from the tourist booklet by Uttar Pradesh tourism agency.  During Operation Sindoor, India's cry to condemn terrorist groups and to dismantle terrorist infrastructure hardly attracted any sympathetic ears. India could not serve green tea to the most successful terrorist group, the Taliban while expecting others to condemn the Taliban's offspring.  

Political and geopolitical miscalculations or taking risky political and foreign policy decisions are integral to any policy decision-making process. India's approach to the Taliban could have been probed, but not at the expense of alienating the entire Afghan nation, humiliating Afghanistan's democratic constituencies and abandoning India's Afghan allies. To use Plato's tripartite political philosophy concept, the Taliban's return to power resulted in India's loss of security and interest. The ensuing Indian's strategy led it to lose its honour in Afghanistan. It would be a herculean task for India to restore its honour as well as secure its interests and security in Afghanistan for generation(s) to come.

This article was originally published in the book "The Taliban in Afghanistan: Changing Attitudes of India and the World", released by "The Hindu" in November 2025.

Dr. Davood Moradian is the Director-General of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies and a Former Senior Policy Adviser at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He tweets @DrMoradian1.

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The article does not reflect the official opinion of the AISS

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