For most, May 15 was an uneventful Thursday. Over at South Block, however, the phone rang. External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar picked it up. Who was on the other side of the call? Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi.

This single phone call confirmed what many in Indian strategic and foreign policy circles have known for long – that India and the Taliban are in close and regular contact.

So, what was on the agenda of the call? For starters, both EAM Jaishankar and the Taliban’s Muttaqi chose to expose Pakistan for the shameless liar that it is. Jaishankar commended Muttaqi for firmly dismissing baseless reports aimed at damaging India-Afghanistan relations.

This was in reference to Pakistani claims that India orchestrated a fake operation at Pahalgam with the help of the Taliban, and that the Indian Armed Forces (IAF) launched air strikes against Afghan territory during Operation Sindoor.

Obviously, the Taliban has picked sides in the ongoing India-Pakistan flare-up. For decades, Pakistan has considered the Afghan Taliban as one of the many proxy groups it controls in the region. At the behest of the West, Pakistan trained rag-tag mujahideen who went on to fight Russian forces during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The same mujahideen, with the open support of Pakistan, metamorphosed into what the world today knows as the Taliban. However, after the Taliban recaptured Kabul in 2021, it dumped Pakistan like a mismatched Hinge date – polite at first, but ghosted the moment a better match (India) swiped right.

What explains this turnaround? It seems the Taliban, regardless of its own notorious history, has come to a stark realisation: Pakistan is a rogue nation, a sponsor of terrorism, and effectively, a failed state. The sheer irony is that even the Taliban finds Pakistan too precarious for a committed relationship, and that profoundly........

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