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СпутникиРНSpaceXРоскосмосNASAMoscow's deepening relations with the Taliban hint at growing doubts about Pakistan as a counterterrorism partner.
In late May, in a hall outside Moscow, Taliban Defense Minister Mohammad Yaqoob signed a military agreement with Russia. Two days later, back in Kabul, he promised that no neighbor would again strike Afghan territory with the same confidence. The neighbor he had in mind went unnamed but was obvious: Pakistan.
At a May 26 meeting of the security chiefs of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, Russia’s FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov told the assembled representatives that the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) is actively recruiting citizens of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, as well as labor migrants inside Russia. He described clandestine networks forming across CIS territory, with functioning financing channels and attack preparations already underway. The Taliban defense minister was among those present.
Bortnikov’s sharpest formulation was directed not at Kabul. He argued that ISKP, allied jihadist groups, and armed anti-Taliban formations are working to undermine Taliban authority with what he called the “active support” of British intelligence. Moscow offered no evidence for that claim, and independent observers have treated it as unsubstantiated; it fits a recurring Russian narrative that places Western intelligence services behind any and all instability on the CIS periphery.
The framing matters less for its accuracy than for its target. Bortnikov stressed that collective security would depend on stability in the Afghan-Pakistan region, and with Taliban leadership in the room and the threat localized in territory outside Taliban control, the warning points implicitly toward the Pakistani border.
Two days after the CIS Security Council session, Russia and the Taliban signed a military-technical cooperation agreement on the sidelines of the International Security Forum, held outside Moscow. Russia’s signatory was Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu; Afghanistan’s was Taliban Defense Minister Mohammad Yaqoob. Zamir Kabulov, Russia’s special envoy for Afghanistan, stated that the agreement would focus on repair and restoration of Russian-made military equipment in Afghanistan.
Agreements of this type typically cover equipment supply, training, repair, and licensing, though analysts note that Moscow’s capacity to deliver advanced systems is constrained by the ongoing war in Ukraine and sanctions. The agreement consolidates a diplomatic trajectory that began with Russia’s recognition of the Taliban government in July 2025 and the removal of the movement from its list of banned organizations.
Russia is the only state to recognize the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan.
Moscow publicly articulates an acute terrorist threat emanating from Afghan soil while simultaneously deepening ties with the Taliban. That is the dual character of the Russian strategy. The threat narrative reinforces a self-assigned security role across Central Asia; the partnership with Kabul provides the instrument for that role. Russia has for years expressed concern about militant activity from Afghanistan while consistently expanding political and security contacts with the Taliban.
The Taliban, for their part, read something else into this document.
On returning to Kabul, Yaqoob told journalists at the airport that Pakistan had been striking Afghan territory with confidence in recent months, and that Afghanistan would ensure no neighbor felt such confidence going forward. He acknowledged that Islamabad might have objections to the Moscow agreement, insisting that Afghanistan threatens no one. The shift in tone, delivered immediately after the signing with Russia, signals to Islamabad that Kabul now sees its own leverage.
For decades, Pakistan’s military establishment followed a doctrine of strategic depth, using proxy fighters to project influence in Afghanistan and reduce pressure on its western flank. The environment now is entirely different. Relations with the Afghan Taliban have collapsed into open hostilities, including cross-border air strikes earlier this year and the worst border clashes in years.
Kabul accuses Islamabad of striking Afghan territory at will. Islamabad accuses Kabul of sheltering the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has stepped up attack on Pakistani soil since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 2021. The porous border now incubates both the TTP and ISKP. The strategy designed to give Pakistan depth has instead turned its frontier into a source of threat.
Beyond that, Pakistan is cultivating contacts with the Afghan opposition. Islamabad has, according to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), maintained regular covert contacts with Ahmad Massoud’s National Resistance Front (NRF), and in October 2025 hosted a number of Afghan opposition figures.
At this stage, however, military action against Afghanistan deepens the country’s economic deterioration and creates space for Moscow to entrench its influence. For years Pakistan was Afghanistan’s single largest export market and its main transit channel to the outside world.
