The lights went out in Afghanistan without warning. One night in late September, the entire country seemed to vanish from the network — phones dead, internet gone, data lines cut like arteries. Inside the blackout, the Taliban said little. “Technical issues,” one spokesman muttered. Others hinted at “moral reasons.” No one believed them. What it really felt like was a rehearsal — a reminder that the state can pull the plug whenever it wants. The world looked in, briefly, and then looked away. But in the dark, the real story was elsewhere — in the slow rearrangement of Afghanistan’s place on the geopolitical map. Russia has quietly moved in where the West left off. For the first time since the Soviet withdrawal, Moscow now recognizes the Taliban as the legitimate government. Officially, it’s about countering ISIS-K and stabilizing the region. Unofficially, it’s about reach — projecting influence south of a crumbling sphere in Central Asia. Afghanistan doesn’t touch Russia, but it sits just beyond the line, close enough to matter. Tajikistan, with its long and porous border, has become Moscow’s listening post; Russian troops there keep watch while Taliban envoys slip quietly in and out of Moscow hotels. China keeps its own calculus: corridors, copper, lithium, and silence. Iran whispers through Herat. Pakistan pretends it’s in control and knows it isn’t. The Americans are gone — or at least, their presence has been reduced to ghosts. And yet, one place keeps pulling at Washington’s imagination: Bagram. Built by the Soviets, expanded by the U.S., abandoned in a single night. Now it sits like a relic of empire, a strip of concrete at the foot of the Hindu Kush, half-claimed by the Taliban, half-haunted by history. When Donald Trump talks about “getting Bagram back,” it sounds like campaign bravado — nostalgia for a war he once promised to end. But beneath the rhetoric lies a clear instinct: geography still dictates power. From Bagram, the U.S. could watch over Central Asia, pressure Iran, monitor China’s western frontier, and keep a finger on the pulse of Russia’s southern underbelly. It remains the perfect listening post. The Taliban know this, which is why they treat Bagram as a trophy. The runway has become a symbol of sovereignty — the empire’s skeleton repurposed as a flagpole for the new order. Reopening it to the Americans, even under another name, would be political suicide. Yet the idea keeps resurfacing in Washington because, in strategic terms, Bagram is the one square on the chessboard that still matters.

Trump’s foreign-policy circle is now reassessing both Afghanistan and Pakistan through that lens: access, leverage, proximity. Pakistan, for all its volatility, sits between the fantasy of Bagram and the reality of logistics. Every viable route into or over Afghanistan still runs through it — the air corridors, the refueling stations, the intelligence pathways. If the U.S. ever seeks to project power back into the Afghan theatre, even just to contain ISIS-K, it will have to go through Islamabad.

That fact alone makes Pakistan indispensable again, just as it was during the early War on Terror. And Islamabad knows it. The same establishment accused of nurturing militant proxies can once more present itself as a necessary gatekeeper — a partner against terrorism, a transit hub for aid, a mediator with the Taliban. The same double game, rebranded for a new administration.

Trump’s rhetoric toward Pakistan oscillates — condemnation one week, pragmatism the next. But his people understand the arithmetic of geography. Without Bagram, any renewed American reach into Afghanistan depends on Pakistan’s consent. The corridor from Karachi to Kabul may not look like power, but in practical terms, it’s the only artery left.

Recognition came not with ceremony, but with a shrug. One day in Moscow, the Russian foreign ministry announced it had removed the Taliban from its list of banned organizations. No handshake on the tarmac, no anthem, no flags — just a bureaucratic update that redrew a line last set in 2003. But in geopolitics, paperwork is power. The move broke the diplomatic freeze that had defined the Taliban’s fourth year in office, and it opened a corridor for something more tangible than ideology: money. Since then, delegations have moved back and forth under the radar — trade envoys, security men, energy advisers. Russian firms have been circling Afghanistan’s mineral fields for years, especially the northern oil and gas tracts the West once surveyed and shelved. The Taliban, desperate for revenue, are selling access in long leases and quiet barter: fuel for mining rights, wheat for concessions, technical aid for silence on human rights. It’s less a strategy than survival disguised as diplomacy. Moscow’s interest isn’t purely commercial. The terror front ties directly into the calculus. Russia’s new partnership is built as much on fear as on opportunity — fear of ISIS-K’s reach, of the next Crocus City Hall, of instability spilling north through Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Intelligence contacts have begun to reconstitute the old Cold War grammar: deniable liaisons, shared watchlists, intercepted chatter moving between Kabul, Dushanbe, and Moscow. The Taliban, eager to prove control, pass on fragments — coordinates, movements, the names of foreign fighters they claim to have detained. For every lead they hand over, they ask for something in return: investment, fuel, recognition. Afghanistan remains what it has always been — a buffer and a breeding ground. The terrain doesn’t belong to any one flag for long; it just hosts whoever knows how to disappear. ISIS-K attacks continue across provinces — Jalalabad, Kunduz, Kabul — striking markets, mosques, and checkpoints with the regular rhythm of a heartbeat that never really stopped. The Taliban answer with brutality: raids at dawn, mass arrests, executions in dry riverbeds. But the idea of total control is fiction. For every camp dismantled in Nangarhar, another flares to life just across the Durand Line. Pakistan still plays the double game it perfected decades ago. Parts of its security establishment claim to be fighting ISIS-K while quietly using its fragments as leverage — a faction here, a training pocket there — useful pressure on Kabul, or on the Americans when memory serves. The borderlands of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan remain threaded with informal camps and “religious schools” that serve as holding pens for militants in transit. Fighters drift between banners — ISIS one month, Taliban the next, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan when money or revenge demands it. The distinctions are political; the networks are shared.

In Balochistan, regional reporting has long described the rise of local warlords who operate in the grey zone between sectarian militancy and state patronage. One of the most often-named figures is Shafiq Mengal, a former militant commander whom Pakistani and international media have linked to death-squad activity and private detention sites in the province. Islamabad publicly denies any such structures exist, yet the allegations persist across multiple investigations and eyewitness accounts. Whether these networks act on behalf of elements inside the security apparatus or simply exploit its protection remains deliberately blurred — a hybrid of warlordism and state design.

The Emirate trades stability like a commodity — selling calm to its neighbors in exchange for legitimacy. Russia wants quiet borders; Iran wants manageable chaos; China wants nothing to spill across the Wakhan Corridor. Pakistan wants deniability. Everyone pays in their own currency — fuel, recognition, silence.

For the Taliban, this is statecraft by fragments — legitimacy built not through the U.N., but through invoices, trade corridors, and security briefings. Every quiet deal is a step out of isolation; every intelligence hand-off a currency of survival.

The blackout showed the Taliban can switch off the country. Recognition, in its new form, shows they can also switch it back on — selectively, strategically, for whoever is watching.