The Taliban is navigating strained relations with Pakistan externally while confronting the threat posed by ISKP and deepening socio-political fault lines internally.
India's reference to Afghanistan as a ‘contiguous neighbour’ is a calibrated strategy to underscore the enduring nature of India’s historical connections.
The Taliban 2.0 have refused to bow to Pakistan’s dictates on multiple issues, including on cracking down on the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan and their relationship with India.
The monograph examines the inception of China's geostrategic/geo-economic pivot towards Pakistan— and more recently, Afghanistan— before charting the trajectory of its expanding role in the Af-Pak region. It assesses the viability of the evolving geopolitical triangle comprising China, Pakistan and Afghanistan, before evaluating possible Chinese strategy behind deepening engagement with a region marked by chronic volatility. The study, in particular, assesses China's strategic interests in Afghanistan and how Pakistan remains central to its Afghan policy. The monograph also seeks to explore whether the return of the Taliban and China's rising profile in the region would signal the evolution and fruition of China's Af-Pak strategy. By examining both convergences and divergences in Afghanistan and Pakistan's bilateral ties with China, the study investigates the contours of a potentially hyphenated approach. It concludes by outlining prominent security paradigms in the region and the inherent dilemmas that shape China's strategic calculus in this complex geopolitical theatre.
South Asia is witnessing new alignments, with divergences between old allies (the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan) and convergences between new partners (India and the Afghan Taliban).
China has been a part of the Afghan maze, but landlocked Afghanistan seemed to have factored either marginally or episodically in its geopolitical quests in the past decades. While the role of certain regional actors in Afghanistan has been far widely debated and analysed, China’s role, particularly the nature and scope of its bilateral interactions and engagements with various Afghan regimes in Kabul, from Zahir Shah to the Taliban, has remained comparatively understudied. This book is a modest effort in that direction.
The edited volume comprises 16 chapters contributed by Afghan, Central Asian, Iranian, Russian, Western, and Indian scholars and analysts. The chapters not only dwell on country perspectives but also key issues of concern to the people of Afghanistan and the wider region. It includes terrorism, transnational crime, drug production and distribution, the governance system and the state of education in Afghanistan. The contributions in the volume paint an unflattering view of the ground reality in Afghanistan, and a connecting thread of pessimism runs through various analyses.
The Taliban's unwritten and ambiguous 'general amnesty' neither implies Tpolitical integration nor national reconciliation. It's about total control, and about who gets to stay and who gets to come back, and on what terms. In the absence of any credible political opposition, and with more and more Afghans being deported or forced to return to the country, including the exiled members of the previous regime, the Taliban's Contact Commission will remain in business in the foreseeable future.
However, reports of violation of 'general amnesty' by the Taliban members, particularly in the case of mid and low ranking former military personnel, have exposed the limitations to the implementation of the amnesty decree across the country.
