India, Pakistan and the Battle for Afghanistan

[desiman]

India, Pakistan and the Battle for Afghanistan

The road to success for President Obama's Afghanistan strategy runs through India, goes an increasingly familiar refrain. That's because reversing the Taliban's momentum requires getting rid of the movement's sanctuary in Pakistan, where the insurgent leadership is known to be based in and around the city of Quetta. But while Pakistan is aggressively tackling its domestic Taliban, it has consistently declined to act against Afghan Taliban groups based on its soil — because it sees the Afghan Taliban as a useful counterweight to what it believes is the dominant influence in today's Afghanistan of Pakistan's arch-enemy, India. Unless India can be persuaded to take steps to ease tensions with Pakistan, some suggest, Pakistan will not be willing to shut down the Afghan Taliban.

Needless to say, that argument is not exactly conventional wisdom in New Delhi.

Indian influence has expanded after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and toppled the Taliban — it had been a longtime supporter of the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban coalition that dominated the Karzai government, and it poured hundreds of millions of dollars of aid into supporting the new regime. That's left many in Pakistan raising the specter of Indian encirclement — a concern noted by U.S. General Stanley McChrystal in September, when he said that "increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions." Some U.S. pundits have even called for India to scale back its operations in order to appease the Pakistanis.

Indian officials have little time for such reasoning. Events northwest of the Khyber Pass have had a central place in the strategic calculations of generations of rulers in Delhi, dating back to the imperial Mughals and the colonial British. India's ties with Kabul had lapsed during the bloody civil war that saw the Pakistani-backed Taliban rise to power in 1996, turning Afghanistan into a hotbed of extremism, some of it directed against India. In 1999, an Indian passenger airliner was hijacked by Pakistani nationals and flown to Afghanistan — negotiating for the release of the hostages, India was forced to free three Islamist militants, one of whom was later implicated in the killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The Taliban also forged links with fundamentalist groups waging war on India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. "The consequences of that vacuum where Pakistan stepped in and meddled were horrendous for India," says Harsh Pant, professor of defence studies at King's College London. "It's a lesson no one in India is in the mood to learn again."

That's why India has pumped over $1.2 billion in development aid to the Karzai government, funding infrastructure projects ranging from highways to hydroelectric dams to a 5,000-ton cold storage facility for fruit merchants in Kandahar. India is building schools and hospitals, as well as flying hundreds of Afghan medical students to train in Indian colleges, because its own experience of the last period of Taliban rule has given it a vested interest in preventing a recurrence.


The popularity of Bollywood music and Indian soap operas also hints at India's significant cultural influence in Afghanistan, which is buttressed by lasting bonds with Afghanistan's political elite. Afghan President Hamid Karzai went to university in India, while his electoral opponent, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, belongs to the old Indian-backed Northern Alliance. Kabul and New Delhi also share a common distrust of Islamabad, seeing the 1996 Taliban takeover as having been enabled by Pakistan's military intelligence wing.

But in the India-Pakistan relationship, each side often thinks itself the victim of the other's machinations, and Pakistan's generals view India's growing influence in Afghanistan as motivated by an intent to destabilize Pakistan. In recent months, officials in Islamabad have claimed that India's consulates in the Afghan cities of Kandahar and Jalalabad have been orchestrating terrorist activity in Pakistan, particularly in the vast, restive province of Baluchistan. India vehemently rejects such claims, for which no evidence has been offered in public. During her trip to Pakistan last month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also dismissed the notion that India was trying to foment trouble in Pakistan. "The Pakistani fears are completely imaginary," says Bahukutumbi Raman, a former top-ranking Indian intelligence official and prominent strategic analyst.

The problem for Washington, at least according to Raman and other Indian analysts, is that regardless of their validity, Pakistan's fears translate into inaction when it comes to tackling the Afghan Taliban on its soil. "[The Afghan Taliban] are important to the Pakistanis. They give them a strategic depth," says Raman. Commodore Uday Bhaskar, director of the National Maritime Foundation, a think-tank attached to the Indian navy, says the Pakistani military is still struggling to accept a strategic universe in which India is no longer its most dangerous enemy. "You get the sense that if [India] does not loom large as a threat, then the Pakistani military loses much of its raison d'etre as an institution," says Bhaskar.


