The abrupt closure of the Taliban’s Qatar office and the Karzai government’s edginess over the whole fiasco since the opening ceremony of the office, the flag the name, and the blame game must have brought some sigh of relief in the power quarters of New Delhi over some hot chai in monsoon.
Last week, India extended its support to the Afghanistan's reconciliation process with the Taliban, but warned that the process must not undermine the legitimacy of the Karzai government and should be within the internationally accepted "red lines."
This shift in Indian policy came after the visit of US Secretary of State John Kerry to Delhi. However, while India did support the peace talks in Doha, it also made it clear that the differences that cropped up between Kabul and Washington regarding the Doha talks, New Delhi’s sympathy rests with Karzai.
To make its position clear, Delhi expounded the imperative need of an inclusive ‘Afghan-led, Afghan-owned’ peace process and stressed on the “red line” that the international community prescribed as the basis for any reconciliation with the Taliban should not be undermined. Namely, the Taliban has to end their long-standing relationship with the al-Qaeda, bidding farewell to arms, violence and respecting the Afghan constitution and, of course, abandoning the past practices of human rights abuse. In the nutshell, India does not want any grey zone to remain in Afghan regime post 2014 to be exploited for non-state violence against India.
This Indian position could be understood by India’s past experiences with the Taliban regime, it was hardly felicitous. Pre-2001 era Afghanistan, during Taliban regime, not only became a breeding ground for any number of Pakistan-based terrorist organizations to inflict non-state violence in India, but also became the site of the infamous hijacking of IC-814 and its humiliating spectacle.
While New Delhi agreed to Kerry’s assurances regarding the India’s legitimate security concerns, is still far from certain that the Taliban is anywhere near bidding farewell to violence and morphing into a peaceful political actor willing to share power under the current Afghan constitution. Nor does New Delhi share the enthusiasm voiced by Washington that there is a genuine shift in the Islamabad’s policy. Knitted into all this is the profound concern in India regarding national security interests, which might be threatened if the US strikes a deal with the Taliban in self-interest that might overlook its genuine security concerns.
It can be argued that India has made a virtue out of inevitability by accommodating the American approach ensuring that no serious contradictions arise with Obama administration. New Delhi stayed modest about projecting its capacity to influence the current peace process, especially given that Washington recognizes Islamabad as the “core actor.”
India realized that despite the forging and evolution of India’s strategic partnership with the United States, the George W. Bush and Obama administration, while in the thrall of yet another military dictator in Pakistan, followed by the civilian government, pursued to keep India at an arm’s length from Kabul. Islamabad’s and indeed, Rawalpindi’s bromides in regard to the “strategic depth” and “Indian encirclement” forced Washington to keep New Delhi away from having any strategic role in the Afghanistan.
Indians by their past experiences knows that Americans have paid scant heed to India’s concerns and periodic calls for its inclusion in various diplomatic discussions on future of Kabul. As a consequence, all India could do was to provide developmental assistance to Kabul. Though New Delhi kept periodically grumbling about its role being confined to reconstruction and developmental assistance while being deprived of a seat at the diplomatic high table, for the most part, it went along with these arrangements and made itself closer to the Karzai administration to secure its interests.
In his visit to India, Kerry made it clear that the US sees a very limited political role for New Delhi in the Afghan transition as such, restricted to providing “technical assistance” to Kabul to hold the presidential election due in coming April, and then Kerry hastily clarified, “Obviously, India is not going to interfere” in the forthcoming election leading to a political transition in Afghanistan.
Simply put, Kerry proposed that “whatever India can do in its close alliance with President Karzai” should be confined to persuading him to free the presidential palace for smooth transition of power by conducting a credible election in April.
This may have come as a bitter pill for the New Delhi policymakers who aspire a greater role for New Delhi in the Afghan endgame. What is evident from Kerry’s talks in New Delhi is that while the US will do what is realistically possible to pay heed to India’s legitimate security concerns, it will not allow India to play any political role in Qatar or Afghanistan in league with the “core players”, as Washington recently identified, namely, Kabul, Doha and Islamabad.
All India can do is to politically maneuver a position for itself, where it can keep enough influence on Kabul to ensure that a neo-Taliban regime does not come back to the fore in a post-2014 Afghanistan, it needs to create this role, and now. This security concerns are legitimate given that, even US intelligence officials, in public testimony before Congress, revealed that the Taliban attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in 2008 had involved the support of Pakistan’s secret services Inter-Services Intelligence and also, recently, the infiltration by militants on India-Pakistan Line of Control has started again.
Given the messy situation India was due to possible Taliban talks, it could not have wished for a better scenario than the derailed Doha talks and the fiasco it created. New Delhi can use this vacuum in the peace process to reposition itself in Kabul to protect its interests, if not Washington. The jolt of fear the flag and name plaque in Doha gave to Karzai administrations and the rise of anti-Pakistan sentiments in Kabul should be more than enough for New Delhi to rekindle its old affairs with the anti-Taliban power actors of Northern Alliance groups and pro-Karzai players in Kabul to protect India’s security interest.
With the time ticking for the drawdown and with no concrete solution in regard to the Taliban the best possible option for the current Afghanistan administration is to strengthen its own security forces, modern weaponry and to train Afghan troops. Now this gives New Delhi an edge given the fact that some of these purposes are already being ably served by India. In 2011, New Delhi and Kabul inked a strategic agreement that authorized Indian army to increase training of Afghan security forces that had begun in 2007. Suggestively, at the very moment Washington was acknowledging the gravity with which it’s considering the drawdown, a delegation of Indian civilian and military officials was in Kabul to discuss training programs. An Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman acknowledged, “the training of the Afghan army in India is on-going, this training is effective in increasing the capacities of the forces.”
At any rate, India’s capacity to influence the reconciliation process with the Taliban is very limited. At best it can only appeal to the US’ goodwill. Or use its trump card in Afghanistan, the wonderful equation with Karzai, but then, the US’s principal objective in the coming ten-month period is to ensure that the Afghan leader denounces his job and walks into the sunset, so that a fresh start is possible in Kabul. As for the erstwhile Northern Alliance groups, they no longer eat out of Indian hands and have dealings with other benefactors, including the US and Pakistan.
In this whole Afghan debacle India is poised to play a political role in the Kabul’s efforts to become a stable, democratic and pluralistic state, but then is India ready for the substantial burden that it will bring? Is New Delhi ready to raise its stake in Afghanistan, can it provide advance weaponry to Karzai administrations, which India has formally rejected? If the Obama administration neglects the Indian security concerns in its exit strategy, will it go back to its erstwhile ally Russia, to make sure that Kabul does not fall back into Taliban’s clutch? If the rumours are true that Karzai might not go for the election until 2015, will India try to break a deal between Karzai and Putin, given that Moscow had offered help under the Collective Security Treaty Organization, assuming that Washington will have limited influence on Kabul’s policies post 2014? With the general elections due next year in India, and growing speculation about the rise of right-wing nationalist party to power, the story will truly unfold in 2014 when the new government will take on New Delhi, and Kabul will be on its own.
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