Stability is not always politically neutral. In Afghanistan, the question is less whether India and Israel desire chaos than whether they sometimes find the strategic pressures generated by instability preferable to an order dominated by Pakistan or Iran. This is the paradox at the heart of Afghanistan’s prospects for peace.
Conventional wisdom assumes that all states seek stability. It is one of the most frequently invoked clichés of international politics. Governments speak of stability, international organisations fund stability, and diplomats negotiate in its name. Yet history suggests a more uncomfortable reality: states do not necessarily seek stability in the abstract. They seek political orders that advance their strategic interests. When stability strengthens a rival, instability can become a tolerable, even useful alternative. This possibility raises an uncomfortable but important question. Do India and Israel see strategic value in a volatile Afghanistan because such volatility acts as a pressure point against Pakistan and Iran?
The question is not whether New Delhi or Tel Aviv actively seek chaos in Afghanistan. Such a proposition is both analytically simplistic and empirically difficult to sustain. The more significant question is whether a certain degree of instability in Afghanistan produces geopolitical outcomes that neither state finds entirely undesirable. Put differently, does disorder in Afghanistan impose strategic costs on Pakistan and Iran that indirectly benefit India and Israel? The answer lies not in the language of conspiracy but in the logic of geopolitics.
The Implications of an Unstable Afghanistan
A stable Afghanistan aligned with Pakistan would represent one of Islamabad’s greatest strategic successes. For decades, Pakistan’s security establishment has sought an Afghanistan that remains sensitive to its security concerns and resistant to Indian influence. The concept of ‘strategic depth’ – a national security approach that establishes a functional and/or physical distance between military front lines and a country’s population, economic hubs and political centres – has long occupied an important place in Pakistani military thinking, with Afghanistan viewed as a space in which Pakistan could avoid confronting hostile pressure simultaneously on its eastern and western fronts. Such an arrangement would provide Islamabad with strategic depth, reduce pressure on its western frontier, and strengthen its position in South Asia.
From India’s perspective, this is hardly an attractive outcome. India’s engagement with Afghanistan after 2001 has focused largely on developing infrastructure; however, this cannot be read merely as developmental idealism. The construction of roads, dams, educational institutions, and parliamentary buildings reflected a broader strategic calculation. New Delhi has sought to ensure that Afghanistan remained politically autonomous and resistant to exclusive Pakistani influence. Notably, the objective was not to seek domination but to ensure denial. India’s own Ministry of External Affairs documents its extensive development partnership with Afghanistan, including the Zaranj–Delaram highway, the Salma Dam and the Afghan Parliament building.
This distinction is often overlooked. Great powers frequently derive strategic advantage not from controlling territory themselves but from preventing rivals from controlling it. The most effective form of power is often the ability to deny others the benefits of power. The history of Afghanistan itself illustrates this logic: during the Cold War, the United States regarded Soviet expansion in Afghanistan as a threat to the regional balance and responded by seeking to raise the costs of Soviet intervention through diplomatic, economic and covert measures.
Viewed through this lens, Afghanistan occupies a unique position in Indian strategic thinking. A politically autonomous Afghanistan complicates Pakistan’s security environment. An unstable Afghanistan complicates it even further. Pakistan is then forced to devote resources, attention, and military capacity to its western frontier rather than concentrating exclusively on its eastern border. In geopolitical terms, instability creates strategic friction.
The same logic applies, albeit differently, to Iran and Israel. Israel’s strategic rivalry with Iran increasingly extends beyond the Middle East. It is a contest over regional influence, strategic depth, proxy networks, and geopolitical reach. Iran’s eastern frontier has historically received less attention than its western one, where its confrontation with Israel and the United States has been concentrated. Yet instability in Afghanistan creates challenges for Tehran that cannot be ignored. Border insecurity, refugee flows, narcotics trafficking, sectarian threats, and extremist networks impose costs on Iranian state capacity. Iran hosts one of the world’s largest and most protracted refugee populations, with UNHCR estimating that approximately 3.7 million forcibly displaced people of various documentation statuses were residing in the country in 2024, most of them Afghans. UNODC has also specifically supported drug-detection capacity along Iran’s eastern borders with Afghanistan, illustrating the continuing security burden generated by cross-border narcotics trafficking.
A volatile Afghanistan therefore acts as a source of strategic distraction. It forces Tehran to allocate resources eastward at a time when its strategic focus lies elsewhere. The mechanism is indirect: when insecurity on one frontier generates persistent security, humanitarian, and economic demands, a state must distribute its resources and attention across multiple theatres, potentially reducing its capacity to concentrate them elsewhere. From Israel’s perspective, any geopolitical development that increases the burdens on Iranian power inevitably acquires strategic significance. Research on Afghanistan, Iran and Israel from the Washington Institute has noted that developments following the Taliban takeover affected calculations surrounding Iran and its regional network. This does not mean, however, that Israel actively seeks instability in Afghanistan. Rather, it might mean that instability could generate consequences that align with certain Israeli interests. The distinction is critical.