Indian analysts fear tensions could be exacerbated by President Obama's declaration that the U.S. will begin to draw down 18 months after surging some 30,000 more American troops into Afghanistan. "It makes political sense for Obama, but the decision has really set the cat amongst the pigeons in the region," says Bhaskar. "Everyone is rattled." The prospect that the U.S. will soon depart Afghanistan makes it even less likely that Pakistan will want to crack down on a group that could still be a strategic asset in an uncertain situation.
India, for its part, is unlikely to change its own strategy in Afghanistan. It is developing a port at Chabahar in Iran, which could become a key point of entry for Indian goods and materiel into Afghanistan because Pakistan refuses India land transit rights to the Afghan border. India also runs an air base at Farkhor in Tajikistan on Afghanistan's northeastern border — a facility it secured with Russian support. Neither Moscow nor Tehran want to see the Taliban return to power, and a growing consensus between Russia, Iran and India — all traditional backers of the Northern Alliance — could work to prevent that in the months and years to come. "India may have to hedge its bets with these regional partners," says Harsh Pant. "When America leaves Afghanistan, they may be the ones left to deal with the mess."

India, Pakistan and the Battle for Afghanistan - TIME

 

[Hulk]

Wish all the best to Afghanistan and I wish soon they will be a managed nation. Its sincere effort from USA that is beginning to show up.

 

[desiman]

Afghanistan: The Pakistan Problem

The news from Pakistan that two more Taliban commanders have been arrested in the aftermath of Mullah Baradar’s capture in Karachi has been promptly hailed by the New York Times as yet another sign of a “turning point” in Pakistani cooperation with the U.S., and as the “best possible news for Obama and NATO” by the ever-sanguine Obama acolytes at the Brookings Institution cited by the paper. Maybe so, but most likely not. It is not difficult to understand why. Pakistani policies vis-à-vis the U.S. and the campaign against the Taliban are driven mostly by the military’s perceptions of its strategic and tactical interest rather than any abstract loyalty to its putative American ally. The key determinant here is the basic incompatibility between the two players’ long-term objectives in Afghanistan. The U.S. desires an independent and democratic Afghanistan strong enough to prevent its territory from becoming again a breeding ground of international terrorism; Islamabad, on the other hand, would prefer a client state it can easily control. At the same time, Pakistan is economically dependent on the United States and given to prevarications and dissembling rather than open disagreement with its patron.

Thus, for seven long years, Pres. Pervez Musharraf claimed staunch support for Washington’s anti-terrorist policies while doing very little to contain the Taliban and other terrorist groups operating at will in the country.

This duality of Pakistani policies has continued to the present day, with the only positive difference being the growing realization of the leadership that the Pakistani Taliban now presents a national-security threat to Pakistan itself. And so the ISI decision to let Americans interrogate the captured mullahs is certainly a positive sign, but the preceding hostile campaign by the military against the Kerry-Lugar bill on non-military aid is the exact opposite. The army’s successful offensive against the Taliban in Swat and South Waziristan was a significant step forward; but its refusal to extend it to Northern Waziristan and its Taliban sanctuaries was a clear setback for the Afghan campaign. And it is very unlikely that we’ll get “the best possible news” until Islamabad moves to deny the Taliban its sanctuaries in Baluchistan and does its best to stop the river of opium that funds the Taliban flowing into Pakistan, neither one of which it has even remotely tried to do so far. Washington can help push them in that direction by informing friend and foe alike that we’ll not leave Afghanistan before the job is done — and misguided talk about quitting at a date certain is just that, even if it comes from high places.

— Alex Alexiev is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

Afghanistan: The Pakistan Problem - Alex Alexiev - The Corner on National Review Online

 

[desiman]

India: Afghanistan's influential ally


Indians have been targeted in Afghanistan before

India believes its embassy was the target of a bomb attack in the Afghan capital, Kabul. If confirmed, it would be the second attack on the embassy in just over a year. The BBC's Soutik Biswas examines why India, one of Afghanistan's closest allies, might be chosen as a target.
A day before the explosion in Kabul, India hosted an international meeting in the capital, Delhi.
The subject, ironically, was: "Peace and stability in Afghanistan, the way ahead."
But it also pointed to India's growing clout in Afghanistan - it appears to be more than the "soft power" which India's junior foreign minister Shashi Tharoor had once described as the country's "greatest asset" in Afghanistan.
After the fall of the Taliban in 2001 India moved quickly to regain its strategic depth in Afghanistan.
It opened two new consulates in Herat and Mazhar-e-Sharif and reopened two others in Kandahar and Jalalabad which had been shut since 1979.
Leading donor

India also became one of Kabul's leading donors - it has pledged to spend $1.2bn on helping rebuild the country's shattered infrastructure, making it the sixth largest bilateral donor.
Funds have been committed for education, health, power and telecommunications. There has also been money in the form of food aid and help to strengthen governance.
India is building the country's new parliament building, erecting power transmission lines in the north, and building more than 200km (125 miles) of roads.
It is digging tube wells in six provinces, running sanitation projects and medical missions, and working on lighting up 100 villages using solar energy. It is also building a dam and handing out scholarships to young Afghan students.
India has also given at least three Airbus planes to Afghanistan's ailing national airline. Several thousand Indians are engaged in development work.

