A lookout post over the city of Kabul, Afghanistan. Pakistani officials accuse Afghanistan’s rulers of supporting a resurgent Pakistani Taliban offensive within Pakistan. — Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times
STUDENTS pressed against the doors of the seminary as the Afghan Taliban’s foreign minister stepped from his car.
Teachers craned for a view. Young men jostled forward with their phones out.
The reception was closer to a popstar frenzy than a diplomatic call.
But this was not Kabul. It was India – a country that, for decades, kept the Taliban at arm’s length, viewing them as Pakistan’s proxy and a threat to its own security.
Yet during Amir Khan Muttaqi’s first official visit to India last month, the welcome bordered on exuberant.
He posed for photographs with officials in New Delhi, who pledged to upgrade India’s mission in Kabul to a full embassy for the first time in years.
Then he beamed his way through the famed Deoband seminary in northern India – the intellectual cradle of the Taliban’s austere religious ideology.
The entire trip looked like a deliberate signal of defiance to Pakistan’s powerful military establishment.
Islamabad once nurtured the Taliban insurgency as a strategic hedge in Afghanistan. Now the relationship is souring fast, and Muttaqi’s appearance in India seemed designed to twist the knife.
Pakistan reacted instantly. Within hours of his arrival, its military launched airstrikes on Kabul – an unprecedented escalation between one-time allies.
The strikes triggered a week of tit-for-tat violence that left both countries bracing for the worst.
Pakistani officials accuse the Afghan Taliban of tolerating, even assisting, the Pakistani Taliban, whose attacks have surged inside Pakistan over the past year.
Kabul denies this, insisting the violence is driven by Pakistan’s own domestic militants.
Still, Afghan officials openly acknowledge their ideological and ethnic ties with the Pakistani Taliban. Both movements draw heavily from the Pashtun tribes straddling a border that Afghanistan has never fully recognised.
Those bonds are rooted in the Deobandi network of religious schools that flourished after the 1947 partition of India.
With CIA and Saudi funding during the anti-Soviet war, the movement expanded further, feeding the ideology that produced the Taliban.
Today, the same ideological family tree is helping drive a wedge between Pakistan and the Afghan rulers it once empowered.
That such a rupture was coming was long predicted. Analysts warned that once the US-backed Afghan government fell – which it did in 2021 – Pakistan would face blowback from the victorious Taliban’s ideological cousins next door.
But few expected relations to deteriorate quite so quickly.
“They created their own Frankenstein, and they thought they could control them,” said David Edwards, a professor of anthropology at Williams College who has chronicled the rise of militancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He was referring to Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, which supported the Taliban insurgency for years and now finds itself in their crosshairs.
Edwards said the current clash is a reminder of a deeper, unresolved issue: the 19th-century Durand Line, a border drawn by the British that split the Pashtun heartland in two.
Afghanistan has never formally accepted the boundary and that old grievance is now resurfacing.
In public speeches, senior Taliban figures invoke a shared Pashtun nationalism that Pakistan can neither contain nor comfortably confront.
Mohammad Nabi Omari, the Taliban’s deputy interior minister and a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay, mocked Pakistan’s prime minister as a puppet of US President Donald Trump.
“God is creating a pretext for that old territory of Afghanistan that is left with them, on that side of a theoretical boundary, to be returned to us,” he declared.
India, for its part, appears keen to exploit the rift.
That New Delhi rolled out the red carpet for a Taliban minister – who needed a UN sanctions waiver just to travel – was noticed instantly in Islamabad.
Afghan officials, meanwhile, used the moment to signal that their movement owes Pakistan no loyalty, not even religiously.
Reactions inside Pakistan’s religious circles have been mixed.
Leaders of the Haqqania madrasah, where Muttaqi once studied, hailed the warm reception in India as recognition of a “long chain of sacrifice”.
Others, such as Peshawar-based scholar Tayyab Qureshi, denounced the Taliban as ungrateful and opportunistic.
A month after the visit, the mood is still raw.
Afghanistan and Pakistan remain locked in a war of words, while tensions between India and Pakistan have also flared after deadly bombings hit both capitals within a day of each other.
Analysts warn that a cycle of blame and escalation could drag the nuclear-armed neighbours back towards confrontation, only months after a ceasefire paused a worrying four-day clash.
In Afghanistan, the rhetoric has only hardened. Taliban leaders boast of their victory over US forces and hint that Pakistan could face the same fate if it continues its military pressure.
“You may have aeroplanes and tanks, but we have the kind of fighters who are sitting here itching for when action will begin again,” Omari said in a recent public address. “Because, when you are addicted to, say, chewing tobacco – excuse my language – you can’t quit so easily.
“Our fighters are used to these wars over the past 20-25 years,” he continued, “and they are wishing for another war.” — ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