That position is now eroding on its own momentum as Pakistan’s share of Afghan exports fell from 54 percent in 2023 to 45 percent in 2024, according to the World Bank, and by 2025 India had overtaken Pakistan as Kabul’s top export destination, with Afghan exports to India rising to $755 million while exports to Pakistan fell to around $505 million.
India trade bypasses Pakistan entirely, moving through Iran’s Chabahar port because Islamabad denies overland transit, while exports to Uzbekistan more than doubled in a single year and Afghan trade with Iran has overtaken trade with Pakistan in absolute terms.
The border closures and cross-border strikes accelerated a process already underway. Bilateral trade collapsed from $2.46 billion in 2024 to $1.77 billion in 2025, and thousands of containers were stranded at Torkham and Chaman.
Each disruption pushes Kabul further toward Iran, India, and Central Asia, and each shift erodes the one form of leverage Pakistan reliably held over Afghanistan. The economic coercion meant to discipline the Taliban is instead teaching Kabul to live without Islamabad.
The blow has landed on an economy already near its limits. According to U.N. figures, roughly 74 percent of Afghans cannot meet basic needs, and more than 17 million people face a food crisis. Layered onto this is one of the largest forced-return waves in the region’s recent history: UNHCR reported that at least 2.8 million Afghans were returned or expelled from Iran and Pakistan in 2025, roughly 1.8 million from Iran and 930,000 from Pakistan, with two thirds of them forced.
The pace spiked after the 2025 Iran-Israel conflict, when expulsions from Iran escalated to a single-month peak in July of last year. Each arrival adds to an exhausted labor market with no capacity to absorb it.
Multiple U.N. bodies, including UNDP and UNODC, identify economic desperation and unemployment as conditions that ease recruitment by violent extremist groups, and a UNDP study of Afghanistan specifically flagged returnees and displaced people as among the most vulnerable to radicalization.
The causation is contested, and economic hardship alone does not produce militancy. But the rupture of trade ties with Pakistan deepens the conditions, mass unemployment and the strain of returnees, that recruiters exploit.
China provides a second source of pressure, and for Pakistan’s economy it carries greater weight. Beijing has invested tens of billions of dollars in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and treats stability along that route as a precondition for further progress.
Pakistan’s security record has undermined that calculation. Since 2021, at least 20 Chinese nationals have been killed in Pakistan, in attacks ranging from Baloch separatist operations in Quetta and Gwadar to a suicide bombing near Karachi airport in October 2025.
According to different unconfirmed sources, Chinese officials have moved from quiet diplomacy to public criticism of Islamabad’s inability to protect Chinese personnel, and joint counterterrorism exercises and pressure for an expanded protection role reflect a partner that no longer presumes Pakistani competence.
That frustration practically aligns Beijing with Moscow, or may even increase Russia’s leverage with China, as one of the few partners with a direct channel to Kabul. Both capitals increasingly coordinate Afghan and Central Asian security directly with regional states rather than through Islamabad as an intermediary.
The “all-weather” friendship is rhetorically intact, but on the specific question of containing transnational jihadist networks China is now hedging. As Moscow and Beijing rely less on Islamabad on the counterterrorism file, its regional leverage erodes.
Pakistan is attempting a pro-Western foreign policy while its own frontier keeps generating the instability its neighbors fear, and that combination alienates each audience in turn. Washington needs a reliable partner. Kabul needs strikes on its territory to stop. Moscow needs a counterterrorism interlocutor. Beijing needs its citizens and investments protected.
Islamabad cannot satisfy all of them simultaneously, and its former advantage, the role of broker with Kabul, is depreciating as Afghanistan acquires other partners.
Central Asia is filling that space. Against the backdrop of war on the Afghan-Pakistani border, the five regional states held the first consultative dialogue in a Central Asia-Afghanistan format in Kabul, are expanding trade through preferential agreements and transit corridors, and cover the bulk of Afghan electricity imports, which account for roughly 80 percent of the country’s consumption. The stability that Islamabad once offered as its primary asset is now reaching Afghanistan from the north, not from the east.
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