By: Khushbu Ahlawat, Consulting Editor, GSDN
Introduction
In June 2026, Belgium granted one-day visas to a five-member Taliban delegation so it could hold talks with European Union officials in Brussels — the first time since the group’s 2021 return to power that an official Taliban delegation set foot on European soil for direct engagement with the bloc. The European Commission was careful to insist the meeting, focused on migration and the repatriation of Afghan nationals, did not amount to recognition. That insistence, however, is becoming a familiar refrain across capitals that have, in practice, been moving toward normalisation with Kabul for years while studiously avoiding the word that would make it official. The EU’s migration-driven engagement is not an isolated European story; it is the latest data point in a broader, remarkably consistent global pattern — recognition arriving in instalments, justified each time by narrow technical necessity, while the cumulative diplomatic reality shifts underneath the official position of non-recognition.
This pattern deserves to be examined as a pattern, because looking at any single country’s engagement in isolation misses what is actually happening: a coordinated-in-effect-if-not-in-intent, multi-track normalisation of the Taliban that has left the group governing with more international engagement in 2026 than at any point since 2021, even as the formal diplomatic status of the Islamic Emirate remains unresolved almost everywhere.
The Baseline: Russia’s Formal Break from the Pack
Russia crossed the threshold nobody else has, on 3 July 2025, becoming the first state to formally recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, following the Russian Supreme Court’s decision to remove the group from its list of terrorist organisations that April. Moscow’s justification was explicitly functional rather than ideological: shared concern about Islamic State-Khorasan Province, which claimed responsibility for the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack that killed 145 people, alongside stated interest in trade and economic opportunities in energy, transport, agriculture, and infrastructure. Bilateral trade between Russia and Afghanistan had already reached roughly $1 billion in 2024 even before formal recognition, with Moscow functioning as a primary supplier of oil, gas, and wheat to Afghanistan throughout the period when the relationship was still technically unrecognised.
What is notable about Russia’s move is less the recognition itself than how unremarkable it turned out to be diplomatically. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcomed the decision within a day, describing Afghanistan as one that “should not be excluded from the international community” — a statement that reads less like surprise at an ally’s unilateral step and more like a chorus member picking up a cue.
China’s Quieter Version of the Same Move
China had, in fact, already taken the substantive step eighteen months earlier without using the word “recognition.” In December 2023, Beijing became the first country to accredit a Taliban-appointed diplomat as an ambassador — full ambassadorial status, the highest rung of diplomatic representation short of the word “recognition” itself — while its foreign ministry simultaneously and explicitly denied that the move constituted recognition. This is the precise manoeuvre that has since become the template followed, with local variations, by the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Türkiye, and Pakistan, all of which have upgraded their diplomatic relations with Kabul to ambassadorial level while maintaining the same formal disclaimer.
China’s approach has been consistent with its broader Belt and Road logic: engagement calibrated to protect and expand infrastructure and investment interests, while security concerns about Uyghur militant groups operating from Afghan soil give Beijing the same counter-terrorism justification Moscow has used. At least seventeen countries now maintain embassies in Taliban-run Afghanistan, and Taliban-appointed diplomats represent the country in most Asian capitals, generally at the chargé d’affaires level — a rank just below full ambassador that has become the diplomatic community’s preferred way of maintaining substantive relations while keeping a technical fig leaf over the recognition question.
India’s Parallel Track: From Evacuation to Embassy
India’s trajectory illustrates the pattern’s incremental logic especially clearly, because it started from the furthest distance. New Delhi evacuated its diplomats from Kabul entirely in August 2021 and cancelled visas for Afghan citizens, reflecting decades of Indian wariness toward a Taliban movement historically backed by Pakistan’s intelligence establishment. Within a year, though, India had quietly redeployed a “technical team” to Kabul to coordinate humanitarian aid delivery — food and medicine — without any of the political engagement that would follow later.
The real shift began on 8 January 2025, when India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri met Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in Dubai, the first substantive high-level contact of the post-2021 era. Telephone diplomacy followed, then, in October 2025, Muttaqi made a six-day visit to India — the first by any senior Taliban official — after the UN Security Council’s sanctions committee granted him a temporary travel exemption. During that visit, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar announced the upgrade of India’s technical mission in Kabul to the status of “Embassy of India,” while pointedly stopping short of language that would imply formal recognition of the Taliban government. India also agreed to let the Taliban post its own diplomats to the Afghan embassy in New Delhi, and by January 2026 a Taliban-nominated chargé d’affaires, Mufti Noor Ahmad Noor, had taken up that post. India’s 2026-27 budget subsequently raised Afghan aid from Rs 100 crore to Rs 150 crore, and a Taliban trade delegation led by Industry and Commerce Minister Noorudin Azizi visited India in November 2025 to discuss mining, agriculture, and infrastructure investment.
India’s own strategic logic mirrors the pattern’s functional justification elsewhere, but with a distinctly regional inflection: New Delhi’s outreach intensified precisely as Pakistan-Taliban relations deteriorated into open border clashes over Islamabad’s accusations that Kabul harbours Pakistani Taliban (TTP) militants — clashes serious enough to close the Torkham and Chaman crossings and require Qatari, Turkish, and Saudi mediation for a ceasefire in October 2025. That backdrop let India frame its embassy upgrade not merely as bilateral outreach but as positioning itself as a stabilising alternative to Afghanistan’s overreliance on Pakistan, while simultaneously working to blunt Chinese and Pakistani influence in Kabul — a reminder that even within a broadly similar pattern of engagement, each state’s specific calculus remains shaped by its own regional rivalries as much as by any shared theory about Taliban governance.
