When President Donald Trump met Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa in the Oval Office last month, it crystallized how fast international politics can reorder yesterday’s “unthinkable.” Al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda-linked commander who carried a U.S. bounty, was received in Washington as a head of state whose cooperation the White House now sees as useful for Syria’s stabilization and the fight against the Islamic State.
Al-Sharaa earned this redemption by moving away from insurgency to governance, adopting a transitional legal framework, and making himself acceptable to outside powers seeking security guarantees and a pathway to reconstruction. The result has been incremental normalization resulting in sanction waivers and a widening circle of engagement that would have been off-limits a few years ago.
The approach matters beyond Syria, because another Islamist movement is also trying to pull off a similar transformation, namely the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban still presides over a pariah state, shunned by most of the world. Yet recent developments show it is also “coming in from the cold,” rebuilding ties with a wider set of countries even as it remains locked in a dangerous cross-border dispute with Pakistan and trapped by financial isolation.
This is the Taliban’s crossroads, a partial diplomatic thaw without real economic relief. The Taliban can use this opening to trade militancy and support for militant groups on its soil for durable rehabilitation, or it can treat a string of isolated engagements as a substitute for reform and drift into an impoverished emirate that is frozen in time.
Diplomatic Thaw That Doesn’t Translate into Cash
Since the Taliban’s return to Kabul in 2021, no major Western government has formally recognized it. Sanctions remain, and Afghanistan’s central bank reserves are still largely frozen outside the country.
And yet the diplomatic temperature has started to warm slowly. Russia has recognized the Taliban-led government, China has pursued what analysts describe as “durable de facto recognition,” and even countries like Germany have opened limited channels to facilitate deportations and repatriations while maintaining broader opposition to recognition. India, too, is recalibrating by hosting Taliban Foreign Minister Muttaqi during a six-day visit to India last October and promising to reopen its embassy in Kabul.
Meanwhile, the Taliban’s pitch to the outside world is transactional, pointing to a tougher campaign against ISIS-K and to the sharp drop in poppy cultivation as proof it can deliver outcomes that matter to other governments. Some foreign capitals have treated such moves as security “wins.”
But this is the trap of “coming in from the cold”: Afghanistan can be engaged without being reintegrated. Meetings and delegations will neither fill the coffers of the Central Bank nor restore a functioning economy, especially when the regime shelters terrorist groups such as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and excludes women and girls from education and much of the formal economy.
Pakistan’s Test: Kabul Can’t Evade It
If the Taliban wants to be treated as a legitimate security actor, it must confront the issue that most directly undermines that claim: cross-border support for terrorism.
Pakistan accuses the Taliban of providing sanctuary to the TTP, whose attacks have made 2025 Pakistan’s deadliest year in more than two decades. The UN Security Council’s thirty-sixth report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team states that “TTP had approximately 6,000 fighters and continued to receive substantial logistical and operational support from the de facto authorities.”
Islamabad has responded by closing border crossings, deporting large numbers of Afghan refugees, conducting airstrikes, and even publicly raising the prospect of a ground incursion to dismantle militant camps on Afghan soil.
This dispute doesn’t just threaten another round of border warfare. It undercuts Afghanistan’s economic prospects by branding the Taliban as an unreliable security guarantor and by placing Afghanistan’s most important commercial geography, namely its access to and through Pakistan, under constant stress. Even if Kabul tries to bypass Pakistan via Iran, those alternatives are slower, riskier, and less scalable in the near term.
In other words, the Taliban cannot diplomatically outrun the security realities. The more it hedges on the TTP, the more it looks like a movement seeking the benefits of statehood without accepting its core obligation to prevent its territory from being used to launch attacks beyond its borders. The Taliban should also remember that harboring Osama bin Laden culminated in the attacks of September 11, 2001, and set in motion the U.S. invasion and the two-decade war that followed.
