India's Outreach to Kabul Amid Simmering ‘Pashtunistan’ Demand Could Give It Leverage Over Pakistan

Chandigarh: India's enduring, albeit calibrated engagement with the Taliban, reinforced by external affairs minister S. Jaishankar’s phone call last week to his de facto Afghan counterpart Amir Khan Muttaqi, has the potential to seriously complicate Pakistan’s strategic calculus over the long-simmering and disruptive issue of Pashtunistan, or a Pashtun homeland, on its western front.

In the first ministerial-level contact between New Delhi and the Taliban that assumed power in 2021, Jaishankar appreciated Kabul’s dismissal of Pakistani assertions that Indian missiles had struck Afghanistan whilst executing Operation Sindoor.

Earlier, and as part of the continuing bilateral dialogue between the two sides over the past year or so, Muttaqi had endeared himself to India by condemning last month’s terror attack in Pahalgam in which 26 civilians were killed.

He also underscored the need to punish the perpetrators of the killings, which India said were backed by Pakistan’s military and in retaliation for which it had launched Operation Sindoor.

Compounding these complex strategic, political and diplomatic moves was the visible deterioration in ties between Islamabad and the Taliban leadership, which has asserted its autonomy in foreign policy and strongly opposed Pakistan on demarcating their western frontier.

The Taliban has also openly defied its nuclear-armed neighbour by continuing to support the domestic Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, the anti-Pakistan Pashtun insurgent group, significantly undermining Islamabad’s abiding leverage over Afghan affairs.

Adding to these ongoing tensions were recurring border clashes between the Pakistan army and Taliban forces that led to fatalities and further soured bilateral relations. In recent months, several firefights and artillery exchanges had been reported at key frontier crossing points like Spin Boldak, Chaman and Torkham, forcing their closure and further aggravating mistrust.

Moreover, Pakistan had further enraged the Taliban regime by expelling over 900,000 Afghan refugees over the past 18 months, worsening the region's humanitarian and socio-political challenges.

Returning home to a miserable future, there were reports that thousands of these Afghans had been mercilessly harassed by Pakistani security forces at the border who extracted an ‘exit fee’ of $500 from the harried refugees, in addition to divesting them of their meagre cash reserves and belongings.

Afghan refugees wait for clearance to leave for Afghanistan at a transit station setup to facilitate Afghan refugees' deportations, on the outskirts of Chaman, a town on the Pakistan and Afghanistan border on April 9, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.

Furthermore, these mass deportations had heightened Islamabad’s tensions with Kabul, straining local resources and creating a burgeoning groundswell of resentment among ethnic Pashtuns, many of whom felt doubly victimised by both the Pakistani state and geopolitical machinations.

All these collective hostilities had also merged to highlight the Taliban’s resistance to Pakistani attempts to enforce the Durand Line as a formal boundary between the neighbours, a demarcation no Afghan regime – monarchist, communist or Islamist – had historically ever acknowledged.

Consequently, over the past four years, soon after coming to power, the Taliban had opposed Pakistan’s fencing of the Durand Line begun in 2017, frequently dismantling portions of it, intensifying border disputes and triggering tension.

Against such a turbulent backdrop, India’s re-engagement with Kabul only threatened to further disrupt Islamabad’s grip on Afghanistan and manage burgeoning Pashtun nationalism, which locally virulently opposed the Punjabi-dominated state apparatus that controlled Pakistan’s national identity, monopolising military, bureaucratic, political and economic power.

Pashtuns straddle the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the historical goal of ‘Pashtunistan’ remains a potent threat to Pakistan’s territorial integrity. Hence, any signs that India is engaging with the Taliban, not just to maintain a diplomatic presence, but also to potentially explore diplomatic, political and economic openings with Pashtun groups or leaders, sets off alarm bells in Islamabad.

Pashtunistan incorporates claims by the largely Pashtun Taliban over vast swathes of Pakistani territory south of Kabul, including Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North West Frontier Province or NWFP) inhabited by their ethnic clansmen, taking their long-standing homeland claims to the municipal limits of Islamabad.

Pashtunistan also notionally includes Pakistan’s seven federally administered tribal areas and six smaller pockets known as frontier regions, adjoining Afghanistan, that too are inhabited largely by warring Pashtuns.

The lingering Pashtunistan movement has long disregarded the Durand Line. Pashtuns claim it was drawn arbitrarily in 1893 by a colonial civil servant, and named after him, and was little more than a ‘line in the sand’, casually agreed to by Afghanistan’s then Amir Abdur Rehman.

At the time, however, it satisfied British colonial aims of defining their limits in the 19th century’s ‘Great Game’, to prevent Czarist Russia from challenging London’s regional suzerainty over India, by seizing Kabul.

The border between British India and Afghanistan in 1934. Photo: Unknown author/Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.

Consequently, the British astutely made the autonomous and largely Pashtun tribal areas and frontier regions their ‘buffer zone’ between Afghanistan and their ‘settled territories’ in the erstwhile NWFP and the adjoining Punjab province.