The EU’s Version: Necessity Dressed as Technicality
Set against this backdrop, the EU’s Brussels meeting looks less like a diplomatic breakthrough and more like Europe arriving, three to four years late and under domestic political duress, at a position Russia, China, India, and several Gulf and Central Asian states had already reached by other routes. The EU’s proximate driver was overwhelmingly domestic: twenty of the bloc’s twenty-seven member states have pushed for stricter migration policies and firmer legal pathways for deportations, against a backdrop of roughly one million Afghan asylum applications received between 2013 and 2024, about half of them approved — making Afghans one of the EU’s largest single migrant cohorts. Germany and Austria had already been negotiating deportations bilaterally, with Berlin going so far as to allow two Taliban officials to work inside the Afghan diplomatic mission in Berlin specifically to facilitate the process — a striking illustration of how migration management pressure can produce de facto working relationships with a government whose legitimacy the same states publicly refuse to acknowledge.
The EU’s own framing — that the talks were “technical” and did not amount to recognition — is structurally identical to the disclaimers used by Beijing after its 2023 ambassador acceptance and by New Delhi after its 2025 embassy upgrade. European Parliament member Hannah Neumann’s critique, that the talks represent political normalisation without securing any accountability from the Taliban in return, could be transposed almost word for word onto criticism of China’s or India’s engagement, and has been by human rights observers in each case.
The Facilitators: Gulf and Central Asian Corridor States
Beneath the headline moves by Russia, China, India, and the EU sits a second, quieter layer of the pattern: the Gulf and Central Asian states that have functioned less as principals and more as connective tissue, making the larger normalisation possible in the first place. Qatar’s long-standing political office in Doha, established originally as a venue for the 2020 US-Taliban talks, has since evolved into the Taliban’s default diplomatic address for engaging with the wider world — the channel through which Muttaqi’s UN travel exemptions and shuttle diplomacy are routinely arranged, including the mediation Doha provided alongside Turkey and Saudi Arabia during the October 2025 Afghanistan-Pakistan border crisis. The UAE, for its part, upgraded to ambassadorial-level relations with Kabul early in the same wave as China, and it was Emirati facilitation that produced the January 2025 Dubai meeting between India’s Foreign Secretary and Muttaqi — the meeting that effectively opened India’s own normalisation track.
Central Asian states have played an equally structural, if less visible, role. Uzbekistan has hosted Taliban delegations to discuss the proposed trans-Afghan rail link connecting Central Asia to Pakistani ports, a project that requires treating the Taliban as a stable enough counterpart to negotiate decades-long infrastructure commitments with. Turkmenistan and Tajikistan have pursued comparable, if more cautious, economic and border-management engagement. None of these corridor states has made a symbolically loaded move like Moscow’s formal recognition; instead, their contribution has been to normalise the logistics of engaging Kabul — travel routes, mediation venues, trade corridors — that larger powers then use without having to build that infrastructure themselves.
This division of labour matters because it means the normalisation pattern is more resilient than any single government’s policy choice. Even if one capital reversed course, the underlying infrastructure of Gulf mediation and Central Asian trade corridors would remain in place, available to the next state ready to take its own incremental step.
Why the Pattern Persists Despite Almost Nobody Endorsing It
What makes this global pattern notable is that it is not being driven by any state’s positive assessment of Taliban governance — the Taliban’s restrictions on women and girls, its ranking of 142nd out of 143 countries on the Rule of Law Index, and the fact that roughly seventeen million Afghans, about a third of the population, remain food insecure according to the UN World Food Programme, are acknowledged by essentially every engaging government, including Russia’s and China’s. Instead, the pattern is being driven by the simple durability of the fact that the Taliban is the only entity actually governing Afghan territory, which makes it the only available counterpart for anything states actually need done there: counter-terrorism cooperation against ISKP, deportation and repatriation logistics, mineral and infrastructure investment, or humanitarian aid delivery.
This is precisely the dynamic that produces recognition by increments rather than by declaration. Each individual government can plausibly claim its own engagement is narrowly functional and reversible — an ambassador is not recognition, an embassy upgrade is not recognition, a migration MoU is not recognition — while the cumulative diplomatic environment the Taliban operates in has unmistakably thickened since 2021: seventeen-plus embassies, ambassadorial relations with several major and middle powers, one outright formal recognition, and now direct European engagement on its own soil. The Taliban’s own foreign ministry has been explicit about reading this correctly — spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid described Russia’s recognition as a “positive message to the rest of the world,” predicting other states would follow, and each subsequent upgrade elsewhere has functioned as exactly the kind of incremental validation Kabul is counting on.
Conclusion
The question worth asking, looking at the EU, Russia, China, and India together, is not whether any single engagement constitutes recognition — by design, none of them individually do — but whether the distinction between formal recognition and accumulated functional normalisation still matters in practice once enough states have crossed enough of these thresholds. For the Taliban, the answer is clearly no: functional engagement delivers most of what recognition would, embassies, trade, aid, counter-terrorism cooperation, and diplomatic visibility, without requiring any single government to answer politically for having granted it. For the states doing the engaging, the salami-slicing approach lets each preserve a technical position on non-recognition that increasingly describes a diplomatic reality none of them, from Brussels to Beijing to New Delhi, actually still inhabit.
