The main geopolitical power struggle in Asia recently has been the trade and military conflicts between China and India. The Taliban’s return changes that.
To understand why, it’s worth going back a few decades, to the years just before the Soviet Union’s incursion into Afghanistan. For all the current buddy-buddy goodwill between the U.S. and India, relations between the two were much more strained during the Cold War—India remained staunchly neutral when it came to the Soviet Union vs. the U.S.
, Saudi Arabia, and even China, which by that point had severed relations with the Soviets. Throughout the 1980s, Pakistan served as a conduit for intelligence trading and arms sales between the anti-Soviet fighters and the U.S., and trained tens of thousands of Afghan rebels within its borders. India, meanwhile, was willing to establish relations with the Soviets’ puppet government in Kabul, in part as a matter of opposition to the fundamentalist ideologies of mujahedeen factions.
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