New Delhi’s deft diplomatic footwork with Taliban-run Kabul

India cannot be content with an offhand attitude because not only the Taliban, but everything in Afghanistan presents existential challenges for all of South Asia

Two-and-a-half years after the Taliban eased out Afghanistan’s legally established government and took power for the second time, India is engaged in some deft diplomatic footwork in that strategically crucial country in its neighbourhood.

The dilemma for the international community is the same as that for India in dealing — or not dealing — with the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Use it or lose it. Many countries in the world are complacent about this dilemma. But India cannot be content with such an offhand attitude because not only the Taliban, but everything in Afghanistan presents existential challenges for all of South Asia. A country where the most infamous terrorist attack in this millennium on September 11, 2001, was mostly plotted can neither be disregarded nor joined forces with.

For its 75th Republic Day, India invited Badruddin Haqqani, the Charge d’Affaires at the Taliban-run Afghan embassy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to attend a ceremonial reception in Abu Dhabi. The invitation puzzled the diplomatic community in the Gulf because Haqqani had an association spanning close to three decades with the Haqqani Network, which was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) by the United States of America in 2012. Worldwide intelligence conclusions point to the Haqqani Network as having been primarily responsible for a 2008 attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in which 58 people were killed.

Close on the heels of this outreach, on January 29, India was officially represented at a regional conference in Kabul, convened by the Taliban administration’s foreign minister, the redoubtable Amir Muttaqi. According to highly placed diplomatic sources, India was persuaded, to an extent, to attend the first-of-its-kind conference convened by the Taliban government because of the presence of Zamir Kabulov, Russia’s Special Representative for Afghanistan. He is a veteran of Afghanistan, going back to the days of the Soviet Union. India has a long and trusted association with Kabulov on Afghanistan, when the government of Indira Gandhi was ambivalent about the Soviet military intervention in Kabul.

It was just as well that India participated in this conference because a day later, China’s President Xi Jinping accepted the credentials of Asadullah Karimi, the Taliban-appointed Afghan ambassador in Beijing. China is the first country to have done so even as the rest of the world is refusing to have formal diplomatic ties with the Taliban government. If New Delhi had boycotted the regional conference in Kabul called by Muttaqi, India would have lost the new Great Game to China in the old, 19th-century playground even before it began.

Last September, convinced that the Taliban is there to stay after completing two years in power, China appointed an ambassador in Kabul, again, the first country to do so after the collapse of the previous government. But he is yet to present his credentials since the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan has no President and the Prime Minister is ‘acting’. China has vital strategic interests in Afghanistan. Its restive Xinjiang province is a potentially fertile ground for Uyghur Islamic militants, who are present in Afghanistan, and could cross the 76-km border into Xinjiang.

Simultaneously, China has set its sights on Afghanistan’s untapped resources, especially rare minerals such as uranium, lithium, chromite, and barite, which have military uses. Beijing is acting in concert with Moscow on issues related to Kabul. Together, they abstained on a United Nations Security Council resolution in December calling for the appointment of a UN Special Envoy on Afghanistan. Like India’s deft diplomatic footwork with the Taliban, it is significant that neither China nor Russia took the extreme step of vetoing the resolution. 

The January 29 Kabul meeting was not the first occasion when India interacted with the Taliban’s second avatar in power. So far, India has attended five meetings on Afghanistan in what is known as the ‘Moscow format’. The most recent of these meetings, held in Kazan in Russia last September, was attended by the Taliban administration’s foreign minister. On February 1, the Ministry of External Affairs formally reacted to India’s participation in the Kabul meeting. “Our Head of Technical Team (who) attended, apprised the meeting of India's longstanding friendship with the Afghan people and the humanitarian assistance that we are carrying out in the country. This particular meeting that we attended should be seen in that particular context.”

Unlike China, which is looking for economic benefits from dealing with the Taliban, India’s focus is on retaining the centuries-old goodwill of the Afghan people through continued humanitarian and development assistance. 

KP Nayar has extensively covered West Asia and reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH).