Afghan Taliban’s commerce minister, Nooruddin Azizi, has landed in New Delhi on a maiden visit to draw greater investments and goods. This comes on the heels of Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi’s unprecedented trip to Delhi in October, the first high-level Taliban visit to India since 2021. For a regime that long vilified India as a Hindu “idol-worshipping” enemy and denounced previous Afghan governments as Indian puppets, this shift is striking.
New Delhi has quietly upgraded its Kabul office to a full embassy while still insisting it does not recognise the Taliban government. Yet the Taliban now seek Indian markets, Indian aid and Indian credit for wheat, medicines and infrastructure. Afghan officials now concede that India has become Afghanistan’s most significant regional trading partner. When Pakistan tightened border controls last month in response to escalating violence, Kabul admitted losing more than $100m in trade almost overnight and moved swiftly to compensate through India-backed corridors. But economics alone does not explain this sudden warmth. What alarms Islamabad is how this alignment mirrors older, documented patterns of India cultivating anti-Pakistan militant proxies inside Afghanistan.
Pakistan has repeatedly produced evidence that factions of the TTP and the BLA (responsible for some of the deadliest attacks on Pakistani soil) have received money, logistics and political facilitation through networks linked to Indian intelligence. Since the Taliban takeover in 2021, cross-border attacks into Pakistan have risen by more than 60 per cent. Dozens of Pakistani soldiers have been killed in ambushes traced to Afghan territory. In November alone, a fresh wave of TTP attacks left numerous Pakistanis dead. Yet the Taliban administration continues to downplay these incursions and has taken no visible action against the networks involved.
This double game is becoming impossible to ignore. The Taliban speak the language of Islamic solidarity, yet show little regard for Pakistan’s security anxieties. They denounce Western banking as un-Islamic but negotiate reconstruction funding through Indian and Gulf intermediaries. They refuse to recognise the Durand Line with Pakistan, yet assure Indian officials that Afghan soil will not be used against India. Even Kashmir, once central to Taliban-linked rhetoric, has been airbrushed out of their conversations with Delhi.
At the end of the day, Kabul will side with whoever shields the Taliban leadership from accountability and enables it to entrench its regressive rule. Pakistan must respond accordingly. It should insist on verifiable counterterrorism steps, including the dismantling of TTP sanctuaries and the handover of wanted militants. Islamabad must also accelerate alternative corridors through Iran, Central Asia and domestic north-south routes so Afghan transit leverage no longer dictates Pakistan’s strategic room to manoeuvre.
Time and again, the Taliban have shown that ideology bends easily when power and patronage are at stake. Pakistan now needs a strategy grounded not in fraternity but in fact. A security-first, interests-first approach is the only credible path to regional stability, and the only way to prevent a dangerous new axis from taking deeper root on our western border. *