Battle lines move from Kashmir to Kabul
By M K Bhadrakumar
There is wide acclaim today among Indian strategic analysts and diplomatic
editors that New Delhi has scored a major diplomatic victory in Afghanistan and
that its "influence" in Kabul has "peaked". This victory has come on the back
of Washington's strategic pro-India tilt and, in the period since end-2001 to
date, India's earmarking of a staggering US$1.2 billion as assistance for
Afghan "reconstruction".
Some Indian cheerleaders expound the thesis that it is the hallmark of an
aspiring great power to "first learn to become a net provider of regional
security" - and Delhi must therefore step in and lend a hand in fixing the
Afghan problem. Others visualize Afghanistan providing a "unique opportunity"
to be of help to the United States, and that Delhi will eventually benefit from
the payback by a grateful superpower that is sure to come. Yet
another Indian viewpoint is that it simply pays to rattle Islamabad by creating
space for Afghan President Hamid Karzai. An invidious Indian argument is that
Delhi should use Afghan soil to retaliate against Islamabad's support of
Kashmiri militants.
In diplomacy, maybe, it pays to sidestep historical memory. Archives may
contain only chronicles of wasted time. Very few Indian strategic analysts who
at present hold forth on Afghanistan seem to be even remotely aware of how,
like Karzai, the then head of state in Kabul, Dr Mohammad Najibullah, was a
frequent visitor to Delhi in the late 1980s.
That, too, was a twilight zone in the 30-year-old Afghan war when the conflict,
like today's, uneasily lingered in the shade. Fortunately for Delhi, though,
the slow-rolling coup that worked its way through the Afghan labyrinth for
months before culminating in the morning of April 16, 1992, with Najib's
ouster, didn't come entirely as surprise. Indian diplomats soon began
diligently seeking out the Afghan mujahideen in the dangerous Hindu Kush
mountains, to explain to those new masters the cold rationale of India's
exceedingly warm friendship with Najib.
They explained patiently that it was after all a strictly state-to-state,
government-to-government relationship with Najib, shorn of ideology or religion
or commitments. The Northern Alliance's Ahmad Shah Massoud still looked away as
elements in his militia systematically ransacked the Indian Embassy, forcing
its diplomats to flee Kabul.
Yet, within no time, by the mid-1990s, Massoud had become India's key Afghan
ally - or, as much as he could be anyone's ally. Certainly, it remains a
tantalizing proposition whether with all the Indian help Taliban rule could
have been overthrown but for al-Qaeda's historic decision to attack New York
and Washington in September 2001.
Historically, there has never been a dearth of justification for Indian
involvement in Afghanistan. At the time of the Afghan jihad in the 1980s
against the Soviets, Indian policy maintained that secular India had everything
to lose with the advent of Islamism in the region - encouraged as a factor of
Cold War geopolitics by the US - and that Najib provided a bulwark against the
Islamist mujahideen based in Peshawar in Pakistan. But Delhi swiftly switched
tack after the mujahideen takeover in 1992.
It found itself networking instead with a mujahideen group that was famously
rooted in political Islam - the Jamiat-i-Islami, belonging to the Afghan-based
Akhwan-ul-Muslimeen, which had strong links with the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt.
Following the appearance of the Taliban in the mid-1990s, India confidently
took the side of the Northern Alliance. In political terms, this phase
signified a wholesale embrace of Islamists, as the Northern Alliance comprised
a variety of radical Islamist groups (including die-hard mujahideen groups like
the Ittihad-i-Islami, which followed the Wahhabi ideology and enjoyed generous
funding during the Afghan jihad from wealthy Saudi benefactors, including from
Osama bin Laden).
The changed rationale was that the Taliban represented the dark forces of
"obscurantism" and "extremism", which posed a threat to regional security and
stability. However, since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, Delhi
incrementally distanced itself from the Northern Alliance. Instead, Delhi began
supporting the US-backed power setup in Kabul. The pro-US policy was
rationalized in terms of the upcoming struggle against "terrorism" proclaimed
by US President George W Bush.
No one knows how much of its surplus capital Delhi ended up spending on various
Afghan groups through the three decades - and, more important, what durable
dividend it brought for India. Unfortunately, the Indian political system
doesn't insist on stocktaking. The 59-year-old Indian parliament is yet to
evolve a system of in-camera hearings, which is a redeeming feature of most
serious democracies in the world, including neighboring Iran.
