We are digging tube wells in six provinces, running sanitation projects and medical missions, and working on lighting up a hundred villages using solar energy. India has also given at least three Airbus planes to Afghanistan’s fledgling national airline, Ariana. Several thousand Indians are engaged in development work. We are currently engaged in the construction of the Salma Dam across the Hari Rud river in Herat, and we are finishing the Afghan Parliament building, a visible and evocative symbol of democracy and of India’s desire to see the Afghan people determine their own political destiny. During his May 2011 visit to Afghanistan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced additional assistance of $500 million, over and above India’s existing commitments, which are now expected to cross the $2 billion mark.
In all this, our endeavour is to help Afghanistan stand on its own feet. We have no other agenda there, other than an acknowledgement that stability and pluralism in Afghanistan and its integration into the regional ecosystem are also fundamentally in our national interest. As an Indian I have no difficulty with the proposition that Afghanistan should not be seen as a battleground for competing spheres of influence. India and Afghanistan, of course, share a strategic and development partnership, based on millennia-old historical, cultural and economic ties. We have an abiding interest in the stability of Afghanistan, in ensuring social and economic progress for its people, and getting them on the track of self-sustaining growth, and enabling them to take their own decisions without outside interference. And we have paid a serious price for our efforts, in lives lost to terrorist action, including in two assaults on the Indian embassy in Kabul and on a residence occupied by Indian development workers, as well as the kidnapping and killing of road-building crews and construction personnel. But we have persisted.
The myriad problems that confront the country can only be resolved in a peaceful environment, devoid of violence and terror. The international community needs to come together to overcome this grave challenge. A sense of defeatism has been pervading some sections of international opinion. New Delhi feels that needs to be guarded against, because it runs the risk of encouraging insurgent groups into thinking they might actually triumph. India has argued, therefore, that Afghanistan needs a long-term commitment, even while remaining mindful of the challenges. The Afghan people have displayed great courage and resilience, and a survival instinct even against the greatest odds. The international community must do its utmost to support them.
Given the turbulence of the past eight years and the recent dramatic decline in security, there is need for an intensified focus on security, governance and development by the Afghan government, and here the international community should do what it can to assist. Failure in Afghanistan’s stabilization will entail a heavy cost for both the Afghan people and the region at large, including for Pakistan whose active current engagement in destabilizing the country could turn out to prove highly counterproductive.
While the Afghan government should spell out its priorities, the international community should come forward to provide the resources for fulfilling them. The Afghan leadership has itself stressed the need for a strong and genuine effort to improve governance, remove corruption and focus on development, especially in agriculture, rural development and infrastructure, with a shift in focus from the central to the provincial and district levels. All stakeholders now agree on the need for greater ‘Afghanisation’ of the development process.
The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) should be enlarged and developed in a professional manner, at a much faster pace. The ANSF should be provided appropriate resources, combat equipment and training. India is prepared to play its part, while mindful that any involvement in military matters in Afghanistan might be a neuralgic issue for Islamabad — a major reason for India’s self-restraint in confining its efforts in Afghanistan to development, while other countries handle security. India is not a member of the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a largely NATO operation to which New Delhi was not invited to contribute, given Pakistani sensitivities about any possible Indian military presence in Afghanistan. (I joked at the time that we were less interested in ISAF than in ‘INSAF’ or justice, which we wanted to prevail in Kabul.)
President Obama’s announcement of a significant drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan, and an increasing emphasis on reconciliation with the Taliban, has obviously been studied attentively in New Delhi. It is hardly a secret that New Delhi sees the foreign military presence as indispensable in promoting political stability and economic reconstruction in Afghanistan. Without the security provided by a serious troop presence, the kind of developmental activities in which India is engaged would become impossible.
But no one in New Delhi really expects American forces to disappear overnight from Afghanistan, despite bin Laden’s elimination. The withdrawal plan began with the departure of only 10,000 troops by the end of 2011. Later, when winter set in (traditionally the season when military activity declines), Washington withdrew another 5000, and when the snows melt and the US election season starts hotting up, Obama says he intends to bring an additional 22,000 of the ‘surge’ troops home by this September. Even if he does that — a decision that will surely have to take into account the ground realities at that time — it will still leave 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan, or twice the number deployed there when he became president. The plan is for NATO forces to shift to a less proactive role next year, acting principally in support of Afghan forces, with combat operations winding down in the course of 2014. That would mark the official ‘withdrawal date’.
After that point, a residual American counterterrorism force would still remain in Afghanistan. Bases are being fortified to house US forces beyond 2014. Several NATO allies hope to be home by then, but a residual ISAF is very much on the cards. After all, the reason for the original US intervention was that Afghanistan should not again become a safe haven for the next bin Laden. Indications are that the United States will retain some 20,000 troops in Afghanistan, even in the most modest scenario.
Indians have every reason to be relieved. India realizes that an Afghanistan without ISAF is a land that will be prey to the machinations of Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence, which had created, financed, officered and directed the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s. This would be a proven security threat to India: the Taliban regime of the day, functioning as a wholly owned subsidiary of the ISI, had been complicit in the hijacking of an Indian airliner in 1999, resulting in the release (in Kandahar) of three diehard terrorists from Indian custody, one of whom went on to kidnap and kill the American reporter Daniel Pearl.
In this context, America’s interest in reconciliation with the Taliban has been studied in New Delhi with some concern. After rejecting this for some time (on the not-unreasonable grounds that there can be no such thing as a good terrorist), New Delhi has come around to accepting dialogue with those Taliban elements who are prepared to renounce violence. President Obama speaks of dealing with those who agree to break with Al Qaeda, abandon violence and abide by the Afghan Constitution, categories India would have no difficulty with. But New Delhi is wary of those who, under Pakistani tutelage, might pretend to be reborn constitutionalists, but seize the first opportunity after an American withdrawal to devour the regime that compromises with them.
This is why New Delhi stresses the importance of improving the capacity of the Afghan government to fight and overcome terrorism; if Kabul’s sinews are not strengthened, it will again be vulnerable to an extremist takeover. The role of Pakistan — which has made no secret of its desire to control the government in Kabul in order to enjoy ‘strategic depth’ for its overambitious military — remains of particular concern. India shares the United States’ commitment to what Obama, in December 2011, had described as the ‘long-term security and development of the Afghan people’. But for New Delhi, any process of reconciliation should be Afghan led, as well as inclusive and transparent. India fully supports the ‘red lines’ laid down by the Afghan government in its London and Kabul communiqués, which it feels Kabul should not be forced to cross.