After the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, it was only a matter of time before conflict erupted between the Afghan Taliban and their former patron, Pakistan. One of the ways this manifested was that the Pakistani faction of the Taliban, encouraged by their handlers in Kabul, executed attacks on Pakistani soil. This was part of their strategy to get China to do business with Afghanistan. The same could be said of the Afghan Taliban’s growing ties with India; it’s a straightforward way to try to break out of international isolation. But the Pakistani government cannot allow Kabul to create a sphere of influence on its western flank. Doing so will lead only to more Pakistani intervention.

On Oct. 15, Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to a temporary ceasefire following the most intense border clashes between the two former allies since the Taliban reestablished its emirate four years ago. The fragile truce came after Pakistan conducted airstrikes on Kabul and Kandahar, the Taliban’s ideological and de facto power center, in response to recent attacks by Pakistani Taliban militants targeting Islamabad’s forces. The strikes coincided with the Taliban foreign minister’s unprecedented six-day visit to New Delhi, highlighting the complex geopolitical contradictions now shaping Pakistani-Taliban relations. An Oct. 12 statement from Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, which expressed hope that the Afghan people would one day enjoy emancipation under a true representative government, underscores the sharp pivot in Islamabad’s rhetoric toward a movement it had long wanted to see in power.

In December 2022, I predicted that Pakistan and Afghanistan were headed toward a fight, and I explained the causes of this radical shift in their relationship. But these warnings are worth repeating here. The Taliban cannot hope to maintain a medieval-era theocracy next to a country that has a modern form of government and a vibrant civil society. For this reason, they want to create a franchise inside Pakistan that insulates them from political influence that could threaten their power. It also enables the Taliban leadership to empower like-minded groups that potentially can be grounded in Pakistan.

For now, the biggest challenge is consolidating their regime, for which they need money and lots of it. The U.S. and the West have largely shunned the Afghan Taliban regime since its return to power. The broader international consensus is that as long as the Taliban continue to impose their draconian interpretation of Islamic law and suppress the freedoms of 30 million Afghans, relations cannot be normalized. Some countries have pragmatically sought to deal with the regime, but they too have been highly selective in their approach.

In short, the Taliban need to have a functional economy, and the only way that can happen is by foreign investment. China is the only real option here. Afghanistan hopes that Beijing will invest in its mining, energy, agriculture, telecommunications, infrastructure and construction, and health care sectors. But China has been very cautious in deploying funds there. In the wake of a failed oil deal in August, Beijing said that the Taliban’s way of doing business was akin to “banditry,” according to a report from NPR.

The Taliban’s problem is that they are largely an insurgent movement that has very little experience in governance, let alone economic statecraft. They bankrolled their insurgency through organized crime and thus have a long way to go before they can engage in internationally recognized political-economic practices. Until then, they seem to be pushing away the one state with which they can form a substantial commercial relationship. The Taliban attacks in Pakistan only further undermine Chinese interests.

Over the past decade, China has invested tens of billions of dollars in Pakistan as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor – the signature project of its Belt and Road Initiative. Pakistan’s chronic financial woes have complicated China’s return on investment, to say the least. Its workers, moreover, have been attacked by both Taliban rebels and Baluch separatists. The question, then, is why do the Afghan Taliban support attacks on Pakistan if those attacks undermine their own economic interests?

The answer has to do with what the Taliban does best: use violence to extract concessions. They know the only way to gain China’s attention is to strike its main regional ally in Pakistan. They also know that Pakistan will need to come to the negotiating table too, even if it decides to respond with force. The Taliban simply wants them to bring China along.

The Taliban are counting on China and Pakistan to realize that they are the only ones who can rein in the Pakistani rebels. When they will inevitably ask the Taliban leadership to intervene, Kabul will exact its toll – that is, Chinese investment. And for the right price, they would be willing even to help rein in the Baluch insurgents as well.

But the Taliban cannot assume their strategy will work. This is why they are hedging their bets with their overtures to the Indians. They realize that New Delhi is no substitute for Beijing. But given their situation, they need to reach out to as many potential sources of assistance as possible. And there is an added benefit of exploiting the India-Pakistan rivalry. That’s the only explanation for why New Delhi, led by a right-wing Hindu nationalist government ideologically opposed to jihadism, would be willing to engage with the Afghan Taliban.

Indeed, there is no other strategic benefit. India has always seen Afghanistan as a way to create connectivity with Central Asia – hence its close relations with Kabul during the two decades of U.S. military intervention. When that regime collapsed in 2021 and the Taliban came back to power, bilateral ties took a hit because Pakistan was an ally of the Taliban’s benefactors. Now that the Taliban has turned against its patron in Islamabad, there are new opportunities for New Delhi.

For India, this relationship is strategically limited. The ideological divide is simply too wide to bridge. India can’t exactly leverage Afghanistan to gain geo-economic access to Central Asia because Pakistan is geographically in the way. Iran is a potential alternative – hence why India has been involved in the development of the Chabahar port, located as it is outside the chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz. But this, too, is unlikely given the tension between the U.S. and Iran, not to mention the additional restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on the project. Even if U.S.-Iranian relations improved, there’s little reason for India to choose Afghanistan over Iran as an entry point to Central Asia. The country is far too difficult – topographically and geopolitically – to effectively develop.

A relationship with India thus amounts to little more than tactical leverage against Pakistan. And for this reason, Islamabad cannot tolerate the Taliban regime in Kabul. Pakistan does not have any good options at this stage, but it is in Islamabad’s interest to eventually seek regime change in Kabul, as ironic as that may be. More realistically, Pakistan can be expected to militarily intervene more frequently in Afghanistan in the foreseeable future.