Murtaza Shibli’s article in the Kashmir Times (October 14, 2025), titled “How India Can Navigate Afghanistan Under Taliban,” promises insight into India’s evolving policy toward the Taliban regime. What it delivers instead is a familiar, overwrought narrative. It is less an analysis of India–Afghanistan engagement than a therapeutic outpouring of hostility toward a particular establishment, one that Shibli has recycled with minimal variation and even less evidence.
Behind its sharp phrasing lies a shallow understanding of South Asia’s complex security matrix. The Taliban, Pakistan, India, and regional powers such as China and Iran exist within a web of conflicting interests. Reducing this to a morality play of “bad generals, good civilians, and heroic Taliban” is not analysis. It is polemics.
Shibli begins with his old refrain: Pakistan has been “run and ruined” by corrupt military generals for most of its history. This is simplistic and historically misleading. Pakistan’s crises—economic, political, and institutional—are products of collective failure. Civilian dynasties, feudal networks, religious parties, and a weak judiciary have each contributed their share.
The military’s role in politics has been damaging, no doubt, but the country’s chronic misgovernance cannot be understood without examining how civilian leaders, from landlord Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to industrialist Nawaz Sharif, used the same patronage and coercive structures the generals built.
Pakistan’s fiscal deficit, owes also much to civilian subsidies on energy and agriculture nearly as much as defense allocations. The narcotics trade and informal economy that Shibli blames on “military-run mafias” actually predate General Zia-ul-Haq. They thrive today under civilian provincial administrations. The truth is less dramatic but more instructive. Pakistan’s governance system is corroded across all institutions, not only those in Khaki.
To lend rhetorical force, Shibli cites the late Asma Jahangir’s famous remark about “duffer generals.” Jahangir was a fearless critic of military excesses, but she also built her arguments on evidence. Shibli offers none.
Between 2009 and 2021, Pakistan’s armed forces lost more than 10,000 soldiers fighting the same Taliban factions he accuses them of “creating.” These losses represent the price of flawed but determined counter-insurgency campaigns in Swat, Waziristan, and Khyber. Calling the entire institution “duffer” ignores the reality.
Entire Pakistani structures, including civil society, made grave strategic mistakes, supporting Afghan jihad in the 1980s, tolerating militant proxies later. But to paint just one arm of the establishment as a caricatured villain is to evade nuance.
Shibli’s reference to a slogan, “Yeh jo namaloom hai, yeh sab ko maloom hai,” makes for a good street chant, but it trivialises the real complexity and exhibits extreme bias and ignorance about Pakistan’s internal structures. In 2024–25 alone, Baloch separatists targeted more than 50 civilians, Islamic State-Khorasan carried out a dozen suicide bombings, and criminal networks in Karachi killed dozens of policemen. These incidents cannot be conveniently assigned to the military simply because the perpetrators remain unidentified. The notion that “if it’s unknown, the army must have done it” is, at best, a conspiracy theory.
One of Shibli’s most glaring errors is his portrayal of the Taliban as principled Islamists, who refuse to fight Pakistan’s TTP. This romanticised reading ignores the Taliban’s transactional nature. Multiple reports from Kabul, including leaks from the Afghan Ministry of Interior in September 2025, confirm that the Taliban have been negotiating with Pakistan over relocating TTP militants in exchange for financial incentives and diplomatic recognition.
Though the Taliban have often denied the presence of TTP in Afghanistan, some reports suggest that a Taliban spokesperson assured that TTP bases in Kunar and Nangarhar would be “relocated away from the Durand Line.” This shows the Taliban are pragmatic actors, who bargain over geography and power, not ideological purists rejecting Pakistan out of moral conviction, as opposed to Shibli’s unrealistic claims.