All through the painful twists and turns, Indian policy towards Afghanistan was
steeped in pragmatism and remained largely Pakistan-centric. But things seem to
be changing. The horizons appear to have vastly expanded. According to
Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid, Kabul is "replacing Kashmir as the main area of
antagonism" between India and Pakistan. The Pakistani security establishment
has convinced itself that Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies are engaged
in undermining Pakistan's security. American analysts say Afghanistan has
explicitly become a theater of Pakistan-India adversarial relations.
But there is a much larger dimension. The Pakistani establishment is also
sizing up the new geopolitical reality - the unprecedented pro-India tilt in
the US's regional policy. It is having a hard time coping with the trilateral
consensus between Kabul, Delhi and Washington, which pillories Islamabad as the
"primary and near-exclusive trouble maker" in the region. The Pakistani
establishment cannot accept that while Islamabad remains a key partner for
Washington in the "war on terror", it is Delhi that is on the way to becoming a
stakeholder in US global strategies.
Indeed, the National Defense Strategy document released by the Pentagon in
Washington on July 31 confirms the worst Pakistani suspicions. It underscores,
"We [the US] look to India to assume greater responsibility as a stakeholder in
the international system, commensurate with its growing economic, military and
soft power." India is the only country hailed in this fashion in the entire
29-page document.
The Pentagon seems to have overlooked how such a vehement US national defense
strategy pronouncement citing India as a pivotal country would go down with the
Pakistani generals. To be sure, Delhi finds the US doctrine to be immensely
attractive. This is how the Indian elite always wanted the US to view India.
But the Pakistani perspective sees the emerging regional equations as a
dangerous slide toward Indian military superiority and regional "hegemony". How
does the Pakistani military, weaned on adversarial feelings towards India,
countenance such a challenge?
First, Pakistan will assert its legitimate interests in Afghanistan, no matter
what it takes. Make no mistake about it. The Pakistani generals know what
transpired when American and British top brass met in Britain last month to
exchange notes on Afghanistan. The conclave assessed there were huge problems
with the Karzai regime's performance and the war might last for another 30
years, which is a hopeless scenario, as "war fatigue" is setting in among North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies and the tide of public opinion is
turning against the war. But that isn't all.
From the Pakistani perspective, whereas in the past India essentially developed
its own line toward Kabul, it is today acting in concert with the US.
Meanwhile, India is also working towards establishing formal ties with NATO.
For the first time, the Pentagon invited India to take part in the two-week Red
Flag air exercise, which is currently underway in Nevada. And in September,
NATO will deploy in southern Afghanistan one of its seven ultra-sophisticated
Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft, capable of peering deep inside
Pakistan.
On the eve of the US-India military exercises in Nevada, which also includes
NATO participation, the commander-in-chief of Russia's air force, General
Alexander Zelin, was quoted as saying that Russia's strategic bombers may soon
start patrolling the Indian Ocean. A prominent strategic analyst at the Russian
Academy of Science's Institute of World Economy and International Relations
Center for International Security in Moscow, Vladimir Yevseyev, commented that
Zelin's statement was intended to "warn" India, as the US has "come to regard
the Indian Ocean as a zone of its priority interests".
In other words, though Indian rhetoric on Afghanistan is carefully couched in
terms of countering terrorism, Pakistan doesn't see it that way. Instead, it
views it in much larger terms as an Indian thrust, supported by the US, as the
pre-eminent regional power in South Asia. In recent weeks, Pakistani military
raised the ante along the Line of Control bordering the Indian state of Jammu
and Kashmir. The resurgence of tensions seems a calibrated move. Islamabad is
sending some signals.
Nasim Zehra, a relatively moderate, sensible voice in the Pakistani strategic
community, wrote recently, "It is time for Pakistan to categorically state:
enough of Pakistan bashing, enough of vacuous Kantian moralizing in a Hobbesian
world, enough of the do-more mantra and enough of partisan analysis, enough of
selective perceptions, enough of double standards ... Pakistan will play 'as
clean as the world around it'. Take it or leave it. There is no 'going it
alone' for any of Pakistan's neighbors.
"No matter what anyone's GDP [gross domestic product] may be or their nuclear
arsenal, we are in this mess together ... That is the message of the spreading
militancy ... The region will unravel if the governments in the area and those
involved outsiders like Washington do not make it a common cause to jointly
work to address the causes of growing militancy. The answer lies in a regional
solution."
The message is simple: If Pakistan goes down, it will take India down with it.
There is no such thing as absolute security.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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