Work on the projects has also moved briskly.
In January, India completed building the 218km Zaranj-Delaram highway in south-west Afghanistan near the Iranian border.
In May, an India-made power transmission line to Kabul and a sub-station were opened, bringing 24-hour electricity to the capital for the first time in 17 years.

The new parliament building in Kabul and a new dam in Herat should be ready by next year.
'High profile'
Bilateral trade has grown rapidly, reaching $358m in 2007-2008.
"India's reconstruction strategy was designed to win over every sector of Afghan society, to give India a high profile with Afghans, gain the maximum political advantage and, of course, undercut Pakistani influence," says analyst Ahmed Rashid.

Pakistan has had misgivings about increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan since the Taliban were ousted.
"Afghanistan has been a prize that Pakistan and India have fought over directly and indirectly for decades," wrote analyst Robert D Kaplan.
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf openly accused Afghan President Hamid Karzai of kow-towing to India. Islamabad has also said the Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad were funnelling arms and money to insurgents in Pakistan's troubled Balochistan region.

India is sponsoring vocational training of Afghan nationals
All this once provoked Mr Karzai, who went to university in India, to say: "If Pakistan is worried about the role of India, let me assure [you], I have been very specific in telling the Indians that they cannot use Afghan soil for acts of aggression against another country."
Analysts say Pakistan believes its influence is declining in post-war Afghanistan.
"India's success in Afghanistan stirred up a hornets' nest in Islamabad which came to believe that India was 'taking over Afghanistan'," says Ahmed Rashid in his book Descent Into Chaos.
Changing fortunes
Local Taliban are blamed for attacking and kidnapping Indians in the country.
There have been explosions and grenade attacks on the Indian consulates in Herat and Jalalabad.
In January 2008, two Indian and 11 Afghan security personnel were killed and several injured in an attack on the Zaranj-Delaram road.
In November 2005, a driver with India's state-run Border Roads Organisation was abducted and killed by the Taliban while working on the road.
There have been other attacks on Indians too.
In 2003, an Indian national working for a construction company was killed by unknown attackers in Kabul's Taimani district.
In 2006, an Indian telecommunications engineer was abducted and killed in the southern province of Zabul.
India's fortunes in Afghanistan have swung back and forth for much of the past two decades
A staunch ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, India supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
This decision made India hugely unpopular among Afghans.

President Musharraf had accused Afghanistan of kow-towing to India
A decade later, it continued to back the Communist-regime of President Najibullah, while Pakistan threw its entire support behind the ethnic Pashtun mujahideen warlords, particularly the Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who were fighting Soviet troops.
So when the Taliban swept to power and put an end to a bloody civil conflict among warlords, India was left without any influence in the country.

It ended up backing the Northern Alliance, which controlled territory north of the Shomali plains near Kabul.

Pakistan, on the other hand, backed and recognised the pariah Taleban regime and gained further strategic depth in the region.
Afghanistan's interior ministry said the 2008 attack on the Indian embassy was carried out "in co-ordination and consultation with an active intelligence service in the region".
It was clearly alluding to Pakistani agents, who have been blamed for a number of attacks in Afghanistan.

We may never know precisely who carried out the attacks.
But the bombing points to the "Great Game" still being played out between neighbours seeking to gain influence in Afghanistan.

 

[desiman]

Mac Deford: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India: Where Lies Our National Interest?

by Thomas McAdams Deford

This year's Camden Conference, entitled "Crossroads of Conflict," might well have been called "Crossroads of Confusion."

Enlightening it was - it's hard to imagine a better, more balanced collection of experts giving their solidly based, from-the-ground, candid views. There were no punches pulled. But if you went into it hoping to find a clear solution to the turmoil surrounding Afghanistan, you came out of it empty-handed; and if you had arrived thinking you knew the answer - well, one of the speakers might have reinforced your views, but several others would have torpedoed them.

