Afghanistan’s neighbors watch warily as Taliban completes its dramatic takeover

For Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban’s return delivers a strategic victory over Pakistan’s rival, India, but also potentially a boost to an affiliated insurgent group, known as the Pakistani Taliban, that threatens Pakistan itself. For India, it heightens anxieties about militancy in Kashmir at a moment when it is juggling combustible border standoffs with not just Pakistan, but also China.

And for China, the hasty U.S. withdrawal has raised fears of a widening network of militant groups targeting the ambitious infrastructure projects it is unfurling westward across the Eurasian continent. As the Chinese presence in countries like Pakistan — perhaps Beijing’s closest ally — has soared over the past decade, so too have attacks against its citizens.

The fraught regional dynamics were on display last month when a suicide bomb ripped through a bus with Chinese construction workers in northwest Pakistan, killing 13. The Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said Friday the attack was carried out by the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), with help from India and the Afghan government — a claim India dismissed as “absurd.”