SPEAKING FREELY A route for South Asian peace via Afghanistan
By Raja Karthikeya
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As the war in Afghanistan takes a turn for the worse, the burden of blame has
increasingly come to rest on the state of relations between India and Pakistan
and their rivalry in Afghanistan. The conclusions of the report of General
Stanley McChrystal, the top US military commander in Afghanistan, the recent
bombing at the Indian Embassy in Kabul, and the continuing reports in Pakistani
media about Indians in Afghanistan being involved in fomenting the insurgency
in Pakistan's Balochistan province, have ratcheted up tension between the
neighbors.
It is therefore relevant to ask if Pakistan and India's interests in
Afghanistan are indeed incompatible. It is indisputable that Pakistan and India
have deeper cultural and historic relations with Afghanistan than perhaps any
of the country's neighbors except Iran, and have a major stake in the stability
and future of Afghanistan. But such is the two countries' post-partition
history that one can sometimes read too much into it. Diplomacy requires fresh
thinking and the courage to act on bold ideas. It needs leaving behind the
baggage of history without necessarily forgetting it. If we peel through the
layers of perceptions, we can find several converging interests.
Achieving convergence
First, there is a need to recognize that fears based on history are often
exaggerated. For instance the fear of "strategic encirclement", a key argument
with reference to Afghanistan. A commonly cited fear in Pakistan is that if
there is a hostile regime in Kabul, in the event of a war with India, the
Afghans would invade to claim Pashtun lands in their pursuit of creating
Pashtunistan. And yet, in none of the Pakistan-India wars (1965 and 1971 being
the most significant ones) did a government in Kabul commit aggression against
Pakistan while the latter was distracted by the war with India.
In the case of India, a longstanding fear involves aggression by China to take
advantage of an India-Pakistan conflict or in support of Pakistan. Yet,
declassified archives show that during the 1971 war, despite the Richard Nixon
administration's appeals in support of the Yahya Khan regime, the Chinese did
not open a front against India.
Secondly, the Cold War is now over, and the neighbors must move away the
vocabulary, sentiments and perceptions that were imposed on the subcontinent.
The concept of "strategic depth", which dominates literature on Pakistan's
involvement in Afghanistan, is hardly relevant in an age of nuclear deterrence
between the two neighbors.
There is also an equal need to dispel mutual misperceptions about the ethos
that guides either country's foreign policy. For instance, hardly anybody in
India today reads, much less admires, the Arthashastra, an archaic 4th
century BC text whose Machiavellian tenets are often cited in Pakistan as the
fountainhead of modern India's foreign policy towards Afghanistan. It would
equally be a mistake for Indian strategists to believe that Pakistan's foreign
policy, which has been highly pragmatic, is exclusively guided by religious
identity.
In terms of perceptions, it would be delusional for either side to believe that
territorial disputes, including Kashmir, in which both sides have enormous
stakes, can be resolved through force (direct or covert), or that a policy of
payback can ever act as an enduring deterrent.
Thirdly, as two nations that threw off the yoke of imperialism and achieved
self-rule after decades of struggle, India and Pakistan are obligated to
respect each other's sovereignty and, at the very least, recognize each other's
stake in regional stability. No doubt both nations are aware that a break-up of
the other country creates unparalleled dangers and instability. Therefore,
repeating pledges to respect each other's territorial integrity and believing
each other's pledge would help.
It also involves recognizing that both nations have a stake in South Asia and
neither has an exclusive "sphere of influence", and neither can India dictate
Pakistan's relationship with Bangladesh, nor Pakistan the relationship between
India and Afghanistan. Diplomatic ties go a lot longer than the miles of border
shared.
Fourth, either side should acknowledge that national interests are never static
and evolve with time and changing ground realities. The respective interests of
Pakistan and India vis-a-vis Afghanistan have changed considerably over the
past three decades. Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan go well beyond
containing Indian influence. The dominant reasons for Pakistan's involvement in
Afghanistan in the 1980s were to ensure a buffer against Soviet expansion that
could be an existential threat to Pakistan, and to create conditions for the
return of the millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
But by the early 1990s, as ambassador S Iftikhar Ahmed has essayed, they had
metamorphosed into a need to end the Afghan civil war, restore stability in
Pakistan's neighborhood, and to create conditions for uninterrupted trade with
Central Asia. This included courting several mujahideen members including, at
times, leaders of the Northern Alliance.
India's objectives in Afghanistan have been equally diverse. India, which had
been a peripheral player in Afghanistan in the 1980s, began to see its interest
piqued in Afghanistan after what Zahid Hussain calls "the privatization of
jihad" happened in the late 1980s - a situation in which non-state actors and
individuals from across the world had begun declaring "jihad" (in a gross
distortion of the word) in Afghanistan with no sanction of their respective
states.
