Opinion / Analysis
By Dr Muhammad Shahid
For the better part of two decades, Pakistani officials making the case that India funds militancy on Pakistani soil through Afghan channels have run into the same dismissive response: unverified, self-serving, propaganda. That response became considerably harder to sustain this year — not because Islamabad repeated the claim louder, but because the people now confirming it are no longer Pakistani.
A confirmation from an unlikely source
Lieutenant General Sami Sadat spent years as one of the most senior commanders in the Afghan National Army, fighting the Taliban directly before the Western-backed government’s 2021 collapse. He has no institutional reason to flatter Islamabad’s narrative, and every reason, given his own history, to be skeptical of Pakistani claims about the Taliban. That is precisely what makes his recent on-record statement difficult to wave away: that the Taliban maintain close relations with India, that Indian money reaches Taliban hands, and that the Taliban in turn channel that money to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and to separatist networks in Balochistan to fund operations against Pakistan.
This is not a vague insinuation. It is a specific, direct description of a financial pipeline, offered by a man who commanded Afghan government forces against the very Taliban he is now describing as an Indian-financed conduit.
A pattern that keeps resurfacing, not a one-off claim
Sadat’s statement did not emerge in isolation. Pakistani reporting this month has pointed to a classified document alleging a more formalised arrangement: a standing operational relationship between India’s Research and Analysis Wing, Afghanistan’s intelligence apparatus, and senior Taliban leadership, specifically facilitating financing for the Balochistan Liberation Army. The report names intermediary figures allegedly coordinating manpower, weapons, and funding between Taliban-linked networks and Baloch separatist groups.
This fits a far older pattern than either of these specific reports. Pakistani officials — from a former interior minister in 2009 to the country’s current defence minister this year — have repeatedly and consistently pointed to Indian involvement in funding instability on Pakistani soil via Afghan territory. India has just as consistently denied it, dismissing the allegations as absurd. What has changed is not the substance of Pakistan’s claim, but the source: it is no longer only Pakistani officials making it.
Why the source matters more than the noise around it
Critics of Pakistan’s position have long argued that Islamabad has an obvious incentive to blame India for problems that are substantially homegrown — and that argument deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. But that argument weakens considerably when the person making the claim is a former Afghan general with his own military credibility at stake, speaking without any evident benefit to himself from aligning with Pakistan’s narrative.
It is also worth being precise about what remains unverified. Specific operational details — exact routes, named front companies, individual transactions — are the kind of claims that deserve continued scrutiny and independent verification before being treated as settled fact, regardless of which direction they point. Pakistan’s case is strongest where it rests on these kinds of corroborating, named, on-record sources, and weakest wherever it leans on unnamed “officials” or unverifiable viral claims circulating without any credible sourcing behind them.
What this should actually change
For Pakistan, the real significance of Sadat’s statement is not vindication for its own sake. It is leverage for a specific, concrete diplomatic ask: continued international pressure on the Taliban to sever ties with the TTP and Baloch militant networks, and renewed scrutiny of the Taliban’s external financial relationships generally, including with India. A claim repeated only by the accused party’s adversary is easy for the world to discount as self-interested. A claim repeated by a former Afghan commander, with no reason to carry water for Islamabad, is a different category of evidence entirely — and deserves to be treated as such by the international community currently deciding how closely to engage with Kabul.
–Ends