BANGALORE - The recent visit
of India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Kabul
has drawn attention to the steps Delhi is taking
to enhance its relevance as a player in the
approaching endgame in Afghanistan.
First,
it has stepped up its old strategy of contributing
to Afghanistan's reconstruction and
capacity-building. In Kabul, the Indian prime
minister pledged another US$500 million to
Afghanistan, bringing India's total aid to the
war-ravaged country to $2 billion. The aid package
will focus on small development projects in
agriculture and capacity-building among other
things that will directly benefit the Afghan
people.
India is Afghanistan's
sixth-largest donor. Since the fall of the Taliban
in 2001, it has contributed in a big way to
infrastructure
projects, including
construction of the 218-kilometer Zaranj-Delaram
road, the Salma dam and the Afghan parliament
building, the latter not yet completed. Besides,
it has worked extensively in health and education.
This has earned it much public goodwill -
easily its biggest asset in Afghanistan. While
some Indian analysts have argued that this
goodwill will count for nothing in the Afghan
endgame, given Delhi's limited political clout and
absence of military boots on the ground, it is
evident that the government sees some merit in
putting more money in reconstruction there; hence
the stepping up of aid to people-centric projects.
In Kabul, Manmohan stressed that India's
commitment to Afghanistan was "for the long term".
"India is your neighbor and partner in
development," he told Afghan President Hamid
Karzai and other senior officials. "You can count
on us as you build your society, economy and
polity."
The message he sent out is clear.
Unlike the US and other Western countries that are
looking to cut and run after contributing to the
bloody chaos in Afghanistan, India was not going
to abandon the Afghan people. Neither terror
attacks on its embassy in Kabul nor on its
personnel in Afghanistan would intimidate it into
leaving.
Besides building on its
development projects in Afghanistan, Delhi is
seeking to enhance its political influence there
by building bridges across the political spectrum.
Indian analysts have been warning of
India's political marginalization in Afghanistan.
This is in part the result of the US's reluctance
- on the insistence of Pakistan - to allow India a
more high-profile role in the country.
However, Delhi has itself to blame too. In
contrast to previous decades when it avoided
supporting one group over another, during the past
15 years it has taken sides in the civil war,
which means it does not have friends across the
faultlines.
In the late 1990s, it backed
the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. Over
the past nine years it has put its weight behind
Karzai. It has not only failed to reach out to the
Taliban but also it has ignored opposition
politicians - some of them it was close to
earlier. Similarly, by putting all its eggs in the
US basket and fully supporting the US military
operations in Afghanistan, it has antagonized its
friends in the neighborhood.
Analysts have
said that this strategy of not engaging with
politicians and insurgents of all hues has
diminished any role it could have played in the
endgame.
There are signs that Delhi is
seeking to dig itself out of this isolation.
During his Kabul visit, Manmohan announced
that India supported the "process of national
reconciliation" that Afghanistan has embarked
upon. "We wish you well in this enterprise," he
said in a speech at a joint session of the Afghan
parliament.
This support to the
reconciliation process marks an important shift in
India's policy to Afghanistan. Hitherto, while
supportive of the reintegration of Taliban
combatants, Delhi had staunchly opposed
reconciliation with the Taliban. Indian officials
had pointed out to Asia Times Online last year
that while reintegration involved drawing Taliban
combatants into the mainstream after weaning them
away from violence, reconciliation with the
Taliban would mean accommodating its extremist
ideology - something Delhi was not comfortable
with.
India had valid apprehensions over
Karzai's reconciliation initiative. The process
aims at ending the insurgency through a
power-sharing deal with the Taliban. Given the
Taliban's close links with Pakistan, Delhi has
been anxious that a reconciliation process that
would allow the Taliban back into the Afghan power
structure would provide a huge shot in the arm for
Pakistan's clout in Kabul. Why the turnaround
then in opposing the reconciliation with the
Taliban?
While India's concerns over the
Taliban and its links with Pakistan have not
diminished, there is a realization in Delhi that
it is time it adopted a more realistic approach.
The reconciliation process may be moving in fits
and starts and it might be flawed. But it is
happening. By carping from the sidelines and
remaining at odds with the process, Delhi was
running the risk of becoming irrelevant. Nobody
was listening to its warnings. If it was keen to
shape the outcome of the talks it would have to
nudge the process from within, as a supporter of
the reconciliation process, rather than complain
from the margins.
India realized that by
giving up its blanket opposition to the
reconciliation process it stood a better chance of
being heard and of determining who among the
Taliban would be talked to. Talking to the Taliban
and accommodating them carries enormous risks. But
in a situation where there are few options, why
not try to be in a position to shape, however
minimally, the outcome of that gamble?
India's decision to support the
reconciliation process also stems from its reading
of the ground situation. There is a measure of
support for the reconciliation process from the
Afghan people. Besides, the Taliban - however
distasteful their ideology and methods might be -
do represent a section of Afghans and for any
settlement to be sustainable they need to be
included.
Whether talking to the Taliban
will result in peace or collapse to plunge the
region in worse violence will depend crucially on
Pakistan's role. Both India and Afghanistan
realize that. During his visit to Kabul, Manmohan
made sure he did not ruffle Islamabad's feathers
or feed into its insecurities.
The Indian
prime minister's visit to Kabul came less than a
fortnight after the killing of Osama bin Laden in
a safe house in the heart of Pakistan. Many were
expecting him and Karzai to indulge in a
high-decibel attack on Pakistan for sheltering the
al-Qaeda chief. After all, for several years now
India and Afghanistan had been warning that
Islamabad was protecting Bin Laden. However, the
two leaders were rather muted in their criticism
of Pakistan.
Manmohan did speak of a need
for a "thorough investigation" into Bin Laden's
presence in Pakistan, but he did not go beyond
that. In fact, he ruled out the possibility of
India carrying out a US-style operation to
eliminate anti-India terrorists in Pakistan. A
joint statement issued at the end of the visit
took special care to calm Pakistan. It stated that
the new India-Afghanistan strategic partnership
was not aimed at any third country.
India
has taken important steps to enhance its relevance
in Afghanistan. But are these steps too little and
too late? The situation in Afghanistan is far too
messy and India's clout too limited for Delhi to
have an impact on its own. This makes it
imperative for Delhi to reach out to regional
powers. India's excessive identification with US
operations in Afghanistan and its continued
support for the American troop presence there has
annoyed countries like Iran and will raise
questions over how genuine its commitment is to a
regional initiative.
The reconciliation
process as it exists in Afghanistan is an elite
one, preoccupied with getting a deal done over
power-sharing rather than mending the broken
relationship between peoples and communities torn
apart by decades of civil war and enabling them to
live together.
Reconciliation stands a
better chance of ensuring that the violence of the
past does not recur if it is a bottom-up process.
It is here that India, whose strength lies in
public goodwill, can play an effective role.
Sudha Ramachandran is an
independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore. She can be reached at
sudha98@hotmail.com
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