After the collapse of the mujahideen government, India's support to the
Northern Alliance was predicated on regional stability and a fear of such
non-state actors. The hijack of an Indian airliner to Kandahar in December 1999
and the subsequent drama in which the Taliban allowed the escape of the
terrorists released by India in exchange for the passengers, and the fact that
non-state actors like al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba freely used Afghanistan as a
sanctuary in the late 1990s precipitated India's role today in Afghanistan.
Understanding these interests would help reject the web of suspicion into which
the neighbors have woven themselves.
Breaking the deadlock
After crossing the barrier of history, there is a need now to look ahead. This
means that besides identifying the neighbor's national interests, one needs to
appreciate his legitimate interests. As Rajmohan Gandhi recently wrote,
"Indians should recognize that ties of geography, ethnicity and family bring to
the Pak-Afghan relationship a depth that can never enter the India-Afghan
relationship." To translate this into action, India should quietly encourage
Afghanistan to resolve the Durand line dispute with Pakistan, a major source of
concern for Pakistan's strategists.
India should never refrain from stating that it sees preserving Pakistan's
territorial integrity as a priority. On its part, Pakistan should encourage
rather than oppose India's efforts at infrastructure reconstruction in
Afghanistan, the fifth-poorest country on the planet. Pakistan should also
effectively act against the presence in Waziristan of groups like the Haqqani
network, whose attack on the Indian Embassy last year and ties to other
terrorist groups have threatened peace efforts between the two neighbors and
between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The moot political question remains the Taliban. Here again, there is more
convergence of interest between Pakistan and India than acknowledged. Pakistan
and India have been in and out of favor of Afghanistan's Pashtuns in turn over
the past two decades. But both India and Pakistan want the same - that Pashtuns
have adequate representation in power in Kabul.
So should the Taliban be that Pashtun voice? The Afghan Taliban's agenda lacked
(and continues to lack) any plan of governance. It also damaged Pakistan's
relations with Iran and sowed the seeds of widespread Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian
violence in the region - indeed, as a senior Pakistani diplomat of that era
confessed, "after 1999, Pakistan's government could no longer affect the
trajectory of the Taliban and they increasingly fell under the influence of the
Arabs [that is, al-Qaeda]".
Given the fact that the Taliban today is more of an ideology and a worldview
than a political movement, they are a threat to the subcontinent's stability.
However, as long as an insurgent gives up the tag, violence and radical
worldview of a Talib, he can be recognized as a legitimate voice of the Afghans
and be reconciled with. Despite differences in articulation, this political
vision is common to both Pakistan and India. In fact, Indian Foreign Minister S
M Krishna's recent statement supporting a political solution in Afghanistan can
be seen as an allusion to this.
The benefits
There are at least four benefits accruable from believing in a convergence of
interests. Having a strong, stable, pluralistic government in power in
Afghanistan helps regional stability, secures Pakistan and almost by corollary,
India.
Secondly, terrorism is a threat to both countries today, and sooner than later,
the same elements threaten both countries - as in the case of Jaish-e-Mohammed,
founded by Masood Azhar, one of the men released by India to the Taliban in
Kandahar after the 1999 hijack. The group is since believed to have been
involved in both the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 and the recent
attack on the Pakistan army headquarters in Rawalpindi.
Thirdly, the two neighbors are the most energy-deficient nations in the region.
Tapping into the energy resources of Central Asia (for example, through the
trans-Afghanistan or TAPI pipeline) would help cater to their energy demand and
also reduce their disproportionate dependence on the Middle East, especially as
piracy and periodic saber-rattling between the West and Iran imperils oil
supplies from the Gulf.
Fourth, allowing transit of Indian goods to Afghanistan would not harm the
interests of Pakistan. On the contrary, the transit tolls from Indian goods can
actually help the Pakistani government make up for the loss of coalition's
goods traffic to former Soviet republics. Indeed, allowing Afghanistan-India
two-way transit trade through Pakistan could lay the foundation for much-needed
direct commerce between Pakistan and India.
Although the idea of recognizing converging interests is not new to diplomats
on either side, it has often been sacrificed on the altar of political
expediency. However, arrival at this understanding should not be done in a
back-channel process away from the glare of the media. There is a need to take
the people along.
In the interim, the neighbors should desist from blaming each other for
terrorist attacks. Conspiracy theories should be quickly de-legitimized.
Diplomatic relations cannot fall prey to irrational rabble-rousers, talk-show
hosts or conspiracy theorists. Instead of being a new theater for conflict,
Afghanistan can be a new beginning for Pakistan-India relations. Exploring and
building upon this convergence is our responsibility not just to the Afghan
people, but to the people of India and Pakistan.
Raja Karthikeya is a researcher at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington DC.
(Copyright 2009, Raja Karthikeya)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in contributing.
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