The recent cataclysmic developments in Afghanistan may have shocked the world. They have particularly left the Indian establishment sullen, perturbed and in a state of confused anguish. Worse, they have left them without many options.
Diplomacy and foreign policy are designed to avoid such scenarios. A successful strategy enhances your opportunities, affords you flexibility in difficult areas and helps you salvage an otherwise hopeless situation. India’s approach to Afghanistan, and particularly denying recognition to the Taliban, however, has denied them a seat at the table.
For decades since the Soviet invasion, India enjoyed an ideal geo-strategic position vis-à-vis Afghanistan. Despite India’s fundamental insistence on only accepting and reproducing ‘integral part’ maps, the republic does not share a land border with Afghanistan — not even via the bifurcated union territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
This cushioning of safe distance provided India with a unique vantage point in South Asia – without having to deal with difficult but existent ground realities of insurgents and refugees, India, being a key stakeholder in the greater neighbourhood, could safely take the high road and pontificate on terrorism versus good governance, Pakistan versus the allies, Karzai/Ghani versus the Taliban.
Especially since 9/11, too, in a heady era in international politics marked by security jargon and amorphous notions of us versus them, India viewed its relationship with the United States partly through the prism of US-Pakistan dynamic – most allied ally of the US, no less. And partly through its own aspirations to arrive on the global stage as a future power and be the desi bulwark for American values in the region.
That lust for association meant the Indians only ever had one bet in Afghanistan. The Americans, on their part, set the Indians up for an arresting failure in that country, with their acquiescence to Karzai and his brother, and later Ashraf Ghani, arming the largely illiterate Afghan military with unfamiliar and much advanced American weaponry, training them through self-interested contractors that changed every 6 months, not replacing American air cover with the Afghan air force and sticking with the drawbacks of the single-transferable vote that brought forth wholly unpopular and illegitimate leaders.
It’s disingenuous to fault Afghan venality twenty years later when it’s the outcome that the system was specifically designed to produce. Hanging on the coattails of the Americans just might have cost the Indians a lot more than the $3 billion they poured into Afghanistan.
It’s disingenuous to fault Afghan venality twenty years later when it’s the outcome that the system was specifically designed to produce. Hanging on the coattails of the Americans just might have cost the Indians a lot more than the $3 billion they poured into Afghanistan.
Shorn of moral judgement, Pakistan’s Afghan policy is a doctorate in realpolitik, grounded in the realities of a divided ethnicity, a fenced yet porous mountain border that snakes through rivers and caves for more than two thousand kilometers and being Afghanistan’s permanent and most important neighbour. If anything, the desultory allied scuttle out of Afghanistan not only resurrects the ghosts of 1989 in Pakistan, it serves as a wretched reminder of broken promises and expedient American desertion to India and beyond.
But the guilt of beguiling rests not only with Pakistan, for New Delhi has also been speaking in forked tongues since the days of Bush and Singh. Their equivocation to commit Indian boots on Afghan soil, once bemoaned by former president Donald Trump, was only matched by the pernicious eagerness of Indian lobbyists to spur Washington to advance and extend America’s forever war. That tunnel vision strategy, uncomplemented with any broad-based rapprochement with the Taliban, demonstrated India’s inability to learn the ropes of the Afghan game.
After all, this is not the first time the Indians have felt lonely in Afghanistan. Cast back to December 1999, just short of the new millennium, when India found itself fighting in no man’s land for 155 hostages aboard the IC814 plane. Having failed to stop the hijackers in Amritsar, the Indian negotiating team were impotent and forlorn in Taliban-controlled Kandahar with no prior channels of recognition or communication with the group.
Operating in a complete political and diplomatic vacuum, the Indians had no sense of understanding with the Taliban, and had to relent to the demands of the hijackers.
But if fault can’t be imputed to India for their refusal to engage with the Taliban back then – only three countries in the world did – this time the voice hankering for talks came from the pulpit itself. Not just the United States, but Russia, China, the United Kingdom and other stakeholders encouraged the Indians to follow their lead and open back channels to bring about a political settlement in Kabul. According to former Indian ambassador Vivek Katju, time to manifest ties with the Taliban had been ripe since 2017. The intransigence of the Indian establishment to engage with ‘ISI’s wholly owned subsidiary’ is as inexplicable as it is ignorant.
This approach has levied a double toll on Indian foreign policy in the greater region. At the micro level, it is an epic failure to take stock of, and possibly exploit the crevices that exist in this very complicated situation. As organized as they might appear, the Taliban today operate under different nodes of power, each with their own local alliances, constraints and ideological nuances. The entanglement with Pakistan is further punctuated by the ambivalent relationship they have with Pakistani Pashtuns, non-Pashtuns, various non-state actors and, at times, the Durand Line itself.
To imagine them as exclusively militant, not least a puppet monolith of a neighbouring country, is quite simply to not understand Afghanistan outside a Pakistan-phobic worldview.
At the macro level, India is reduced to a silent non-participant in the ambitious Chinese project of coalescing countries on its western side amongst themselves, from South to Central Asia and Turkey via Afghanistan, as well as with China’s western provinces. Those links also bypass India across its south and east through Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and onwards to the Strait of Malacca, thereby perfectly encircling what could end up being a regional pariah state.
A dispassionate analysis of the last decade catapults Doha as an inflection point. In the buildup to Doha, the United States orchestrated the release of 5000 Taliban prisoners even before their leadership arrived at the table. Following Doha, the United States, China and Russia announced their willingness to do business with an Afghan government with Taliban representation. For all the obvious telltale signs about Doha and what it signaled, Indian strategists are still in a bit of a funk. As one of their own, former RAW chief A. S. Dulat casually mused, they just don’t have the hang of it. The only lucid explanation points to their inability to see the Taliban without Pakistan or Pakistan without the Taliban.
India’s benighted Afghan policy and its obduracy to insulate itself from what could be Afghanistan’s most articulate political force today is a test botched by an aspirant global power. But ‘never’ has a certain elasticity in foreign policy. For India to carve out a role in the post-Taliban Afghanistan, it needs to revisit not just key relationships but the entire architecture of its security outlook. If not, they can settle for enjoying the final views passing out of Khyber.