During the freedom movement, the charismatic Pathan leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as ‘Frontier Gandhi’, sought an independent Pashtunistan, but was denied it by the British, triggering a chain of events that resulted in the Babrra massacre by Pakistani security forces in August 1948 in the then-NWFP.

Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Huseyn Suhrawardy referred to this bloodbath some years later as ‘surpassing’ the Jallianwala Bagh massacre by the British in Amritsar in 1919.

Thereafter, firefights erupted frequently between Afghanistan-backed Pashtun tribesmen and the Pakistani military, further embittering relations between Kabul and Pakistan.

These, in turn, threatened the outbreak of hostilities between the neighbours in 1955, the year that Kabul formally announced its formal backing for Pashtunistan, a position it has not since rescinded.

In fact, in the intervening years, but with resort to little historical fact, Kabul maintained that the Durand Line had a 100-year deadline that had expired in 1993.

During the '80s, however, Pakistan’s astute military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq somewhat defused the Pashtunistan issue by inducting Pathans into the political mainstream, the military and the civil service and giving them a stake in his country’s power structure, which they had earlier lacked.

The Pashtun nationalist spirit, however, survived these placatory initiatives but lost its centre-left orientation that underpinned Ghaffar Khan's ‘Red Shirts’ movement. Instead, it mutated into an Islamist ideology through assorted Taliban-like groups like the Jamiat Ulema i-Islam or JUI that presently hold sway over Pakhtunkhwa and other parts of Pakistan.

Ironically, the first batch of Taliban were mostly young Pashtuns trained in JUI madrassas headed by Maulana Fazlur Rehman around 1994. Latterly these had morphed domestically into multiple groups that had emerged collectively as the TTP.

India's ongoing engagement with the Taliban represents a marked shift from its traditional reliance on ‘soft power’ in Afghanistan to a more pragmatic, realpolitik-driven policy. Photo: X/@meaindia.

In the intervening years, the Soviet-backed Afghan government too overtly supported Pashtunistan, and correspondingly a pusillanimous Islamabad, plagued by short-lived elected governments of Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, adopted the path of least resistance by conceding that the Durand Line was little more than a ‘delineated zone of responsibility’, and not a conclusive border.

But soon after, Pakistan’s President General Pervez Musharraf, realising the strategic criticality of securing the Durand Line and of defusing separatist sentiments for a Pashtun homeland, called for fencing the border. He met with stiff resistance from Pashtun political parties domestically and in Afghanistan and backed down.

Nevertheless, as a default option, he adopted a policy to ‘sponsor’ Afghan Islamists, temporarily ‘subordinating’ Pashtun ethnic nationalism, once again to the default option of Islamic religious sentiment.

This only postponed, not halted, the irksome homeland demand which, in turn, imperilled security in the already restive Balochistan province. Here the Balochs had become a minority following the uninterrupted influx of Pashtun Afghans that began after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and launched their own armed struggle for independence, which continues unabated.

Meanwhile, analysts maintained that Jaishankar’s contact with Muttaqi on May 15 sent a clear signal to Kabul and Islamabad that India intended to remain relevant in Afghanistan, regardless of who was there in power.

By engaging with the Taliban – despite its ideological contradictions with Delhi – India was making a pragmatic move to protect its regional interests by hedging its priorities against growing Pakistani and Chinese influence in the region.

However, from a doctrinal perspective, this ongoing engagement with the Taliban represented a marked shift from India’s traditional reliance on ‘soft power’ in Afghanistan to a more pragmatic, realpolitik-driven policy. For, in reaching out directly to the Taliban, India was acknowledging the new geopolitical reality, while signalling that it did not plan on ceding strategic space to its neighbouring collusive military and nuclear rivals.

The implications for Pakistan, on the other hand, from such a strategy were substantial. It had long considered Afghanistan its ‘strategic backyard’ of extended territory which ideally remained under its influence.

The Taliban’s victory in 2021 was initially seen as a win for Pakistan's “strategic depth” doctrine against India, with Prime Minister Imran Khan declaring that Afghanistan had ‘broken the shackles of slavery’.

But hostilities erupted soon thereafter over the Durand Line, cross-border attacks, Afghan refugee expulsions and, above all, intensified TTP attacks.

Ultimately, analysts and diplomats believed that this strategic outreach could potentially provide Delhi a dual edge: a foothold in Kabul and a consequent psychological lever over Rawalpindi, where even the perception of Indian influence over Pashtun aspirations would geopolitically be destabilising for Pakistan, leave alone palpable sway.

According to reports from the region, India’s engagement with the Taliban, though in its incipient stages, is one that Pakistan is already finding hard to ignore, as it threatens putatively to re-order the chaotic regional chessboard.

But above all, the message for Pakistan is clear, especially after Operation Sindoor, that India is back in the Afghan game, and this time, it's playing by a different set of rules.

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