Why is India talking to the Taliban?

By Mihir Sharma

The sole checkpoint between India and Pakistan opened again late last week — for one particular, highly symbolic convoy. More than 150 trucks from Afghanistan, carrying dried fruit and nuts, were allowed into India.

New Delhi had a point it wanted to make. The border was closed after the April 22 terrorist attack on tourists in Kashmir, as anger against Pakistan’s military rulers built in India, concluding in days-long clashes between the two countries last month. But India’s leaders wanted to make it clear that this anger did not extend to the army’s former allies, the Taliban.

The trucks’ cargo is a hint that this gesture had more than economic logic behind it. Afghanistan has great cultural resonance in India: One of our most memorable short stories is about a trader in nuts and raisins from Kabul who strikes up a friendship with a family in 19th-century Bengal.

In those days, the British ruled both Kabul and Calcutta (as it then was), and trade and traders could move freely across the subcontinent. Since then, borders have been erected across the subcontinent, but Afghan populations have remained a big part of the lives of many Indian cities nonetheless.

This is particularly true of New Delhi, which became a haven for Afghans when the Taliban seized control of their country in the 1990s. Many from the Kabul and provincial elite were educated in India, and helped staff and support various elected governments in Afghanistan over the past two decades.

But the Indian government closed its embassy in Kabul once the Taliban stormed back to power in 2021, and visas were no longer available. The connection to Delhi was cut just when it had become most important.

Last week, however, came news that visas would once again be handed out to Afghan nationals. This reflects a broader policy shift in India: Relations with the Taliban administration are gradually being normalized. There has been a flurry of high-level discussion between India and Afghanistan over the past months. India’s chief diplomat met the acting Afghan foreign minister in January, and the foreign minister spoke to his Taliban counterpart last month.

Opening up to the Taliban isn’t easy for New Delhi. India was a big backer of the democratic Afghan state the militants overthrew. People here still resent the West for withdrawing its military support to Kabul in 2021, as well as for having looked away while the Pakistani military kept the Taliban alive for its decades in the wilderness. The Taliban conducted multiple attacks on the Indian embassy in Kabul in that period.

But the reality of geography always prevails. Pakistan and Afghanistan will always have a testy relationship as long as their border is porous and undefined. The Pakistani army might have supported the Taliban when it was out of power, but once the militants became the Kabul establishment, bilateral ties soon settled into a familiar, antagonistic pattern. In December, 46 Afghans were killed when the Pakistani air force struck across its western border. Relations are particularly tense because Islamabad has already deported tens of thousands of Afghans, and has threatened to expel millions more.

Pakistan’s patrons in Beijing have tried to intervene, hosting officials from both sides at talks in China. Pushed by the Chinese, Islamabad last week finally appointed an ambassador in Kabul.

But these efforts are unlikely to succeed, as long as the Pakistani state views Afghanistan as its own backyard. Military planners there long assumed that their smaller western neighbor would, willingly or otherwise, provide the Pakistani army with “strategic depth” in a war. Obviously no Afghan government could ever agree to that. But the Pakistanis also tend to worry, during confrontations with India like the one last month, that whoever is in power in Kabul will permit a second front to open on their flank.

The reintegration of the Taliban into regional politics — another of its old enemies, Iran, is reaching out as well — was inevitable once it settled into power. But the West should welcome closer relations between India and Afghanistan in particular. It might be the only thing keeping China from taking over the management of the region.

India was certainly associated in most Afghans’ minds with their deposed state. Most here don’t want to dilute India’s identification with democracy by embracing the Taliban wholeheartedly. New Delhi’s engagement with Afghanistan focused on people-to-people relations, and institution building, not security. This served to preserve and reinvigorate cultural ties dating back to the time when Afghan traders selling dried fruit and preserves were a familiar sight in Indian neighborhoods. Realpolitik matters, but people matter more.