India spent years cultivating a quiet partnership with the Afghan Taliban, betting that a regime desperate for legitimacy would be willing to do what New Delhi could not do openly. That bet has now failed in full view of the world, and the wreckage tells its own story. The Afghan Taliban claimed a drone strike inside Pakistani territory, a claim meant to project strength on India’s behalf. It came from India, part of a wider consignment of low-grade unmanned systems handed to the Taliban regime specifically to be turned against Pakistan. A partnership built on borrowed proxies and second-rate hardware was never going to withstand a defence built specifically to withstand it, and the events of this summer have proven that in the plainest terms possible.