Pakistan has been publicly making the point for six months to the US and Nato forces that it is willing to play peace-broker with the Taliban.
India is slowly being marginalised in Afghanistan, and as Pakistan prepares a gameplan for the time when the US and Nato forces exit, New Delhi appears to be floundering with no definite strategy to stop the slide.
The enormous goodwill New Delhi has earned among ordinary Afghans with its development work which touch their lives may slip away as India seems unable to counter Pakistan’s gameplan in Afghanistan.
In a bid to maintain its strategic depth in the country, Pakistan has been publicly making the point for six months to the US and Nato forces that it is willing to play peace-broker with the Taliban. In return, it wants to ensure that India’s growing influence is curtailed and it has a friendly government in place when foreign troops leave the country.
Wednesday’s New York Times report confirms what was evident to analysts watching the play of forces in Afghanistan. Whether Islamabad is finally able to get its way with the US, Taliban and al Qaeda forces is not known. But it is a fact that Pakistan, which was sidelined after the Taliban was thrown out of Kabul in 2001, is emerging as an important political player in the drama.
Senior Indian officials refused to comment on the NYT report. “Let us not be taken in by newspaper reports. Wait and see what happens,’’ a senior Indian official said. “We have a proper evaluation of the situation on the ground and are not worried that India will become irrelevant in Afghanistan. Remember, ordinary Afghans prefer India to any other country in the region. People are saying so in poll after poll.”
While that may be true, but so far there is no indication of India’s gameplan for the region.
“What is the point of having strategic ties with the US, if our concerns are not taken into consideration,” former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal asked. He pointed out that during prime minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington last November, there was no indication that the US was planning such an exit strategy.
“It is baffling. There is a huge gap between what was told to the prime minister and his team, and reports of what’s happening on the ground now,” Sibal said.
But strategic analyst K Subrahmanyam is not overtly worried over Pakistan’s attempt to be the game-changer in Kabul. “Yes, General Kayani has been talking about the Haqqani group for quite some time, but in the final analysis who poses a threat to the US interests worldwide are al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba, and not the Haqqani faction of the Taliban in Afghanistan,” he said.
Former Indian ambassador to the US Naresh Chandra, generally not in sync with the United Progressive Alliance government’s policy, however, does not find much wrong with New Delhi’s Afghan policy.
“Pakistan may think they are being clever and will set the ground rules for engagement with the Taliban, but in Afghanistan the situation keeps changing. What we see now may not be the same six months down the line,” he said.
Today, with the faltering campaign against the Taliban-al Qaeda, every country is looking to the best way to preserve itself from the Afghan quagmire.
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