By Stephen Blank
Just as Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to a cease-fire on October 19, representatives of the Taliban were in New Delhi reviving India’s long-standing ties with Afghanistan, demonstrating the interconnections between Afghanistan, Central Asia as a region, and the rivalries that drive Asian politics, i.e. the Indo-Pakistani-China triangle. In turn, this signifies the region’s increasing importance to major external actors as well as the growing importance and agency of Central Asian states. 
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
BACKGROUND: India’s rapprochement with Afghanistan follows the examples of China, Russia, and Central Asian states. Although Pakistan promoted the Taliban during the insurgency against the U.S., their relations have deteriorated since 2021. Pakistan has increasingly charged the Taliban with sheltering and supporting the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a militant group responsible for a surge of deadly attacks inside Pakistan. This tension has led to frequent and sometimes deadly border clashes, airstrikes, and the repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan. Despite the latest cease-fire, continued tensions can be expected along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
There are compelling reasons for India and Afghanistan to resume ties and connections, e.g., air flights from New Delhi to Kabul. Prior to the Taliban takeover, India had a thriving, strategically motivated, relationship with Afghanistan. India is in a permanent state of tension with Pakistan, which continues to sponsor terrorist attacks on India, while China supports Pakistan to prevent India from rivalling it as an Asian great power. These two states have consistently sought with considerable success to isolate India from Central Asia, thereby giving China a freer hand in the region.
Pakistan has long strived to have hegemonic influence over Afghan governments. It previously sponsored the Taliban against the pro-Western and pro-Indian Karzai and subsequent governments in Afghanistan. Consequently, as Taliban ties to Pakistan eroded and the need for economic support from abroad grew, India has emulated other actors in Central Asia to resume ties with Afghanistan.
India, Central Asian governments, Russia, and China have congruent economic-political reasons for restoring ties to Kabul. The same is true for Washington, although to a lesser degree. All these governments have concluded that if they wish to prevent the Afghan government from sponsoring terrorism, whether against Russia, Uzbekistan, or China, they must engage seriously, and enter into diplomatic relations, with Afghanistan.
Similarly, by virtue of its geographical location Afghanistan is instrumental to transcontinental trade and transportation routes, including the Middle Corridor and Belt and Road, leading from China through Central Asia to Europe. The construction of such corridors is now one of the most urgent issues on the agenda for these states, making a reasonably secure and robust economic engagement with Afghanistan a necessity for both Central Asian states and China. As a result of this awareness, we now see numerous proposals for a railway and other transportation routes connecting Central Asia and China. The Afghan government also evidently grasps the need for secure and thriving economic links with its Central Asian neighbors, China, and Russia.
The enhanced understanding on all sides of the urgent need for improved connectivity obliges foreign governments to press for an end to support for terrorists. It remains to be seen if Kabul can or will terminate this support. If it does not, it will be shunned by its neighbors and potential partners.
Great power interest in Afghanistan is also fueled by the fact that previous international studies estimate that Afghanistan is sitting on an estimated US$ 1 trillion of rare earths and minerals. As access to these goods has now become a central issue in global politics, and especially Sino-American relations, there is an intensifying competition to gain secure and uncontested access to them. Once again, Afghanistan could become a central arena for great power rivalry.
Moscow needs good ties to Kabul to reinforce its overall Central Asian policy goals and prevent domestic terrorism; and also aspires to sell arms to Kabul. Soviet arms sales provided the basis for its earlier influence in Afghanistan, and Russia hopes to repeat this especially as it has little to offer economically compared to Beijing and Washington. The Trump Administration, apart from its growing obsession with rare earths, wants to regain access to Bagram Air Base to monitor Chinese military developments.
IMPLICATIONS: Rising interest in ties with Afghanistan across the board opens the way for the Taliban to play the traditional small state game of hedging and balancing among competing foreign governments. However, the developments outlined above tell us things about Central Asia that are prospectively much more important. First, Central Asian states that are displaying ever more interest in regional cooperation and integration now acknowledge that their region is incomplete if Afghanistan does not or cannot participate in it. This insight applies with equal force to economic issues as well as security concerns. For them, no discussion of the regional future is complete without including Afghanistan. Therefore, they are promoting bilateral and regional plans for projects to expand trade, transport, and technology projects to Afghanistan.
Second, it appears that all of the major foreign state actors appreciate the fact that for economic, political, and strategic reasons they all need to engage not only Afghanistan but the entire region. This awareness enhances their mutual rivalries throughout Central Asia but also prospects for Central Asian states to acquire much needed foreign assistance, on better terms than if they were dependent on only one foreign provider. This foreign rivalry enhances their economic and security capabilities while also creating a possibility to pacify Afghanistan’s domestic and foreign policies.
However, as is often the case, these potential benefits come at a price. Although Central Asian states, India, China, Russia, and the U.S, are all engaging Afghanistan, it is unlikely that they can induce it to stop supporting terrorism even if it is directed at Pakistan, itself a known supporter of terrorism. Thus, Central Asian states that depend to some degree on the economic-political development of Afghanistan cannot escape involvement in the tangled relations of South Asia. To the extent that Central Asian states hope to include Afghanistan in their future projects this involvement is unavoidable.
Meanwhile, Pakistan and China work steadily to impede India’s engagement with Central Asia. Chinese analysts increasingly frame the Pakistan-Afghanistan tensions with reference to a wider Indian role as manifested in India’s ties to Afghanistan. Pakistan fears such connections and strongly objected to the references to Jammu and Kashmir in the Indo-Afghan communique.
Moreover, Uzbekistan is now expressing its interest in obtaining a permanent berth at the Iranian port of Chabahar in Iran. It has held meetings with Iranian and Indian officials to gain this position because this port, apart from figuring prominently in Iran’s regional commercial ambitions, is critical to India’s efforts to leapfrog or bypass Pakistani obstruction of its Central Asian policies.
The entanglement in South Asia’s rivalries is part of a larger trend where Central Asia is increasingly tied to developments in other regions. Central Asian economies are profoundly affected by the war in Ukraine. Similarly, there is mounting interest in Central Asian countries joining the Abraham Accords, a move that increases their political and strategic involvement in the Middle East on top of their growing economic ties with states of the Persian Gulf.
CONCLUSIONS: The impending Sino-American rivalry over rare earths cannot but draw Central Asian states, including Afghanistan, into the Sino-American, and possibly Sino-European tensions. Thus, what we are now seeing in the spillover of South Asian tensions into Central Asia and vice versa, given the TTP raids into Pakistan, signify the full arrival and agency of Central Asian states as individual and regional actors of more than local significance. These trends will undoubtedly continue but how they develop depends on the actions of all the relevant policymakers involved. While those actions cannot be foreseen, Central Asian states will not be merely the object of other states’ designs but independent actors whose policies, be they support for terrorism or large-scale connectivity projects, will impact trends far beyond their borders.
AUTHOR’S BIO: Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, www.fpri.org.