For a country whose government is not recognised by any nation, Afghanistan’s acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi has had an unusually busy calendar in recent weeks.
He has hosted his counterpart from Pakistan, spoken on the phone with India’s foreign minister, and jetted to Iran and China. In Beijing, he also met the Pakistani foreign minister again. On Wednesday, he joined trilateral talks with delegations from Pakistan and China.
This, even though the ruling Taliban have historically had tense relations with most of these countries, and currently have taut ties with Pakistan, a one-time ally with whom trust is at an all-time low.
While neither the United Nations nor any of its member states formally recognise the Taliban, analysts say that this diplomatic overdrive suggests that the movement is far from a pariah on the global stage.
So why are multiple countries in Afghanistan’s neighbourhood queueing up to engage diplomatically with the Taliban, while avoiding formal recognition?
We unpack the Taliban’s latest high-level regional engagements and look at why India, Pakistan and Iran are all trying to befriend Afghanistan’s rulers, four years after they marched on Kabul and grabbed power.
Who did Muttaqi meet or speak to in recent weeks?
A timeline of Afghanistan’s recent diplomatic engagements:
- April 19: Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar travels with a high-level delegation to Kabul to meet Muttaqi and other Afghan officials. The two sides discussed an ongoing spat over Pakistan’s repatriation of Afghan refugees, bilateral trade and economic cooperation, the Afghanistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
- May 6: Dar and Muttaqi spoke again on what turned out to be the eve of India’s attack on Pakistan, leading to four days of missile and drone attacks between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. The exchange of fire took place after India accused Pakistan of being involved in the April 22 Pahalgam attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, which left 26 people dead.
- May 15: India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar holds a phone conversation with Muttaqi to express his gratitude for the Taliban’s condemnation of the Pahalgam attacks.
- May 17: Muttaqi arrives in the Iranian capital Tehran to attend the Tehran Dialogue Forum, where he also holds meetings with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and President Massoud Pazeshkian.
- May 21: Muttaqi visits Beijing. Trilateral talks between Afghanistan, Pakistan and China take place aimed at boosting trade and security between the three countries.
Head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha, Qatar, Suhail Shaheen said the group is a “reality of today’s Afghanistan” as it “controls all territory and borders of the country”.
“The regional countries know this fact and, as such, they engage with the Islamic Emirate at various levels, which is a pragmatic and rational approach in my view,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to the name by which the Taliban refers to the current Afghan state.
“We believe it is through engagement that we can find solutions to issues,” he added, arguing that formal recognition of the Taliban government “not be delayed furthermore”.
“Our region has its own interests and goals that we should adhere to.”
Why is India warming up to the Taliban?
It’s an unlikely partnership. During the Taliban’s initial rule between 1996 and 2001, the Indian government refused to engage with the Afghan group and did not recognise their rule, which at the time was only recognised by Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
India, which had supported the earlier Soviet-backed government of Mohammad Najibullah, shut down its embassy in Kabul once the Taliban came to power: It viewed the Taliban as a proxy of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, which had supported the mujahideen against Moscow.
Instead, New Delhi supported the anti-Taliban opposition group, the Northern Alliance.
Following the United States-led ousting of the Taliban in 2001, India reopened its Kabul embassy and became a significant development partner for Afghanistan, investing more than $3bn in infrastructure, health, education and water projects, according to its Ministry of External Affairs.
But its embassy and consulates came under repeated, deadly attacks from the Taliban and its allies, including the Haqqani group.
After the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, New Delhi evacuated its embassy and once again refused to recognise the group. However, unlike during the Taliban’s first stint in power, India built diplomatic contacts with the group – first behind closed doors, then, increasingly, publicly.
The logic was simple, say analysts: India realised that by refusing to engage with the Taliban earlier, it had ceded influence in Afghanistan to Pakistan, its regional rival.
In June 2022, less than a year after the Taliban’s return to power, India reopened its embassy in Kabul by deploying a team of “technical experts” to run it. In November 2024, the Taliban appointed an acting consul at the Afghan consulate in Mumbai.
Then, last January, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and Muttaqi both flew to Dubai for a meeting – the highest-level face-to-face interaction between New Delhi and the Taliban to date.
Kabir Taneja, a deputy director at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, says not dealing with “whatever political reality sets in in Kabul was never an option” for India.
“No one is pleased per se that the reality is the Taliban,” Taneja told Al Jazeera. However, while India’s “decades-long” efforts to foster goodwill with the Afghan people have faced challenges since the Taliban takeover, they have not been entirely undone.
“Even the Taliban’s ideological stronghold, the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary, is in India,” he added. “These are ties with the country and its actors that cannot be vanquished, and have to be dealt with realistically and practically,” he added.
What is Pakistan’s calculus?