The Politics of Strategic Ambiguity
Much of international politics operates through what might be called the politics of strategic inconvenience. States frequently benefit when rivals are compelled to confront multiple challenges simultaneously. The objective is not necessarily to defeat an adversary but to stretch its resources, divide its attention, and complicate its calculations. In this sense, Afghanistan possesses value not because of what happens within it but because of the pressures it can generate beyond its borders. Yet this argument must be taken only so far.
The notion that India or Israel would prefer perpetual chaos in Afghanistan misunderstands the nature of contemporary security threats. Instability is rarely a controllable instrument. Once unleashed, it develops its own momentum. Extremist organisations, transnational militant networks, illicit economies, and refugee crises do not remain confined to the territories in which they originate. They produce consequences that spread across regions.
For India, the dangers are obvious. The resurgence of militant networks operating from Afghan territory could directly threaten Indian security interests. India’s own strategic assessments have identified terrorism, Pakistani influence and political instability in Afghanistan as significant concerns for its interests there. For Israel, an Afghanistan transformed into a sanctuary for transnational jihadist organisations would introduce new uncertainties into an already volatile regional environment. Chaos can inconvenience adversaries, but it can also create threats that no state is able to manage effectively. This is why the real strategic preference of both India and Israel is likely neither stability nor instability but ambiguity.
A stable Afghanistan firmly embedded within Pakistan’s strategic orbit would be viewed unfavourably in New Delhi. A stable Afghanistan deeply integrated into Iranian networks would raise concerns in Tel Aviv. Conversely, an Afghanistan capable of imposing costs on Pakistan and Iran without becoming a source of uncontrollable regional disorder creates a more favourable geopolitical environment.
Not So Much Chaos, but an Advantageous Political Order
The uncomfortable truth is that many states do not seek order itself. They seek an order that advantages them. When such an order proves unattainable, they may find a degree of uncertainty preferable to a rival’s dominance. This insight helps explain one of the enduring paradoxes of Afghan politics. Almost every regional actor publicly advocates stability, yet the region remains trapped in instability. The contradiction is only apparent. States support stability in principle but oppose particular forms of stability that strengthen their adversaries.
Afghanistan’s tragedy lies precisely here. It is not merely a fragile state struggling to achieve peace. It is situated within a geopolitical arena in which competing powers often find uncertainty more acceptable than exclusion. The country’s instability persists not because regional actors uniformly desire chaos, but because they remain unwilling to accept a political order that enhances the influence of their rivals.
The question, therefore, is not whether India and Israel value instability in Afghanistan. The more important question is whether they sometimes value the strategic pressures generated by instability more than they fear instability itself. For much of modern geopolitics, the answer has often been yes.
The Contemporary Problem of Peace-Building
The contemporary implication of this argument is not that India or Israel deliberately seeks to perpetuate instability in Afghanistan. It is that peace-building cannot be understood solely through the domestic imperatives of reconstruction, governance and reconciliation. The durability of peace also depends upon whether the political order emerging from a peace process is acceptable to the regional powers whose strategic interests intersect in Afghanistan.
Where stability strengthens a rival, external actors may hesitate to support a political settlement unequivocally. Conversely, where instability imposes costs upon a competitor without producing intolerable risks for oneself, the incentives to tolerate a degree of uncertainty may become stronger. This does not make peace-building futile; it makes it geopolitically contingent. A peace process can produce institutional arrangements within Afghanistan while still failing to resolve the external strategic calculations that shape the behaviour of neighbouring states.
The implication is therefore important for understanding the prospects of sustained peace. Peace-building efforts that treat stability as an uncontested common good may underestimate the fact that different states attach different strategic meanings to the same political settlement. The central challenge is not simply to persuade regional actors that peace is desirable, but to construct a political order in which peace itself does not appear to any major regional actor as a strategic loss.
Afghanistan’s predicament is consequently larger than the familiar problem of internal fragility. It is also a problem of geopolitical compatibility. Unless the strategic anxieties of Pakistan, India, Iran and other regional actors are incorporated into the architecture of peace, instability may continue to reproduce itself even when the immediate actors claim to favour stability.
The paradox is stark: peace may be universally desirable in principle, yet politically difficult to sustain when the order produced by peace redistributes strategic advantage.
Dr Zahid Sultan is an Independent Researcher based in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India. He completed his MPhil on Balochistan Conflict and my Doctoral Research on Rohingya Refugees. He is currently working as lecturer in Government Amar Singh College Srinagar.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