The best way to illustrate the general lack of consensus is to note that Friday, opening day for the conference, the Washington Post and the New York Times had two entirely different takes on the recent seizure of the Afghan Taliban's second-in-command, Abdul Ghani Baradar: "US-Pakistan Cooperation," the Post trumpeted, resulted in his capture. The Times' sources led down a different path: "In Pakistan Raid, Taliban Chief was an Extra Prize" - it was a nice accident.

Meanwhile, the keynote speaker - and one of the world's great experts on the Taliban, Ahmed Rashid - suggested that what was really behind Pakistan's capture of Baradar was that Afghan President Karzai, with American knowledge but without Pakistani involvement, had been negotiating with Baradar in an effort at reconciliation with key Taliban leaders. When the Pakistanis found out what was going on, they grabbed Baradar, whose whereabouts in Karachi they had long known, to nip this peace effort in the bud; not that the Pakistanis are necessarily against negotiations, but they insist on being a major player.

If there's disagreement about the meaning, or even cause, of day-to-day events, getting a grasp on the political interests, relative strengths, and ultimate bottom lines of the various state and non-state players is just that much more problematic; getting agreement on how to deal with them, nearly impossible.

The conference illustrated up close and repeatedly that US foreign policy is a nuanced, tricky, highly sophisticated business, a constant struggle between competing US interests, what-if scenarios, and political realities at home. As one audience member commented during a break, referring to the speakers, "We have such incredibly talented, intelligent individuals handling our foreign policy. How come we don't get better results?" One obvious reason of course is the increased complexity of a rapidly shifting, globalized world.

In addition to Rashid, the speakers included two former ambassadors in the area; an anthropologist who has focused on Afghanistan for nearly 40 years; a Pakistani cultural historian; the acting president of the American University in Kabul; and defense and intelligence analysts who have devoted their careers to the area.

A question that snaked its way through the entire conference, regardless of the specific focus of an individual speaker, was: Is the current counterinsurgency strategy, outlined last summer by Gen. McChrystal and given Obama's stamp of approval in the late fall, the correct one?

An even more fundamental question loomed over the proceedings: Is Afghanistan, and hence the outcome of this war, vital to our national security interest? In short, why are we there, and must we stay?

The argument, for those who answered the necessity of our role affirmatively, came down to Pakistan. Pakistan, the argument goes, has nuclear weapons. Islamist extremism has grown significantly in recent years (there are now, for example, about 20,000 Islamic madrassas teaching a generally fundamentalist Islam). Were Pakistan to become a failed state or sufficiently destabilized that extremist elements could have access to its nuclear arsenal, the terrorist threat to the West, not to mention India, would be dangerously magnified.

But, the opposing argument runs, where exactly does Afghanistan fit into this equation? Pakistan, as a counter to Indian influence in Kabul, continues to support the Afghan Taliban. And Pakistan supported the Taliban when it took control of Afghanistan following a lengthy civil war after the Soviet Union was driven out. But why would a resurgent Taliban rule in Kabul destabilize Pakistan now any more than it did in the 1990s?

There was in fact general consensus that the Taliban, whether the Afghan version or their Pakistani cousins, have limited, nationalist objectives and do not share the global jihadist ideology of al-Qaeda. As a result, some speakers were confident that were the Taliban to take power again in Afghanistan, they have learned the cost of harboring al-Qaeda and would, this time around, deny them a safe-haven in Afghanistan.

Perhaps. Other conference participants noted that, despite their differing strategic aims, at various levels al-Qaeda and the Taliban are closely linked, and that the Taliban's ability, or willingness, to stiff-arm al-Qaeda is not at all a given.

But even so, the counter-argument ran, the advantages of an al-Qaeda safe-haven, on whichever side of the Afghan-Pak border, are overrated. Would, for example, events in Afghanistan, be it a Taliban victory or a Taliban defeat, have any bearing on the ability of another Nigerian - or Yemeni, or Somali, or Pakistani living legally in England - to attempt, and perhaps succeed, at blowing up an American jumbo jet?

Behind the focus on Afghan-istan lies the 60-year-old enmity between Pakistan and India, and Pakistan's concern over Indian influence with President Karzai's government. Afghanistan is merely a pawn in the larger Indo-Pak struggle; peace there, under this scenario, can never come until India and Pakistan resolve their differences. But the central issue between them is Kashmir; and no one expects that whatever compromise India is willing to make on Kashmir would be remotely acceptable, politically, in Pakistan.

