ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – On October 28, after Pakistani and Afghan negotiators hit a wall in talks to extend a fragile ceasefire following deadly border clashes, Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Asif blamed third country India for not even attending the talks.
In a television interview, Asif claimed that India had “infiltrated” the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan. he claimed that was the reason Tensions escalate between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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He praised the Taliban leadership during the meeting in Istanbul. “But the people in Kabul who are pulling the strings and staging the puppet show are being controlled by Delhi,” Asif charged. “India wants a low-intensity war with Pakistan. To achieve this, they are using Kabul.”
The defense minister did not provide any evidence to support his claim that India is supporting the Taliban in their challenge to Pakistan. But his comments represent increasing attempts by Pakistan to portray its tense relations with Afghanistan as the result of a growing friendship between the Taliban and India.
Earlier this month, during clashes between Pakistani and Afghan forces along the border, Asif said the Taliban were “sitting on India’s lap”. Islamabad has accused the Taliban of allowing anti-Pakistani militant groups such as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to operate on the Afghan mainland, and has also claimed, without official evidence, that India is behind the TTP.
Taliban leaders have rejected accusations that India played any role in the crisis between Pakistan and Afghanistan and denied any responsibility for the TTP’s repeated attacks on Pakistani territory.
Still, analysts said the decision by Asif and other Pakistani leaders to cast India as a shadowy villain pulling the strings of the Taliban underscores Islamabad’s deep misgivings over relations between New Delhi and Kabul. For Pakistan, wedged between Afghanistan to the west and India to the east, New Delhi’s expansion 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 being brokered by Qatar and Turkiye, analysts say India is increasingly becoming a key player at the table.
regional conflicts
When a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck northern Afghanistan on Monday, India was one of the first countries to offer aid.
Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar called Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, and New Delhi shipped 15 tons of food to earthquake-hit Balkh and Samangan provinces. Medical supplies will soon follow, he said.
Jaishankar’s support comes just days after Muttaqi completed a six-day visit to India, the first visit by an Afghan Taliban leader to New Delhi since seizing power for the second time in Kabul in August 2021.
The visit also highlighted the broader re-engagement between India and the Taliban in recent years, culminating in New Delhi’s decision to reopen its embassy in Kabul last month.
The situation in the region is very different from four years ago, when the Afghan Taliban returned to power. At the time, India had suspended most diplomatic activities in Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s influence in Kabul was widely seen as increasing.
For many years, Pakistan has been a major backer of the Taliban. India has long viewed the Taliban as an agent of Pakistan. The group accused the group and its allies of repeatedly targeting Indian diplomatic posts in Kabul, Jalalabad, Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif between 2001 and 2021, when the Taliban was ousted and fighting the Afghan government backed by U.S. and Western forces.
Islamabad’s long-standing doctrine of “strategic depth” is rooted in the military’s desire to exert influence in Afghanistan and blunt India’s influence in South Asia.
But since 2021, the Taliban has pursued a more conciliatory stance toward New Delhi.
C. Raja Mohan, a former member of India’s National Security Advisory Council, recently wrote in a column for Foreign Policy magazine that India’s re-engagement with Kabul after 2021 has been “cautious, pragmatic, and deliberately quiet.”
But the change has upset Islamabad, especially as Pakistan faces security threats on both its borders.
The flashpoint was the Pahalgam attack in April, which killed at least 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir and which India blamed on a Pakistan-based group.
India’s retaliation two weeks later escalated tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals, leading to a four-day conflict in May.
Five days after the ceasefire, Jaishankar called Muttaqi and expressed his gratitude for Afghanistan’s condemnation of the Pahalgam attack and reiterated his support for Afghanistan’s development.
“We underlined our traditional friendship with the Afghan people and our continued support for their development needs. We discussed ways and means to move cooperation forward,” the Indian foreign minister wrote on his X account.
After clashing with India in May, Pakistan also engaged in a week-long battle with Afghanistan during Muttaqi’s visit to India.
The fighting ultimately ended with a cease-fire brokered by Qatar and Turkiye through two rounds of talks in Doha and Istanbul. But peace remains precarious.
deeper anxiety
However, some analysts argued that Pakistan’s concerns reflected long-standing strategic anxieties rather than recent developments with Afghanistan.
Amina Khan of the Islamabad Institute for Strategic Studies said Pakistan had hoped that the Taliban would not create a “space or vacuum” in India, but those expectations have not been met.
Khan pointed out that Muttaqi’s recent visit to India had led to strong statements not only from the Afghan government but also from Indian officials, leading to increased anxiety on the Pakistani side.