Shibli calls India’s engagement with the Taliban “pragmatic,” yet warns that Pakistan’s intelligence agency will “engineer divisions within Taliban ranks” to launch a new insurgency. Both assertions cannot coexist. If the Taliban are so independent and ideologically hostile to Pakistan, why would anybody’s manipulation succeed? And if they remain susceptible to Pakistani influence, then India’s “pragmatic” diplomacy is built on shifting sand.
India’s own record with the Taliban belies Shibli’s moral absolutism. The first formal contact occurred in Doha in August 2021, when Indian envoy Deepak Mittal met Taliban negotiator Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai. Does that make India complicit in “military manipulation”? Of course not. States engage adversaries when their interests demand it. Shibli grants India the right to realism but denies Pakistan the same.
In his entire piece, Shibli dedicates just a caption to “Afghanistan’s brave women of substance,” but fails to mention their current plight under the Taliban. The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has doubled its morality police since May 2025, and girls above grade six remain barred from school. India’s own diplomatic photo-ops in Kabul, where no Afghan women were present, highlight how even “pragmatic engagement” often sidelines gender justice. Shibli’s selective empathy reveals a lack of principled moral outrage.
Shibli’s sweeping claim about “unprecedented levels of corruption within the military” comes without a single citation. Corruption in Pakistan is systemic, not uniform. To single out one segment without evidence is poor scholarship.
The Taliban’s relationship with Pakistan and India cannot be understood in isolation from regional geopolitics. China’s deepening Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) footprint in Afghanistan, Iran’s cautious outreach to Kabul, and Russia’s quiet engagement with the Taliban all shape the equation. India’s reopening of its Kabul embassy and limited aid to Afghanistan are not moral endorsements but strategic hedges to retain minimal influence in a region increasingly dominated by Beijing’s and Islamabad’s networks.
Shibli’s triumphal tone about India’s supposed “new foothold” underestimates the Taliban’s opportunism. The same leadership that welcomed Indian engineers in Kabul has continued to host foreign fighters and levy taxes on narcotics. For India, as for Pakistan earlier, engagement is a necessity, not a victory.
What runs through Shibli’s writing is a yearning for moral simplicity: Pakistan’s generals are villains; India’s diplomats are pragmatists; the Taliban are misunderstood rebels.
But South Asia’s geopolitics allows no such clean distinctions. The Taliban’s rise was enabled by global hypocrisy. The same Western powers that denounce extremism today once funded it against the Soviets. India’s cautious outreach today mirrors Pakistan’s policy in the 1990s - contain, engage, and hope for restraint. History suggests the results will be similar.
India’s outreach to the Taliban is neither a moral triumph nor a regional breakthrough. It is an attempt to remain relevant in a post-American Afghanistan and to balance against Chinese influence. For Pakistan, engagement with Kabul is about border security and refugee control, not romantic pan-Islamism. Both countries are pursuing interest-based policies within severe constraints.
Shibli’s article, however, transforms this messy reality into a morality tale, of painting Pakistan as irredeemably evil and the Taliban as potentially noble. That distortion does a disservice to readers seeking genuine understanding.
The Taliban still harbour Al-Qaeda operatives, suppress dissent, and flog women for “improper hijab.” Any state that bets on its reform risks learning the same hard lessons Pakistan did two decades ago.
At its core, Shibli’s essay vents personal anger, dresses it up as human-rights advocacy, and then projects it onto Afghanistan’s shifting politics. In doing so, it misses the larger picture of India’s limited leverage in Kabul, the Taliban’s enduring brutality, and the region’s shared vulnerability to extremist resurgence.
A serious conversation on India–Afghanistan relations would focus on rebuilding humanitarian channels, holding the Taliban accountable for women’s rights, and addressing the cross-border militancy that threatens everyone, from Khost to Kashmir.
Until Shibli engages these realities, his commentaries will remain what the late Eqbal Ahmad called “the opium of the anti-military exiles—soothing, addictive, and ultimately soporific.”
(*The writer is a research associate at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations, Islamabad.)
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