South Asia’s risky gamble as it engages with the Taliban

Regime’s expanding influence is raising concerns of inspiring regional movements

- Kalicharan Veera Singam

Taliban security staff at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in Kandahar on Dec 29, 2025. Deepening engagements with the Taliban risk increasing the group's resonance and appeal with its apparent regional support base. PHOTO: AFP

(AFP)

Recent visits by Afghan Taliban officials to Asian capitals, including Moscow, show a growing regional quasi acceptance for the regime, despite worsening human rights and humanitarian conditions in Afghanistan.

While the Taliban government is not widely recognised globally, its leaders are increasingly diplomatically engaged and able to travel and meet overseas followers, raising concerns about the regime’s influence over Islamist movements in South Asia.

For governments in South Asia, it is a strategic imperative to engage the Taliban even though the regime is still believed to share affinities with, and harbour, a few terrorist groups.

Regional governments are competing for Afghanistan's untapped resources and want to be in a position to exert leverage over the regime to ensure terrorist actors there do not target their countries.

However, deepening engagements with the Taliban, which come with high-level diplomatic tours and social visits by Taliban officials to their countries, risk increasing the group’s resonance and appeal with its apparent regional support base.

In a trip that might have been deliberately kept low-profile, a few Taliban officials were spotted in Bangladesh in late December 2025 — just a few days after suspected Islamist groups attacked cultural institutions and media houses there amid concerns of growing Islamist influence in Bangladesh’s politics. These attacks were not known to be linked to the Taliban.