The events of late February 2026, the US-Israeli strikes killing Iran's Supreme Leader, Iranian retaliation hitting Gulf states, Pakistan declaring open war on Afghanistan, have been covered extensively elsewhere. This piece looks at what these events reveal about India's structural position and what that position demands going forward.
The Vulnerability Equation
India imports 87 percent of its crude oil. Its strategic petroleum reserves cover approximately nine to ten days of consumption. For comparison, China's cover eighty-plus days. As of this week, nearly 50 percent of India's monthly oil imports travel through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes. That waterway is now an active conflict zone.
When Washington threatened a 25 percent tariff on any country doing business with Iran, on top of the 50 percent India already faces, Delhi didn't have the cushion to push back. India halted Iranian oil purchases in 2019, cut Russian crude from over 40 percent of its import basket to roughly 22 percent by January 2026, and zeroed out the budget allocation for Chabahar port, India's flagship infrastructure investment in southeastern Iran designed to give it trade access to Afghanistan and Central Asia while bypassing Pakistan.
Every one of these decisions made sense on its own terms. Together, they describe a country whose foreign policy options are shaped by energy dependence. The more useful question isn't whether India made the right calls under pressure, but why the pressure works so effectively and what would need to change for it not to.
The Pakistan-Afghanistan Inversion
While Iran dominates the conversation, something potentially more consequential is happening on India's western flank.
Pakistan built the Taliban over three decades as a tool for maintaining influence in Afghanistan and keeping India out. Keep Afghanistan as a friendly buffer state, prevent Indian strategic presence west of the Indus. For thirty years, it worked.
That arrangement has now broken down. Pakistan declared open war on Afghanistan on February 27, bombing Kabul and Kandahar. The Taliban, the organization Pakistan spent decades backing, has over the past two years been building independent ties with India. It has appointed diplomatic representatives in Delhi and Mumbai, condemned attacks on Indian soil, and in a joint statement with India's foreign ministry, referred to Kashmir as "Jammu and Kashmir, India," a formulation that directly contradicts Pakistan's position. Pakistan's own defense minister accused Afghanistan of becoming "a colony of India."
India didn't plan this. Pakistan's failure to manage the TTP insurgency operating from Afghan soil, combined with its mass deportation of Afghan refugees and aggressive border policy, pushed the Taliban to look for alternatives. The Taliban's interest in India is practical. It needs partners other than Pakistan and China. It needs Chabahar port for trade access that doesn't go through Pakistani territory. And it needs humanitarian and development support that India is positioned to offer.
For the first time since partition, India has a realistic prospect of strategic influence in Afghanistan that doesn't depend on Pakistan's cooperation. This doesn't solve the connectivity problem on its own since India and Afghanistan don't share a border and any physical route still goes through Iran or Central Asia. But it changes the regional picture in a way that hasn't been available to Indian policymakers before.
Three Scenarios from Here
The current situation could develop along three broad lines. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Controlled escalation followed by ceasefire:
The US-Israeli strikes achieve their military objectives. Iran retaliates but the exchange stays within limits that international mediation can manage, likely through Oman, the only Gulf state Iran has not attacked. Hormuz disruption is temporary. The Pakistan-Afghanistan fighting follows the pattern of previous flare-ups and drops back to low-level border tension. India faces a sharp but manageable energy price spike. Chabahar stays frozen. The Afghanistan opening keeps developing. India's position relative to its neighbors actually improves, because Pakistan and the Gulf states take more direct damage.
Prolonged regional conflict:
Hormuz stays disrupted for weeks or months. Iran's retaliation continues. Gulf states hosting American military assets remain under periodic attack. The Pakistan-Afghanistan border stays active. India faces severe energy disruption since rerouting half its oil supply around Africa instead of through the Gulf would take months to set up. The 8-9 million Indians living and working in Gulf states become an evacuation challenge. The Afghanistan relationship becomes one of the few functioning pieces of India's western strategy, since both countries need each other more urgently than before.
The most dangerous element in this scenario is Pakistan. A country fighting a war on its western border, losing the Gulf remittances that prop up its economy, dealing with the worst domestic terrorism in a decade, all while holding nuclear weapons and operating under a military establishment that has historically made decisions under stress that it later regrets.
