A meeting between India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri  and Afghanistan’s foreign minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi in Dubai, in January, is being scanned by Pakistan’s foreign policy experts to find out what exactly it means for their country and the rest of the region. One can read signs of worries in their writings and articulations. For them, it is a reversal of fortunes for all the investment Pakistan had done in its western neighbor. This is becoming more worrisome for them as there has been a dramatic and drastic drift in Islamabad-Kabul relations after August 2021.

Indeed these are testing times for Pakistan’s foreign policy; Afghanistan is of deep strategic interest to Pakistan.  Afghanistan always sat as an area of strategic depth in its geopolitics. Pakistan also believes that it has done many favours to Afghanistan in the Cold War era, especially after the Soviet troops walked in. It had acted as a  nerve center for  sending “mujahedeen”, mobilized from various countries, including Saudi Arabia, to  get Afghanistan “liberated from the Soviet Union”. It was indeed successful in doing so with the liberal military and financial aid  from the United States of America. 

The Soviet Union  was a federation of republics established in 1922 and lasted till 1991. It had Russia and 14 other countries on its map and it collapsed in 1991, leading to the establishment in the Baltic and Central Asia. Its collapse was caused by the crushing defeat and retreat by the Russian troops from Afghanistan and Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms – perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness).

And second time, soon after the Cold War ended, it played a big but dubious role in Afghanistan after world’s biggest terror attack on........

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