In the 19th century, Afghanistan was sucked into what was known as "The Great Game," when England and Russia were vying for influence in central Asia. A buffer state in the 19th century, a pawn in the 21st. Shifting alliances - China, Iran, and Pakistan on one side, with Russia and India on the other; both sides hoping to pull Afghanistan into their orbit. Where does the US fit in? Why must we be involved?

Twelve hours of discussion, questions, disagreements.

At least a general consensus on where we are and how we got there: We attacked Afghanistan as a rational response to 9/11. We squandered a quick military defeat of the Taliban, primarily because we shifted our focus, erroneously, to Iraq. Rightly or wrongly, we have recommitted ourselves, under Obama, to preventing the Taliban from coming back to power. However, a US military victory is not possible. The counter-insurgency strategy we have adopted is a stop-gap maneuver to better position ourselves to negotiate a compromise solution so that we can began to extricate ourselves.

But, if by the middle of 2011, or 2012, the situation hasn't improved? And the Taliban aren't interested in negotiating a compromise? And the Afghan military is not ready to take over?

There was no final resolution, no line drawn.

If you tried to find the very broadest consensus on where we are heading, it would be close to this: We are in Afghanistan, very deeply. South Asia and its stability - the countries' alliances within the region and outside it, their relationships to the US, and add China to the mix - is of increasingly vital national interest to the United States. How we get out of Afghanistan can affect that interest. Realistically, we know we cannot win militarily; we also know we have to get out. We are hoping to do so in a way that will have the least adverse effect on our long-term regional interests.

A one-sentence summary, then: we are looking for the least worst solution. Not the best position to make our diplomacy shine.

Denied:1up! Software ()

 

[pak-yes]

Oh Come on yar Afghanistan is like our Client state or Fifth Province.Indian's should not waste their energies in Afghanistan because Ultimately Pakistan has the game.

 

[desiman]

Oh Come on yar Afghanistan is like our Client state or Fifth Province.Indian's should not waste their energies in Afghanistan because Ultimately Pakistan has the game.

Lol im not so sure you should say that, Afghanistan is a separate sovereign country but yes it shares close relationships with Pakistan as well as India.

 

[pak-yes]

Lol im not so sure you should say that, Afghanistan is a separate sovereign country but yes it shares close relationships with Pakistan as well as India.

Close Relations with ONLY PAKISTAN.Don't Poke your Nose in our backyard.

 

[desiman]

Close Relations with ONLY PAKISTAN.Don't Poke your Nose in our backyard.

You are wrong there brother, Afghanistan has historically been very close to India. We share a very friendly and strong relationship with them. Pakistan being the closest neighbor is obviously the closest but you cannot say its ONLY Pakistan. And India is not poking its nose anywhere.

 

[pak-yes]

You are wrong there brother, Afghanistan has historically been very close to India. We share a very friendly and strong relationship with them. Pakistan being the closest neighbor is obviously the closest but you cannot say its ONLY Pakistan. And India is not poking its nose anywhere.

Ok Yar India can try it's best but Ultimately Afghanistan is Ours.

 

[desiman]

Ok Yar India can try it's best but Ultimately Afghanistan is Ours.

I hope when you say its OURS, you mean your friend right ? lol

 

[jagjitnatt]

Indo-Afghan relationship is a part of Global Indian presence. Soon India would start investment in numerous countries including Afghanistan. Indian presence in Afghanistan is going to increase a lot in the recent years. It would help Afghanistan get organized and India expand its economy and get another ally.

Win-Win situation for us.

 

[equiliz3r]

Ok Yar India can try it's best but Ultimately Afghanistan is Ours.

may the better country win

 

[equiliz3r]

Indo-Afghan relationship is a part of Global Indian presence. Soon India would start investment in numerous countries including Afghanistan. Indian presence in Afghanistan is going to increase a lot in the recent years. It would help Afghanistan get organized and India expand its economy and get another ally.

Win-Win situation for us.

well India already building a port in Iran..............which help Afghanistan and India for trade with each other and Iran too will benefit.

 

[jagjitnatt]

well India already building a port in Iran..............which help Afghanistan and India for trade with each other and Iran too will benefit.

The way India is expanding its influence to Iran, Afghanistan, Israel, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, SA, African Countries, Dubai, Russia etc it would in no time be able to catch upto China.

In 10-15 years, India's GDP growth would outpace China's and in 35-45 years, India's GDP would be very comparable with China.

India Shining!