What Kabul Can Learn from Damascus
The Taliban is not Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, and Afghanistan is not Syria. But al-Sharaa’s journey underscores a hard truth about how normalization works. Outside powers will deal with unsavory actors if those actors deliver on core interests and if they can demonstrate, not merely declare, that they have changed their behavior.
To begin with, the Taliban must make a verifiable break from any support for the TTP. Kabul does not need to “choose Pakistan” to choose the basic obligations of sovereignty, dismantling militant infrastructure and reducing cross-border attacks in ways that are visible to neighbors and credible to third parties. Denials that Afghan soil is being used for terrorism carry little weight against the facts on the ground. If the Taliban wants credibility, it should accept some form of monitoring, whether UN-facilitated, regionally brokered, or jointly structured, that can test compliance rather than merely record promises.
Second, take concrete steps toward legible statehood. The Taliban’s current model as a closed clerical circle governing by decree while excluding women from education and much of public life keeps recognition politically toxic for most governments, even when narrow engagement is tolerated. A realistic pathway would not require immediate liberal democracy, but it would require clearer limits on arbitrary rule and visible inclusion of women and capable non-Taliban technocrats in the administrative state.
Lesson for India
Pakistan’s decades-long bet on the Afghan Taliban boomeranged, ushering in chronic border instability, a resurgent insurgent threat, and a Kabul leadership that shows little interest in enforcing Pakistan’s red lines against ideologically aligned militants.
Herein lies the lesson for India.
India’s re-engagement with Kabul is sometimes framed as hard-nosed realism that calls for engaging the authorities who control the capital, exploring trade and mineral opportunities, and keeping the door open. But engaging a misogynist theocracy that has waged a deliberate campaign to erase women from public life is not “neutral diplomacy”; it is reputational and strategic contamination. Afghanistan under the Taliban is not becoming a stable partner. It is becoming a sanctioned, brittle, factionalized security sink, one that survives by monetizing access, playing neighbors off one another, and offering selective counterterrorism cooperation while shielding fellow militants when convenient. India does not gain leverage by tying its Afghanistan policy to that model; it inherits risk.
The most reckless version of this policy is South Asia’s familiar addiction to proxy warfare. Pakistan already alleges that India backs anti-Pakistan militants, including Baloch insurgents and the TTP, claims New Delhi denies but that predictably resurface and intensify after major attacks. The broader strategic point does not hinge on proving any single allegation. Even flirting with the proxy option is self-harm for India. The Baluchistan Liberation Army is now designated a U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization, so any hint of patronage would invite diplomatic blowback and legal exposure and undermine India’s claim to be a responsible, rules-based power.
Worse, proxy games do not stay neatly “pointed outward.” They normalize militant ecosystems, deepen transnational smuggling and facilitation routes, and feed jihadist propaganda that casts India as a civilizational enemy. In an India already strained by communal polarization, this is not a distant hypothetical. It is a security externality waiting to be imported.
A region in which India cultivates militant assets against Pakistan would not yield leverage. It would generate spillover into Afghanistan’s already fractured order and, in time, into India’s own cities and fault lines.
The Choice in Kabul
Al-Sharaa’s White House visit does not guarantee Syria’s transition succeeds. Even in the best case, normalization is not absolution, and state-building remains fragile.
But the Syrian case sharpens the Taliban’s real choice. Kabul can keep chasing recognition by sheltering militants, governing by exclusion, and betting that the world will eventually accommodate the “only game in town.” Or it can use the current thaw to do what it has resisted most. It can treat militancy as a liability to dismantle rather than a lever to manage, accept predictable governance as the price of economic survival, and recognize women’s rights not as a foreign talking point but as the cornerstone of any welfare state worthy of the name.
The Taliban may never find their route to legitimacy running through the White House. Yet the logic that made room for an unlikely Syrian figure is the same logic confronting the Taliban now. The world will not bankroll what it cannot trust, and trust in geopolitics is earned less through declarations than through verifiable changes in behavior.