Iranian regime transformation:
Khamenei's death eventually leads to a succession crisis that produces a fundamentally different Iranian state over a period of years. This is the longest-horizon scenario and the hardest to predict. If Iran eventually reintegrates into the global economy, Chabahar could come back to life and Indian oil imports from Iran could resume, giving India supply options it currently doesn't have. But a 90-million-person Iran rebuilding its economy and regional influence would also be a competitor, not just a trade partner. And the years in between would be messy.
If forced to assign rough probabilities: the first scenario sits around 35-40 percent, the second around 30-35 percent, the third around 15-20 percent. The remainder accounts for the fact that wars regularly produce outcomes nobody predicted.
The Structural Argument
India's outcomes across these scenarios depend less on the diplomatic decisions made this month than on structural capacities that were either built or neglected over the past decade.
A country with 60-90 days of strategic petroleum reserves would not have been forced to abandon Iranian oil in 2019. A country with a working rupee-based trade settlement system would be less exposed to dollar-denominated sanctions. A country with several operational connectivity routes to Central Asia would not be watching its most important westward corridor shut down over a dispute between Washington and Tehran that doesn't involve Indian interests.
India has made real progress in some of these areas. It achieved 20 percent ethanol blending in petrol five years ahead of the original target. EV adoption stands at 8 percent of new vehicle registrations and is growing. Oil import sources have been diversified to over 40 countries. The India-Middle East-Europe Corridor is a serious piece of long-term connectivity planning.
But the distance between where India is and where it would need to be to weather a crisis like this one comfortably is still large. Nine days of petroleum reserves while Hormuz is under missile fire tells you everything about where that gap sits. The renewable energy transition is real and moving in the right direction, but it is decades away from reducing oil import dependence enough to change how India's strategic options work.
The Afghanistan Window
The opportunity most likely to be undervalued in the current moment is the Afghanistan opening.
The logic is straightforward. Afghanistan under the Taliban needs a major power partner that isn't Pakistan (currently bombing Afghan cities) or China (which brings Belt and Road conditions that limit sovereignty). India needs westward strategic depth and a foundation for its connectivity ambitions. Chabahar serves both countries' interests. And the Taliban has shown willingness to engage with India at a level that would have seemed impossible five years ago.
The risk isn't that India engages with the Taliban. It's that India moves too slowly and misses the window. China is already in talks to bring Afghanistan into the Belt and Road Initiative. Russia formally recognized the Taliban government in June 2025. Several Central Asian states have exchanged ambassadors with Kabul. India's leverage with the Taliban is at its peak right now because Pakistan-Afghanistan relations are at their lowest point. If that conflict eventually cools and Pakistan starts rebuilding its relationship with the Taliban, India's bargaining position weakens.
Working with the Taliban comes with reputational baggage. The regime suppresses women's rights, runs a closed political system, and operates in ways India officially opposes. But every other major power in the region has already moved past that calculus. The window is defined by strategic timing, not moral readiness, and it won't stay open on India's schedule.
Where This Lands
India in March 2026 faces short-term vulnerability and medium-term opportunity at the same time. The energy dependence, the Hormuz exposure, the Chabahar freeze, the pattern of yielding to American pressure on Iran and Russia: these are real costs that reflect real weaknesses in India's position. But the breakdown of Pakistan's Afghanistan strategy, the growing relationship with the Taliban, the push toward energy diversification, and the fact that India is more stable than most of its neighbors right now, all of this creates space that wasn't available before.
Whether that space turns into lasting advantage depends on what gets built over the next decade. Reserves. Renewables. Alternative trade corridors. Financial systems that don't depend entirely on the dollar. These are all problems India has the capability to solve within a ten-to-fifteen-year window.
The question is whether the political system treats this as a generational priority or files it away once the immediate crisis passes. India's foreign policy options will remain limited by energy dependence until that dependence is reduced at a structural level. That's the part of this picture that doesn't change regardless of what happens in Tehran, Kabul, or Washington.
