BANGALORE - The resurgence of the Taliban
in Afghanistan and the spurt in violent attacks in
recent months have heightened India's concern over
the security of Indians working in that country.
This was among the issues raised by Indian
External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee during
his two-day visit to Kabul. In the Afghan capital
to invite President Hamid Karzai to the upcoming
summit of the South Asian Association of Regional
Cooperation in New Delhi, Mukherjee announced that
India, Afghanistan's fifth-largest donor, is
hiking its financial contribution
to
Afghanistan's reconstruction and development by
another US$100 million, raising its aid assistance
to that country to $750 million.
India,
Afghanistan and the United Nations Development
Program also signed a memorandum of understanding
on capacity-building there.
Mukherjee drew
the attention of the Karzai government to the
threat posed by the Taliban to Indians working in
Afghanistan. About 3,000 are engaged in
infrastructure construction, capacity-building and
development projects in Afghanistan.
Indians have repeatedly been targeted by
the Taliban. In 2003, two engineers working on a
road project in Zabul were abducted and
subsequently released. The same year, an engineer
with an Afghan telecom company was shot dead. In
2005, a driver working with the Zaranj-Delaram
highway project was abducted and then killed. And
in 2006, an engineer with a Bahraini company was
executed.
It is those who are engaged in
road-building activity in Afghanistan who have
been the most vulnerable.
India's
involvement with road-building is bitterly opposed
by both the Taliban and its sponsors in Pakistan,
as the highway under construction not only will
boost Afghanistan's connectivity and trade ties
with the outside world, it will also enhance the
trade and influence of Iran and India - countries
whose relations with Islamabad and the Taliban are
hardly friendly. Pakistan fears that with the
completion of the highway, India's presence and
influence in its neighborhood to the north, ie
Central Asia, will increase manifold.
India's Border Roads Organization (BRO) is
constructing the 217-kilometer Zaranj-Delaram
highway in the southwest of the country. It will
link Zaranj, which lies on Afghanistan's border
with Iran, to Delaram, situated on the "garland
highway". The garland highway links Kabul,
Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz. Once
the highway is completed, Zaranj will be linked to
several Afghan cities.
This highway will
connect Iran with the garland highway, too. Iran
has been working on improving road links from its
ports to towns that lie on its border with
Afghanistan. It has completed construction of a
vital bridge on the Helmand River marking the
frontier between itself and Afghanistan, and is
busy upgrading the road from Chabahar, where its
new port on the Makran coast is coming up, to
Zaranj.
So once the Zaranj-Delaram highway
is completed, goods from Afghanistan's main cities
can be brought overland to the border with Iran
from where they will be transported to Chabahar,
and vice versa. The Zaranj-Delaram highway will
provide landlocked Afghanistan with a valuable
lifeline.
Currently, Afghanistan's access
to the sea is through Pakistan - via Peshawar and
onward to the port of Karachi. The road link
through Pakistan has been a headache for
Afghanistan, with Pakistan often holding up
consignments meant for Afghan reconstruction. The
Delaram-Zaranj highway opens up another option for
Afghanistan via Iran. What is more, the overland
option through Iran to the port of Chabahar is
shorter than the one currently available through
Pakistan.
The land route through Pakistan
is the simplest way of moving goods between India
and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Pakistan is
reluctant to allow India access to Afghanistan via
its territory, although such a move would earn it
considerable revenue in the form of transit fees.
This Pakistani stance has made the land route via
Iran into Afghanistan all the more crucial for
India. India hopes that the road link through Iran
and Afghanistan will open up markets for its goods
in Afghanistan and beyond in Central Asia. Hence
the Indian interest in completing the
Delaram-Zaranj highway.
Since 2003, India
and Iran have been cooperating in developing the
Chabahar port complex. Chabahar is closer to India
than the existing port at Bandar Abbas. Iran has
extended huge concessions to Afghanistan to
attract it to use Chabahar port rather than the
port that Pakistan is developing with Chinese help
at Gwadar in Balochistan province.
Since
the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Pakistan's
influence in Afghanistan has fallen dramatically
and that of India's has grown. None of the
projects that India is involved with in
Afghanistan undermines Pakistan's influence as
much as the Zaranj-Delaram road link. This
explains why Indians working on this project are
particularly vulnerable to Taliban attacks.
Although India is keen to complete the
project as soon as possible, it is behind the
December 2006 completion date, with only a fourth
finished. And the cost of the project, which was
originally pegged at about $70 million, has almost
doubled.
"The cost and time overrun has
been because of the security situation," BRO chief
Lieutenant-General K S Rao said recently, pointing
out that the road runs through "the
drug-cultivation belt where there is huge
resistance to the work being done" by the BRO. The
poor security situation has compelled BRO to work
only eight hours a day. Initially, BRO worked on
several stretches of road simultaneously, but
after the killing of one of its workers in 2005,
it was compelled to take up one stretch at a time
to keep its workers together.
About 300
Indians work for BRO on the Zaranj-Delaram
project. They are protected by about 70 personnel
of the paramilitary Indo-Tibetan Border Police
(ITBP). However, ITBP personnel are not permitted
to move beyond the living camps with weapons, so
Afghan security personnel provide security at the
work site.
BRO has drawn Delhi's attention
to the need for more security, but even after a
number of reviews the number of Indian security
personnel has not been stepped up.
India
is said to have put in a proposal to the Afghan
government to send personnel of the Central
Reserve Police Force to protect BRO workers, but
there has been no movement on this. Pakistan is
opposed to India assuming a larger security role
in Afghanistan and there is concern in Delhi, too,
that stepping up Indian personnel for protection
will only attract more attacks from the Taliban.
India has therefore asked the government
of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul to step up
security for Indian workers.
BRO is
clearly working against all odds. And it is not
just the security situation. Nimroz province,
where the highway is being built, is tough terrain
to work in and suffers extreme seasonal
temperatures. It is said that during their
occupation of Afghanistan, the Soviets attempted
road-building in this province twice but gave up.
India has indicated that it is made of
sterner stuff, and for now the road-building
continues, regardless of Taliban attacks and
threats. Sudha Ramachandran is an
independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore.
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