Afghanistan’s Role in India’s Regional Security Strategy

Afghanistan rarely shares a headline with India without the word “strategy” close behind. For a country that does not even share a land border with India, it occupies an outsized place in New Delhi’s thinking about security, trade, and influence in its wider neighbourhood. Understanding why means looking at where Afghanistan sits on the map, what India has invested there over two decades, and how the long shadow of Pakistan shapes almost every decision. This post breaks down the geostrategic logic behind India’s engagement with Afghanistan and why it remains central to the country’s regional security calculations.

Where Afghanistan sits and why it matters 🔗

Afghanistan is landlocked and surrounded by six countries: Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and China. This places it at a junction where South Asia, Central Asia, and West Asia meet. For India, that location is the whole point. A friendly and stable Afghanistan acts as a gateway to the energy-rich Central Asian republics, which hold large reserves of oil and natural gas that India wants access to.

The catch is geography itself. India and Afghanistan have no direct land link. The only overland route between them runs through Pakistan, which has consistently refused to allow Indian goods to transit its territory to reach Afghan markets. This single fact explains a great deal about how India has had to engage with Afghanistan: indirectly, creatively, and often at considerable expense.

The connectivity problem and the workaround 🔗

To get around Pakistan, India turned to Iran. The plan rests on two linked pieces of infrastructure. The first is Iran’s Chabahar Port on the Gulf of Oman, which India has helped develop as a sea entry point that bypasses Pakistan entirely. The second is the Zaranj-Delaram Highway, a 218-kilometre road that India’s Border Roads Organisation built inside Afghanistan and handed over in 2009. The highway connects to Afghanistan’s main “garland” ring road, linking the Iranian border to Herat, Kandahar, Kabul, and Mazar-i-Sharif.

Together, these create a corridor: goods can sail from India to Chabahar, move by road into Iran, cross into Afghanistan at Zaranj, and then travel onward to major Afghan cities. In 2024, India and Iran signed a ten-year agreement to operate the port long-term, which India describes as a connectivity hub for landlocked Afghanistan and Central Asia. The route is not without friction, though. The border crossings are vulnerable to closures, and the wider corridor has faced complications from US sanctions on Iran.

A relationship built on history and aid 🔗

India’s connection with Afghanistan is not new. The two countries signed a Friendship Treaty in 1950, and ties have generally stayed warm across decades of upheaval. Cultural links run deep, carried by shared affection for Bollywood and a strong cricketing relationship, with the Afghan national team having based itself in Dehradun for years.

What sets India apart from many other players in Afghanistan is the scale of its development assistance. Over roughly two decades, India committed over $3 billion across infrastructure, education, and healthcare. This was a deliberate strategy: build goodwill and institutional presence rather than deploy troops.

Flagship projects on the ground 🔗

India’s footprint in Afghanistan is physical and visible. A few projects stand out:

The Salma Dam: Built on the Hari Rud river at a cost of around $290 million, it generates power and irrigates farmland. It was renamed the India-Afghanistan Friendship Dam.

The Afghan Parliament building: India financed and constructed the new parliament complex in Kabul, inaugurated in 2015, as a symbol of support for Afghan democratic institutions.

Power and transport: India built a transmission line bringing electricity to Kabul, restored the century-old Stor Palace, donated buses, and contributed to schools and universities.

Beyond bricks and mortar, India has invested heavily in human capital. More than 65,000 Afghan students have studied in India under scholarship programmes, with thousands of those scholarships reserved specifically for young Afghan women. This education diplomacy has built a generation of Afghans with personal ties to India.

Why stability in Afghanistan is a security issue for India 🔗

India’s interest in Afghanistan is not only about trade routes and goodwill. It is fundamentally about security. The country has long viewed Afghan stability as directly linked to its own.

The terrorism dimension 🔗

The border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan have historically been a haven for militant groups. India’s core worry is that instability in Afghanistan creates space for outfits whose violence can spill across the region, including into Jammu and Kashmir. Groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, long associated with anti-India attacks, have operated in this broader zone. A government in Kabul hostile or indifferent to India’s concerns would, in this thinking, worsen India’s security environment considerably.

This is why India has historically backed Afghan security forces with training and equipment, and why it places such weight on assurances that Afghan soil will not be used against it. During the recent high-level engagement in 2025, the Taliban’s foreign minister publicly stated that Afghanistan would not allow its territory to be used against India’s interests.

