KABUL: Afghanistan’s Taliban government has appointed their first senior official in India since the group returned to power in 2021, charged with leading its embassy in Delhi.
India has not officially recognised the Taliban government, but the move signals a deepening engagement, with New Delhi seeking to exploit divisions between Islamabad and Kabul.
Noor Ahmad Noor, a Taliban foreign ministry official, assumed responsibility as charge d’affaires and has already held meetings with Indian officials, the embassy said in a statement.
“Both sides emphasised the importance of strengthening Afghanistan–India relations,” the Afghan Embassy said, in a post on X late Monday.
India has not commented, but the Afghan embassy posted a photograph of Noor with senior Indian foreign ministry official Anand Prakash.
The Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic law may appear an unlikely match for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, but India has sought to seize the opening.
Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan fought a brief but deadly clash in May 2025, their worst confrontation in decades.
The appointment is significant for the Taliban, which has sought to reclaim control over Afghanistan’s overseas diplomatic missions as part of a broader push for international legitimacy.
In October, India said it would upgrade its technical mission in Afghanistan to a full embassy.
Russia is the only country to officially recognise the Afghan Taliban government.
The only reason Bush and Blair invaded Iraq was so they could take focus and attention away from Afghanistan because they did not want the Taliban to be eliminated (the Taliban had unconditionally surrendered in Dec 2001 but Bush and Rumsfeld wouldn’t accept their surrender, and the Bush admin had OBL cornered in Tora Bora but they allowed the Pakistanis to safely evacuate OBL to Pakistan instead of the Bush admin killing or capturing OBL).
The defeat/elimination of the Taliban would have meant the end of Pakistan (the Afghan part of Pakistan re-joining Afghanistan, and the Indian part of Pakistan re-joining India with the support of the international community), which Bush and Blair opposed.
Within a month and a half of the Iraq invasion, the US and UK had achieved total victory, but Bush deliberately did things which led to an insurgency in Iraq, an insurgency he could have easily crushed anytime he wanted to within the first 2 and a half years of that war, but he deliberately allowed to fester.
For this reason, in people’s heart of hearts, people think the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, even though they may pretend otherwise. When they pretend otherwise, they are simply being disingenuous.
Regarding the first 4 years of the war of terror, journalists were totally complicit and they did not do their job of holding Bush to account by asking why America had not and is not crushing the terrorists already and why America is giving them breathing space to fester instead.