Wrong place, wrong time

Afghanistan has rightly been called the graveyard of Empires, as the US and its Nato allies are now beginning to find out. And within this quagmire, it is pertinent to ask what New Delhi hopes to achieve in this anarchic war ravaged land? India has already drained over a billion dollars in a country where money goes unaccounted, and which requires $5 billion a year for at least another decade to become a functional state. While India’s development work and socio-economic initiatives have earned it the appreciation of the Afghans, it has also earned New Delhi the annoyance of Pakistan which views Afghanistan as its strategic backyard. For all this, New Delhi is hoping to earn a place at the high table, when peace shall prevail in this land of the ‘Great Game’. 

 But that will perhaps never be so. Pakistan’s military minders in GHQ Rawalpindi are wedded to the idea — which emerged as an article of faith in the 1990’s — that Afghanistan must remain under Pakistan’s control, as a safe strategic hinterland, for Pakistan’s establishment to fall back into in the event of a successful Indian military thrust into the heartland of Pakistan. Therefore, Pakistan’s brass hats are averse, and will remain so, to any role that India or for that matter the US and Nato wish to play in Afghanistan. This has certainly been conveyed to New Delhi but not so much to Washington, since America is still paying Pakistan’s bills. But once the western forces are exhausted and when they’ll begin to leave — a day that does not seem too far now — Pakistan will push in its Taliban proxies back into Afghanistan to run the country as they did when the Soviet army had left in the 1990s. For this they retain links with various Taliban groups — led largely by the veteran Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the ISI stooge, Jalaluddin Haqqani — as strategic assets to regain influence in Afghanistan.

And where will this leave India? At best, as an outsider with no political role within Afghanistan. This therefore raises the question as to what the policy alternative for Delhi should be, in the emerging scenario in Afghanistan.  The common view within India’s foreign office (the ministry of external affairs) is that India must continue to support its friends and allies within Afghanistan, so that New Delhi will one day be allowed to decide the future of this ravaged land.  But the reality will be far from this. 

Today, as the Americans call the shots, they allow little role to even their closest ally, the British, on policy matters in Afghanistan. And when they go, and if Afghanistan slips back into Pakistani hands, India will have no role at all. This is a point that India’s foreign office clearly prefers to ignore under the guidance of Indian’s intelligence agencies, like RAW, which feels that diplomacy, at least with Pakistan, is best attended to by a system of tit for tat.  No wonder Pakistan continues to blame India for having too many missions in Afghanistan with many of them providing  space to India’s intelligence agencies to operate across the Af-Pak border and meddle in the affairs of Pakistan’s tribal and  Baloch areas. This India denies, but it has no takers in Islamabad.

Moreover for Pakistan, apart from the strategic space that its military is obsessed with obtaining, any future pipeline for the gas which can come from the central Asian countries north of Afghanistan, has to pass through Afghanistan and into Pakistan and then elsewhere. Thus Pakistan’s added motivation to have Afghanistan under its influence.  For India to get that gas, the hurdles would be even more than the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline, which till date is a non-starter.

So, a way forward for India will be to address Pakistan’s complex strategy to counter India’s dominating presence in the region. Afghanistan can be a key to that. Pakistan could have been a regional power if it lay anywhere else on the world map, but seen against India and China, its two immediate neighbours, it looks small. So, by allowing it a prominent role in Afghanistan and then onto  the gas rich region of central Asia would be a diplomatic master stroke. But, India’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan must be used as a major diplomatic bargaining tool to extract a worthwhile concession from Pakistan, such as cooperation in confronting terrorism.

Moreover, if India has another billion dollars to spare, then it must not pour that in aid and into development projects in Afghanistan, but use it to leverage India better with at least two of India’s neighbours — Bangladesh and Nepal for instance. This would earn much more goodwill in India’s immediate neighbourhood. Sadly, Afghanistan on the other hand has little to offer India.