Afghanistan's India–Pakistan dilemma: advocacy coalitions in weak states

Mulling the Contours of India’s Taliban Policy: Past, Present and Future Prospects

“…India’s strategy involved a focus on development, economic stability and provision of basic needs in support of the more moderate political regimes in power, though D’Souza also comments that India’s capacity-building projects ended up being capacity substituting as infrastructure projects lacked long-term sustainability (Souza, 2021). This was also intended to erode the base for the Taliban, though as Paliwal (2016, p. 477) observes, ‘New Delhi was closely watching Taliban movements and searching for ways to build political constituencies in the Pashtun hinterlands along the border with Pakistan’. Paliwal (2015, p. 32), also informs us that India covertly engaged with certain Taliban and pro-Pakistan factions including Hekmatyar, the Quetta and Peshawar Shura between 2005 and 2006, though in the end, it had no network on the ground.…”

“…While much has been written on the Pakistan-Taliban nexus, this nexus is not that simple. Paliwal (2016) examining the foreign policy behaviour of weak states in a turbulent geopolitical environment, argues that we can best understand Afghanistan’s policy as being Pakistan friendly or Pakistan averse and that despite the weakness of the state, its elites including the Afghan Taliban, understand the importance of balancing India and Pakistan. He notes that the shifting ethnic and religious alliances between groups in Afghanistan and these states show that there is no necessary alignment and reflect its independent agency.…”