Indian Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a press conference last month that while India is closely monitoring tensions on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, it is Pakistan’s “old practice” to blame its neighbors for domestic failures.
“Pakistan is outraged by Afghanistan’s exercise of sovereignty over its territory. India remains fully committed to Afghanistan’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence,” Jaiswal said on October 16.
But Khan said ultimately Pakistan needs to think about its relations with Afghanistan independently of its relations with other countries.
“Pakistan has a bilateral relationship with Afghanistan and it should be viewed in complete isolation,” she told Al Jazeera. “Similarly, despite tensions and conflicts, India-Pakistan relations should also be viewed in isolation, without the Afghan element.”
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Pakistan has long accused India of supporting an insurgency in the southwestern province of Balochistan, where separatist groups such as the Baloch Liberation Army and the Baloch Liberation Front have fought for independence.
Islamabad pointed to the arrest of former Indian naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav in March 2016 in Balochistan province as evidence of Indian interference. New Delhi denied the allegations and called them baseless.
However, the Pakistani government has also linked the recent increase in violence across Pakistan, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces, which share a 2,600-kilometer (1,615-mile) border with Afghanistan, to armed groups operating from Afghan territory.
Islamabad specifically accuses the Taliban of providing safe haven in Afghan territory to the TTP, often referred to as the Pakistani Taliban, and has claimed a series of deadly attacks on Pakistani territory in recent years. Born in 2007, the TTP is distinct from the Afghan Taliban, but they share ideological similarities.
But this year, Pakistan’s official messages have increasingly portrayed both the Baloch separatists and the TTP as Indian-backed proxies, a rhetorical move to link disparate threats with a single external enemy, analysts said.
Former Pakistani diplomat Asif Durrani told Al Jazeera that Baloch group leaders “proudly acknowledged” India’s support and claimed that New Delhi supported the TTP through intermediaries from 2001 to 2021. Pakistan has not presented any official evidence to support India’s claims of support for the TTP.
Relations with the Afghan Taliban are now improving and India “will be able to operate in Afghanistan,” Durrani said.
“I don’t think they are necessarily dictating terms to the Afghan Taliban, but it is likely to be a case of quid pro quo, with the Indians giving them aid instead of the Taliban turning a blind eye.”
strategic suspicion
International Crisis Group analyst Ibraheem Bahis said Pakistani military officials tend to view Afghanistan primarily through an Indian lens.
“Pakistani security services do not consider Afghanistan itself to be an existential threat. But the situation is certainly exacerbated by the idea of a bigger and more powerful threat posed by India. And in that context, Afghanistan becomes a bigger concern for policymakers in Islamabad,” he told Al Jazeera.
But Bahis added that it would be difficult for Pakistan to support the claim that India is behind groups as diverse as the TTP and Baloch separatists.
“While the TTP shares ideological, social and linguistic ties with the Afghan Taliban, the Baloch group is a complete polar opposite in its secular outlook,” he said.
“It’s not a very believable or consistent narrative to claim that two organizations with bitter histories, India and the Taliban, are coming together to support two very different groups.”
However, Islamabad treats its dual ties with Kabul and New Delhi as mutually reinforcing threats.
Khan warned that recent statements from Kabul and New Delhi accusing Pakistan of supporting “terrorism” signaled a concentration of interests, even if only implicitly, which she described as a “marriage of convenience.”
risk of escalation
Pakistan and India’s eastern border has been calm since a ceasefire in May, but relations are strained.
Both sides have ratcheted up their rhetoric, exchanging claims about battlefield successes, including conflicting claims about aircraft losses.
Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh warned in October that any attack in the Sir Creek area would be met with “a violent reaction that would change both history and geography.”
The Sir Creek region is a 100 km long estuary between the Kutch River in India’s Gujarat state and Pakistan, and has been the subject of a long-standing dispute between the two neighboring countries.
On October 27, Singh cited lessons from the May conflict and told soldiers that India needed to prepare for “war-like” situations.
Pakistan Army Chief General Asim Munir issued a counter-warning on October 18 at a fainting parade at Pakistan’s premier military academy.
“India is directly responsible for the ensuing escalation that could ultimately have devastating consequences for the entire region and beyond,” he said. “If a new wave of hostilities is triggered, Pakistan will respond far beyond the expectations of its initiators.”
Both countries have deployed troops in the Arabian Sea and are conducting large-scale military exercises.
Seema Elahi Baloch, a former Pakistani ambassador who took part in informal talks with Afghanistan, said the timing of India’s re-engagement in Kabul was adding to Pakistan’s anxiety.
“The war of words between Pakistan and India will intensify in the coming days and future clashes cannot be ruled out,” she told Al Jazeera.
