SPEAKING
FREELY Can
India stay the course in
Afghanistan? By Shanthie Mariet
D'Souza
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The inking of a
bilateral strategic partnership agreement in
October 2011, organizing an investment summit in
New Delhi in June 2012, and being part of a
trilateral agreement in September 2012: at face
value, these policy markers resemble a determined
effort by India to stay the course in war-torn
Afghanistan beyond the United States 2014
withdrawal.
Such measures, coming at a
time when the international military footprint is
rapidly receding, could be a part of a
well-recalibrated strategy of a continued
multi-layered engagement in a country
where prophecies of doom
are growing louder and more frequent than the
occasional assertions of hope. Whether this
strategy will succeed, however, is a different
question.
India's policy of providing aid
and development assistance in rebuilding war
ravaged Afghanistan, since it reopened its embassy
and four consulates after the routing of Taliban
in 2001, has been on a steady ascendancy. Today,
India is the fifth-largest donor in Afghanistan,
having pledged US$2 billion for wide-ranging
infrastructure development and capacity-building
initiatives.
India has been frequently
described as opportunistic, piggy-backing on the
international military presence. The fact,
however, remains that New Delhi's quiet aid
diplomacy and soft power approach has been largely
successful in carving out a huge favourable
constituency. This not only includes the direct
beneficiary Afghans and the Afghan government,
through which the aid has been delivered, but also
the United States and its allies, who have come
around to acknowledge that India’s developmental
assistance has complemented the international
counter insurgency (COIN) campaign in the crucial
and missing "build and transfer" component.
Therefore, the discourse has increasingly
shifted to expanding and even deepening India’s
engagement with Afghanistan.
Afghanistan
is strategically important to New Delhi for a
range of issues which includes security,
strategic, economic and regional concerns. Hence,
New Delhi's determination to stay put in the face
of adverse conditions on the ground is not
surprising. India’s growing presence and
broad-based engagement in Afghanistan has been
seen by its neighbour Pakistan as checkmating the
latter's policy of regaining its ‘strategic depth’
in Afghanistan.
Much of this narrative has
also been picked up by analysts in the West to
loosely refer to Afghanistan as a battleground of
a zero-sum game between India and Pakistan. Such
assertions have fed into the insurgent propaganda
and strengthened the hand of their sponsors as
witnessed in the increased targeting and attacks
on Indian interests and nationals in the country.
For the past decade, New Delhi reaffirmed
its commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan. It has
battled both external threats as well as some
criticism at home for having a pursued a
rudderless ‘aid only’ policy. However, when the
prospects for Afghanistan look bleak, amid the
transition (inteqal in Dari Pashtu)
beginning of the drawdown of international troops
and the demonstrated inability of the local Afghan
troops to withstand insurgent attacks, such voices
are joining the chorus. New Delhi is coming
face-to-face with a stark reality of downsizing
and even winding down its own operations - thereby
undermining all that it has achieved in the past
decade.
Three developments are indicators
of India's response to the evolving scenario, and
are a demonstration of both determination and
trepidation to prevent the reversal of gains
beyond 2014.
First, in October 2011 India
and Afghanistan signed the Agreement on Strategic
Partnership (ASP). The document was an affirmation
of the positive role in the reconstruction of
Afghanistan and New Delhi's future commitment to a
host of requirements intrinsic to the development
of survival of the war torn country. India not
only committed to train Afghan security forces
especially the Afghan National Police, but set up
an institutional framework to deepen and diversify
cooperation in sectors such as agriculture, rural
development, mining, industry, energy, information
technology, communications, transport, including
civil aviation.
The overall attempt was to
free Indo-Afghan engagement from the personal
choices, orientations, whims and fancies of future
leaders or changing regional security environment.
The ASP was an attempt to consolidate the past
gains and in a way was as an expansion of India’s
role to secure its primary national security
interests. A year since the agreement was inked,
the actual levels of proposed cooperation remains
unknown.
Then in June 2012, New Delhi
hosted an investment summit in Delhi, seeking to
build on the narrative of economic opportunity and
resource utilization-led solution to the Afghan
problem. It was an attempt to be a part of the
approach that seeks regional confidence building,
development, governance, and most lately, trade
and investment, aiming to use the country's
resource potential to build its economic
viability, sustainability and independence. The
third in the series and the first in South Asia,
the summit aimed at attracting investments for
Afghanistan and ensure that the country's economic
and transit potential becomes its inherent
strength to accrue the much needed economic
dividends for itself and the region. Even by
inviting countries like China and Pakistan to
participate and benefit from a reconstruction
agenda, New Delhi’s attempt to present the turmoil
ridden Afghanistan as an attractive destination
remains to be seen.
Thirdly, at the
sidelines of the 6th annual session of the UN
General Assembly in in October 2012, India,
Afghanistan and the United States held a
trilateral summit. The three countries'
representatives exchanged views on the situation
in Afghanistan and a wide range of regional issues
of mutual interests, including combating terrorism
and violent extremism, reviewing cultural
exchanges, efforts to increase regional trade,
investment and economic integration. With its
scheduled drawdown of forces continuing, the
United States is consolidating its position by a
two-pronged approach; first, a bilateral strategic
partnership agreement with Afghanistan, and
secondly, through regional alliances. Washington
has been exhorting India to play a more active
role in post-2014 Afghanistan, especially in
training Afghan security forces.
The
trilateral summit, part of Washington’s unfolding
regional gamble, provided New Delhi the
opportunity to showcase its criticality for
Afghanistan's future, and little else. That is
interpreted as a tactic to put pressure on
Pakistan to fall in line as part of the Afghan
solution. At the same time, New Delhi is wary of
becoming a torchbearer of American policy in
Afghanistan. Additionally, with the self-imposed
restriction of avoiding a direct military role in
the conflict, New Delhi's contribution to
Afghanistan's security efforts will remain
limited.
Apart from these three landmark
policy initiatives, New Delhi has attempted to
shore up support for an inclusive regional
solution and has sought alliances with Russia and
Iran to bring in stability to Afghanistan. It also
tried long and hard to pursue a regional economic
cooperation strategy on trade and transit issues,
including energy pipelines by agreeing to plans
for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India
(TAPI) pipeline that will generate revenue and
employment opportunities for Pakistan and build
long-term stakes in the stability of Afghanistan.
Each of these efforts has been stonewalled by
diverse perceptions of the countries involved.
The strategic churning and policy
realignment before 2014, however, is not unique to
India. Almost every country involved in
Afghanistan has been forced to constantly revisit
their strategies. However, for a country which
shares no border with Afghanistan, which has
invested tremendously in the rebuilding the
nascent democratic country, India's attempt at
protecting its gains is proving to be a litmus
test. The critical policy markers of the last
decade need to be strengthened as Afghanistan
traverses the painful course of transition in the
face of rapidly shifting regional alignments and
waning global interests in stabilizing
Afghanistan.
Dr Shanthie Mariet
D’Souza is Research Fellow at the Institute of
South Asian Studies (ISAS), an autonomous research
institute at the National University of Singapore.
The views reflected in this paper are those of the
author and not of the institute. She can be
reached at isassmd@nus.edu.sg
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
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say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
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