The Pakistan factor 🔗

It is impossible to discuss India and Afghanistan without Pakistan in the frame. India’s foremost interest, analysts argue, has been to ensure that Pakistan does not gain a dominant hold over Afghanistan’s governing structures. A Kabul aligned entirely with Islamabad would give Pakistan what strategists call “strategic depth” and squeeze India out of the region.

Afghanistan has often been caught in this rivalry. The relationship between Kabul and Islamabad is itself complicated by the Durand Line, the colonial-era border that successive Afghan governments, including the Taliban, have refused to fully accept, calling it an “imaginary line.” The Taliban also hosts the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, a group Islamabad blames for attacks inside its own territory. These tensions have produced deadly clashes along the border. For India, friction between Afghanistan and Pakistan has, somewhat counterintuitively, opened more diplomatic room to engage Kabul.

Navigating a crowded field of external powers 🔗

India is not the only outside power with stakes in Afghanistan. After the United States withdrew in 2021, the strategic space did not stay empty. China moved quickly to deepen economic engagement with the Taliban government, with Afghanistan being positioned as a potential node in its Belt and Road Initiative. Russia has also engaged actively, and Iran remains a key neighbour.

This has created what observers describe as a new competitive scenario, particularly between India and China, over influence in Kabul. India’s calculation is that withdrawing entirely, as Western countries largely did, would cede ground to rivals. Maintaining a presence, even a limited one, lets India protect its interests and keep watch on developments that affect its security.

The Taliban era and India’s recalibration 🔗

The Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 forced India into a difficult position. It had built its Afghan presence around a partnership with the previous republican government and had no relationship with the Taliban. India closed its embassy and stepped back.

Since then, the policy has shifted toward what one analysis calls “calculated diplomacy.” India reopened a technical mission in Kabul in 2022 and gradually expanded contact. A turning point came in October 2025, when Afghanistan’s interim foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi made the first high-level Taliban visit to New Delhi since the takeover, made possible by a temporary UN exemption to his travel ban.

During that visit, India announced it would upgrade its Kabul mission back to full embassy status. Both sides emphasised respect for each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and India agreed to deepen cooperation in healthcare, public infrastructure, and capacity-building. Notably, India has stopped short of formally recognising the Taliban government, reflecting concerns over the regime’s record, particularly its severe restrictions on women and girls.

A balancing act with real costs 🔗

This engagement is a careful trade-off. On one side, India gains the ability to track security threats, protect its development legacy, and prevent rivals from monopolising influence. A fully functioning embassy, as observers note, helps India monitor threats on the ground. On the other side, closer ties with a regime widely criticised on human rights carry domestic political costs and difficult moral questions. The exclusion of women journalists from Muttaqi’s initial press conference in Delhi, and the subsequent backlash, captured exactly this tension.

Putting it together: Afghanistan in India’s strategy 🔗

Afghanistan matters to India for reasons that reinforce one another. Its location offers a doorway to Central Asian energy and markets, which is why connectivity through Chabahar is so prized. Its stability bears directly on India’s security, given the terrorism risks in the region. And its political alignment is a contest with Pakistan and, increasingly, with China and other powers for regional influence.

The constraint that runs through all of this is the lack of a direct link, which forces India to work through Iran and to rely on aid, diplomacy, and soft power rather than hard reach. India’s two-decade investment built deep goodwill, and its current cautious engagement with the Taliban is an attempt to preserve that legacy while adapting to a government it does not endorse. Afghanistan, in short, is less a single policy than a long-running balancing act at the crossroads of Asia.

What do you think? Does India’s decision to engage the Taliban without formally recognising it strike the right balance between security interests and principles? And given the absence of a land link, how far can connectivity through a third country like Iran realistically carry India’s ambitions in Afghanistan and Central Asia?

References

1. https://www.insightsonindia.com/international-relations/india-and-its-neighborhood/india-afghanistan-relations/strategic-importance/
2. https://thediplomat.com/2025/11/sanctions-the-taliban-and-an-iranian-port-the-uncertain-future-of-indias-kabul-route/
3. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/india-says-chabahar-port-project-would-benefit-landlocked-afghanistan-central-asia-622144/
4. https://tarunias.com/exams/upsc-notes/india-afghanistan-relations/
5. https://www.dailypioneer.com/2025/top-stories/india-upgrades-kabul-mission-to-embassy-status.html
6. https://civilspedia.com/tag/zaranj-delaram-highway/
7. https://iasabhiyan.in/india-and-afghanistan/
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9. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02627280231190790
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11. https://www.aol.com/articles/india-reopen-embassy-afghan-capital-074000118.html