One of the Taliban’s foremost backers between 1996 and 2021, Pakistan has seen its relationship with the group plummet in recent years.
Since the Taliban’s takeover in 2021, Pakistan has seen a surge in violent attacks, which Islamabad attributes to armed groups, such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Pakistan insists that the TTP operates from Afghan territory and blames the ruling Taliban for allowing them sanctuary – a claim the Taliban government denies.
Emerging in 2007 amid the US-led so-called “war on terror”, the Pakistan Taliban has long challenged Islamabad’s authority through a violent rebellion. Though distinct from the Afghan Taliban, the two are seen as ideologically aligned.
Dar’s visit to Kabul and subsequent communication with Muttaqi represent a “tactical, ad hoc thaw” rather than a substantial shift in Pakistan-Afghanistan relations, says Rabia Akhtar, director at the Centre for Security, Strategy and Policy Research at the University of Lahore.
During the recent India-Pakistan crisis, Islamabad grew increasingly concerned about the possibility of Afghanistan allowing its territory to be used by New Delhi against Pakistan, she suggested. “This has increased Islamabad’s urgency to secure its western border,” Akhtar told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s decision earlier this year to expel Afghan refugees – including many who have spent most of their lives in Pakistan – and frequent border closures disrupting trade are also sources of tension in the relationship.
The refugees question, in particular, could prove to be a key factor that will shape future relations between the two countries, Akhtar said.
“While Pakistan has pushed for repatriation of undocumented Afghans, Kabul views such deportations as punitive,” she said. “If this dialogue is an indication of a recognition on both sides that confrontation is unsustainable, especially amidst shifting regional alignments and economic pressures, then that’s a good sign.”
The Taliban’s Shaheen said while Kabul wanted good relations with Islamabad, they should be “reciprocated” and that a “blame game” is not in anyone’s interest.
“We have taken practical steps as far as it concerns us,” he said, noting that Afghanistan had started building checkpoints “along the line adjacent to Pakistan in order to prevent any one from crossing”.
“However, their internal security is the responsibility of their security forces not ours.”
China, at the trilateral talks in Beijing on Wednesday, said Kabul and Islamabad had agreed in principle to upgrade diplomatic ties and would send their respective ambassadors at the earliest.
Nevertheless, Akhtar does not expect the “core mistrust” between the two neighbours, particularly over alleged TTP sanctuaries, to “go away any time soon”.
“We should look at this shift as part of Pakistan’s broader crisis management post-India-Pak crisis rather than structural reconciliation,” Akhtar asserted.
What does Iran want from its ties with the Taliban?
Like India, Tehran refused to recognise the Taliban when it was first in power, while backing the Northern Alliance, especially after the 1998 killing of Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif by Taliban fighters.
Iran amassed thousands of troops on its eastern border, nearly going to war with the Taliban over the incident.
Concerned about the extensive US military footprint in the region post-9/11, Iran was said to be quietly engaging with the Taliban, offering limited support in an effort to counter American influence and protect its own strategic interests.
Since the Taliban took back reins of the country nearly four years ago, Iran again showed willingness to build ties with rulers in Kabul on a number of security, humanitarian and trade-related matters, analysts say.
Shaheen, head of the Taliban’s office in Doha, said that both Iran and India previously thought the group was “under the influence of Pakistan”.
“Now they know it is not the reality. In view of this ground reality, they have adopted a new realistic and pragmatic approach, which is good for everyone,” he said.
Ibraheem Bahiss, analyst at the International Crisis Group, said the meeting between Muttaqi and Iranian President Pezeshkian doesn’t signal an “impending official recognition”. However, he said, “pragmatic considerations” have driven Iran to engage the Taliban, given its “key interests” in Afghanistan.
“Security-wise, Tehran wants allies in containing the ISIS [ISIL] local chapter. Tehran has also been seeking to expand its trade relations with Afghanistan, now being one of its major trading partners,” he told Al Jazeera.
In January 2024, twin suicide bombings in Kerman marked one of Iran’s deadliest attacks in decades, killing at least 94 people. The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), an Afghanistan-based offshoot of ISIL, claimed responsibility.
In recent years, ISKP has also emerged as a significant challenge to the Taliban’s rule, having carried out multiple high-profile attacks across Afghanistan.
Bahiss added that Tehran also needed a “willing partner” in addressing the issue of some 780,000 Afghan refugees in Iran, as well as the “transboundary water flowing from Helmand River “.
In May 2023, tensions between the two neighbours flared, leading to border clashes in which two Iranian border guards and one Taliban fighter were killed.
The violence came after former and now deceased Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi warned the Taliban not to violate a 1973 treaty by restricting the flow of water from the Helmand River to Iran’s eastern regions. Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers denied the accusation.