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The foreign minister of Afghanistan’s Taliban government, Amir Khan Muttaqi, concluded a week-long trip to India Thursday. Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar rolled out the red carpet for his Afghan visitors, announcing after meeting with Muttaqi last Friday that India would reopen its embassy in Kabul, which was closed when the Taliban swept back into power in 2021. | |
“This visit marks an important step in advancing our ties and affirming the enduring India-Afghanistan friendship,” Jaishankar said in a statement. | |
But the delegation also sparked fierce criticism due to the Taliban’s notoriously brutal treatment of women and its abysmal human rights record writ large. Muttaqi remains on a United Nations sanctions list, along with other officials from the group, and was only able to travel to India after receiving a temporary exemption. | |
The outrage boiled over when, after the meeting with Jaishankar, Muttaqi held a press conference at the Afghan embassy in New Delhi that excluded female journalists. The Press Club of India “strongly condemned” the incident, while the Editors Guild of India called it “blatant discrimination on Indian soil.” Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was forced to issue a statement denying any involvement in the event. | |
The Taliban apparently didn’t anticipate such a backlash. Muttaqi held another press engagement at the embassy two days later, this time prominently featuring female journalists in the front row. When asked why they hadn’t been invited to the earlier event, Muttaqi claimed it was a “technical issue” due to the presser being organized on short notice. | |
Hosting a high-level Taliban delegation is controversial for other reasons. Many Indians still remember the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight by Islamist militants, who diverted the plane to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and held its 189 passengers and crew members hostage for a week. And Indian diplomatic missions in Afghanistan have faced numerous attacks, most notoriously a suicide bombing of the embassy in Kabul that killed dozens of people including two senior Indian diplomats. | |
Yet those attacks did not stop New Delhi from investing heavily in Afghanistan, to the tune of $3 billion in aid and reconstruction funds between 2001 and 2021. Even after the Taliban’s return to power, India kept up diplomatic engagement, partly due to geography. For Indian officials, Afghanistan is an important conduit for increased trade with Central Asia via the Chabahar port in Iran. | |
India’s decision to take the relationship to a new level was likely influenced by a sharp deterioration in Afghanistan’s relationship with Pakistan. The two sides have been engaged in armed clashes over the past week that have killed dozens of people, as Islamabad has accused the Taliban of harboring armed groups that have stepped up their activities in Pakistani territory. For India then, engaging with the Taliban is a way to strategically counter its arch-nemesis Pakistan, with which it fought a brief military conflict earlier this year. | |
At the same time, India faces important constraints in its dealings with the Taliban, including human rights issues and the group’s questionable commitments to constraining armed extremist groups that have launched attacks against Indian interests in the past. New Delhi will likely continue to deal pragmatically with the Taliban, but it faces a tricky balancing act in doing so. |