Afghanistan amid Rival Geopolitics India–Pakistan Shadow Games under Great Power Competition

Introduction

Chapter 1 Unintended Consequences in the Afghanistan-India-Pakistan Triangular Relationship: A Conceptual Framework

Chapter 2 Factoring the Historical Root Causes of Unintended Consequences in Afghanistan

Chapter 3 Post-9/11 Evolving Regional Security Dynamics and Global War on Terror: New Era of Grand Great Game Begins

Chapter 4 India’s Soft Power Engagements in Afghanistan

Chapter 5 The Indian Factor in Afghanistan and Its Implications for Pakistan

Chapter 6 A Reappraisal: Pakistan’s Strategic Reorientation and Policy Options in a Fractured Neighborhood

Biography

Asifa Jahangir (Dr.) was a visiting postdoctoral research fellow under the AAUW international fellowship for 2024-25, and she is currently working as a Resident Research Fellow at Arizona State University's CME-US, in conjunction with the Future Securities Initiative for 2025-2026. She earned a PhD in South Asian Studies with a focus on International Relations from the University of the Punjab, Lahore. Her research interests encompass Pakistan-China relations, Afghanistan-India-Pakistan relations and their political systems, foreign policy, strategic studies, nuclear issues, US-India strategic cooperation versus Pakistan-China, Asia-Pacific security and politics, climatology, and intercultural studies.

Pakistan-China strategic relationship: A glorious journey of 55 years, published in 2015

Asifa Jahangir’s book is an interesting reconceptualization of the historical “Great Game” and its relevance to present South Asian regional affairs, especially Pakistani and Indian affairs, as well as recent events and ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan. The book deserves wide attention and should be mandatory reading for those involved in South Asian regional politics.

-  Dr. Thomas H Johnson, co-author of The Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan and the Taliban Narratives: the use and power of stories in the Afghanistan conflict

Asifa Jahangir’s book Afghanistan amid Rival Geopolitics: India–Pakistan Shadow Games under Great Power Competition presents a much-needed perspective on how to better understand the post-9/11 conflict in Afghanistan as bound to the region’s history and complex, contested political context. Dr. Jahangir explores the underlying causes of unintended consequences in Afghanistan in relation to longstanding tensions between India and Pakistan. In this way, the book is an essential read in these contested times, highlighting aspects of America’s longest war that have largely been obscured by an analytic focus on the US, its capabilities, and interests by focusing on the significance of Afghanistan’s positioning between and among competing regional powers.”

- Dr. Daniel Rothenberg, Co-Director, Future Security Initiative and Professor of Practice at the School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University.

“Afghanistan amid Rival Geopolitics: India–Pakistan Shadow Games under Great Power Competition (2026) to both experts and graduate students. It is a well-researched, addictive page-turner, well-written by a world-class specialist, Asifa Jahangir, Ph.D., who brilliantly analyzes the patterns and records of great power competition in Triangular Relationships in the Grand Great Game of Afghanistan. Afghanistan under the Shadow of Indo-Pakistan Geopolitics (2025) to both experts and graduate students. It is a well-researched, addictive page-turner, well-written by a world-class specialist, Asifa Jahangir, Ph.D., who brilliantly analyzes the patterns and records of great power competition in Triangular Relationships in the Grand Great Game of Afghanistan.”

- Dr. Piotr Pietrzak, Statu Nascendi Think Tank & Vistula University, Warsaw, Poland.

“Afghanistan amid Rival Geopolitics: India–Pakistan Shadow Games under Great Power Competition offers a timely and original contribution to the study of regional security and international politics in South and Central Asia. Drawing on rich data, including elite interviews, this book uncovers the complex and often overlooked consequences of great power rivalry in Afghanistan. It challenges conventional narratives by revealing how Afghanistan’s instability has been a product of external interventions from regional and extra-regional actors. This work is a crucial intervention into debates on post-colonial legacies, regional rivalries, and the future of peace and stability in South Asia.”

-  Dr. Zahid Shahab Ahmed, National Defence College, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

“This book offers a conceptually rich account of how Afghanistan became the epicenter of a “Grand Great Game” in which the United States, India, Pakistan, China, Russia, and regional actors have repeatedly pursued rational geopolitical goals that generated deeply unintended consequences for regional security and state behavior. Interweaving archival history, international relations theory, and contemporary policy analysis, it traces the evolution from the Original Great Game to post‑9/11 interventions, the rise of the Taliban, India’s soft-power ingress, and Pakistan’s New Balance of Threat strategy, showing how great‑power designs, proxy politics, and orientalist narratives reshaped Afghanistan’s role from buffer state to insulator at the heart of a volatile strategic quadrangle. The book not only reinterprets the Afghanistan-India-Pakistan triangle across successive eras, but also illuminates how shifting alignments, peace processes, and crises—from the Doha accord to the 2025 Pak-India conflict—continue to reverberate across South Asia’s nuclearized, crisis‑prone landscape, making it essential reading for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand the long shadow of Afghanistan on regional and global order.”

-  Zafar Iqbal Yousafzai, author of The Troubled Triangle: US-Pakistan Relations under the Taliban’s Shadow.

Dr. Asifa Jahangir’s “Afghanistan amid Rival Geopolitics: India–Pakistan Shadow Games under Great Power Competition” offers an original, interesting, and comprehensive look at the geopolitics of Afghanistan, primarily through a Pakistani lens. The book’s original contribution is the reformulation of the old Great Game in Afghanistan for the 21st century, which Dr. Jahangir names the Grand Great Game. This new version of the old game started after 9/11 and is played not by global powers but by regional ones, India and Pakistan, and involves non-state actors. Somewhat provocatively, Dr. Jahangir argues that Afghanistan’s politics are framed by the unintended consequences of this Indo-Pakistani Grand Great Game. The book’s bold thesis raises important questions about Afghanistan and its place in South Asia’s geopolitics.

-  Dr. Ivan Dimitrov Lidarev, Asian Security Expert at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore.