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3 India
left standing in Afghan musical
chairs By Peter Lee
Think of Afghanistan policy as a game of
musical chairs. When the United States this month
killed Osama bin Laden, it stopped the music.
Now everybody's scrambling to make sure
they have a seat.
Pakistan, despite its
myriad failures as a partner in the "war against
terror" is guaranteed a seat. It has managed to
establish itself as an unavoidable interlocutor in
negotiations with the Taliban. Thanks to signature
American diplomatic clumsiness, Pakistan will also
be reserving a chair for America's main strategic
competitor in Asia - China.
As the
American orchestra is packing up, its favored
South Asian
partner, India, is nervously
trying to squeeze its way onto a chair.
The Barack Obama administration is
extremely anxious to declare victory and shed
responsibility for the Afghanistan mess.
Now that the al-Qaeda monster has been
slain, the US has an excuse to pursue
reconciliation with the Taliban and crank back its
faltering and expensive counter-insurgency
operations. Unfortunately, the United States
clings to the conflicting goal of ensuring the
survival of a moderate, multi-ethnic regime in
Kabul. And that dream has poisoned its relations
with Pakistan.
When the whole sorry
history of the Afghan adventure is written, a
special chapter must be reserved for the
combination of delusion and arrogance that guided
US relations with Pakistan. When former US deputy
secretary of state Richard Armitage conveyed the
George W Bush administration's threat to bomb
Pakistan back into the Stone Age if it didn't
assist in the overthrow of the Taliban regime, he
was simply displaying understandable American
arrogance.
America's image of hyperpower
impunity had taken a hit on 9/11, and destruction
of a third-world regime in Afghanistan was a
suitable demonstration of the maxim that America
dishes it out ... it doesn't take it in.
When the Bush and Obama administrations
decided it was a laudable and feasible goal to
deny Afghanistan as a terrorist haven by
establishing a moderate, pro-Western regime in
Kabul, that was delusion.
By conflating
al-Qaeda terrorists and Taliban militants, the
United States did more than commit itself to a
grinding, unwinnable war in Central Asia. It
forced Pakistan to transform a nagging, peripheral
security problem in its western borderlands ...
into a grinding, unwinnable war in Central Asia.
As an added bonus, Pakistan was obliged to wage
civil war on its own people, with the unwelcome
assistance of US cross-border raids and drone
attacks.
Now Pakistan's economy is in a
shambles, its government in the hands of President
Asif Ali Zardari, a generally derided and
incompetent American stooge, and its civil society
increasingly riven by sectarian tensions. In
matters of domestic security, Pakistan suffers
around 2,500 to 3,000 civilian and security force
fatalities a year from terrorist attacks -
basically, a slow-motion 9/11 ever 15 months or
so.
Heckuva job, Uncle Sam.
From
the perspective of many who run things in
Pakistan, the US war in Afghanistan is the problem
and a Taliban victory - either military or
political - is the solution.
No surprise
that Pakistan hatred of the United States is
visceral and widespread. No wonder that members of
Pakistan's security establishment were willing to
provide covert aid to the Afghan Taliban and
perhaps even harbor Bin Laden.
And no
wonder that, as America contemplates the
implications of Bin Laden's long-term residence in
the heart of Pakistan and calls to disengage the
US from the bloody and expensive Afghan tar baby
mount, its resentment at this unwilling and
seemingly worthless ally is boiling over.
It is a fury, by the way, that is shared
by Pakistan's embattled advocates of democracy and
civil society, who view the reckless and cynical
Afghan adventurism promoted by the entrenched
military and security elite as a national
disaster.
The Indian press have reported
Pakistani discomfiture over the Bin Laden raid -
and American threats to cut off aid as retaliation
for Pakistani shortcomings - with ill-disguised
glee.
Times of India Washington
correspondent Chidanand Rajghatta, who apparently
learned how to mix editorializing with reportage
while studying Mass Communications at Bangalore,
detailed Pakistan's woes:
Senator [John] Kerry, who has
virtually become the Obama administration's
special envoy for Pakistan, fended off pressure
from his Hill colleagues to curtain [sic] aid to
a perfidious and dysfunctional ally ...
Pakistan is said to be the third-largest
recipient of US aid worldwide after Afghanistan
and Israel, taking in more US$20 billion since
9/11. Some of that money is in the form of
reimbursement under a head called Coalition
Support Fund (CSF) for expenses it incurred in
the "war on terror", but that account is now
bedeviled by charges that Pakistan faked or
inflated its bills, causing the US to reject
nearly 40% of the claims in 2010.
Pakistan's embrace of China while living
on US dole and its threat to shoot down American
drones with US supplied F-16s has also created a
disquiet in Washington that the country's
supporters like Kerry are finding hard to
counter. [1]
If American Afghan policy
was a mixture of delusion and arrogance, Indian
policy was a matter of simple delusion.
India yielded to the temptation to meddle
in Afghanistan and discomfit Pakistan.
One
does not have to buy into the hysteria and
calculated paranoia of Pakistan's security
apparatus about India's Research and Analysis Wing
spreading its tentacles inside Afghanistan to see
that India was trying to gain a cheap and easy
geostrategic victory in Afghanistan by allying
itself with the anti-Taliban, anti-Pakistan power
propped up in Kabul by US arms and money.
The Afghan intervention was not simply a
matter of Indian support for a regime that denied
"strategic depth" to a Pakistani security
establishment that probably didn't deserve it. By
promoting the anti-terrorism narrative in
Afghanistan and making it the basis of its
dealings with Pakistan, India helped enable the
aggressive, cross-border counter-insurgency
strategy that pushed the Taliban puss deeper into
deeper into the wounds of Pakistan's wounded
society.
Small wonder if the Pakistani
security forces decided to return the favor by
unleashing the Lashkar-e-Toiba to inflict the
bloody Mumbai horror of August 2008.
India
compounded its Afghanistan woes by turning its
back on President Hamid Karzai when the United
States tried to remove the Afghan leader and
replace him with somebody they considered more
capable, honest and responsive.
As a
result, the fundamentally pro-Indian Karzai - who
didn't want to be pushed out of office by the
Americans or hung from a lamppost a la former
Afghan ruler Mohammad Najibullah by the Taliban -
threw in his lot with Pakistan and its stubborn,
decade-long effort to shoehorn the Taliban back
into the Kabul government.
This leaves
India with a distinct shortage of interested
interlocutors and very little leverage in
Afghanistan. Outlook India took a close and
clear-eyed look at India's precarious position in
Afghanistan:
"There's no question of retreating
from Afghanistan," says a senior Indian
diplomat. Such brave words are perhaps for
public consumption, for there are tell-tale
signs of India scaling down its presence here.
Nearly 50% of Indian personnel working on
various projects in Afghanistan have been sent
home.
The Indira Gandhi Institute of
Child Health in Kabul - the only children's
hospital in the country - is without an Indian
doctor; any medical guidance from New Delhi is
rendered through teleconferencing. And though
four other medical missions are working now,
India isn't taking on any new projects, content
to complete the two on hand - the Salma dam and
construction of the Afghan Parliament - of the
$1.3-billion worth of Indian projects initiated
here.
The SEWA (Self-Employed Women's
Association) scheme, hugely popular as it
empowered Afghan women, has been put on hold;
Indian-run vocational courses have been
suspended; and the training of Afghan civilian
personnel, whether in government or civil
society, will only be imparted in India
now.
The article also described the
marginalization of India in Afghan politics, at
least that quadrant of Afghan politics where the
Indian presence would be most welcome: among
anti-Pakistan and anti-Iranian Pashtuns, Tajiks
and the liberal cosmopolitans who nervously
inhabit Kabul:
There are many here who blame India
for its plight. They say India was not assertive
about its presence here, thus failing to win the
confidence of those who, hemmed in between Iran
and Pakistan, considered it a natural ally. Says
Moridian Dawood, advisor to the Afghan foreign
minister, "India seems apologetic about its
presence. It's a regional player and must behave
like one, instead of insisting on a benign
presence with a penchant for staying in the
background."
Many in the Afghan
establishment echo Dawood's view, pointing out
that even Karzai had told Indian officials that
since New Delhi didn't have the stomach to back
him in the face of US opposition, he had no
choice but to throw his lot with Pakistan. Not
only Karzai, many liberal Pashtuns complain that
India didn't openly back them, preferring to
cultivate its old friends in the erstwhile
Northern Alliance. No doubt, India tried to
correct this perception, locating many projects
in the Pashtun-dominated provinces rather than
at places where ethic minority groups are in a
majority. But this has not quite earned it
enough dividends.
India's claims to
relevance in Afghanistan separate from the Western
military presence appear to rely on exaggerated
ideas of what soft power can accomplish in a war
zone.
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