Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi’s expected visit to India next week signals a quiet but decisive shift. It is the first high-level Taliban engagement with India since Kabul fell in August 2021, and it highlights how quickly regional alignments are redrawing themselves. Afghanistan, once treated as a client state by Islamabad, is recalibrating its foreign ties and seeking partners that can deliver legitimacy, trade and aid.

For India, this is an opportunity to shape policy pragmatically while safeguarding against terror spillovers. For Pakistan, it is a humiliation. The neighbour that claimed unrivalled influence in Kabul now finds itself sidelined, mistrusted, and scrambling for relevance. Afghanistan’s pivot to New Delhi is a diplomatic rupture Islamabad never thought it

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