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The insult and the injury: Indias Afghan policy faces a severe test
By Jawed Naqvi
October 20, 2008 Monday Shawwal 20, 1429
dawn.com
WHEN a couple of years ago the king of Saudi Arabia visited New Delhi for the first time in half a century, he did something so horrific that Prime Minister Manmohan Singhs establishment is understandably keen to cover it up. The king insulted his hosts by refusing to pay a customary visit to the shrine of Mahatma Gandhi, which no other leader had yet dared to do to the revered icon of peace.
He apparently used the fiction that his religion forbade him from visiting non-Muslim shrines. Not even President Pervez Musharraf was so discourteous. When he first came to Delhi for the 2001 Agra summit, he offered flowers at the Rajghat to the man with whom his countrys founding fathers had major ideological differences.
Not by symbolism alone, the kings visit to New Delhi preceded by a few weeks another by a better-camouflaged obscurantist President George W. Bush. And the two are now engaged in divining a vague, alleged difference between good and bad Taliban, presumably in the belief that there are good and bad zealots.
If they succeed in their mission, a project assiduously pursued by a dominant section of the Pakistani establishment, India would be willy-nilly offered to choose between a rock and a hard place. There are strong suggestions that this may have been one of the facets of the meeting that Indian and Pakistani national security advisers held in Delhi last week.
After a long time both governments in Islamabad and New Delhi are on the same wavelength with the Americans and the Saudis alike. It has required India to eject its non-aligned worldview, or whatever was left of it since the end of the Soviet Union, in the process abandoning its traditionally close ties with Iran and other third world comrades.
The two anti-Iran votes at the IAEA and recent comments by the Indian prime minister that he would not want Iran to become another nuclear power in the region (while maintaining a farcical smile over Israels undeclared but widely acknowledged arsenal) were part of a calculated manoeuvre. It amounted to a de facto policy U-turn in order to shape a new one in which the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and US-administered Afghanistan are ranged against Iran and whoever else happens to stand in Washingtons way of the hydrocarbons-rich Caspian region.
The bouquet of grovelling compliments that President Bush got from Prime Minister Singh in Washington was of a piece with the new willingness of the current Indian establishment to pay any price to endear itself to the group of countries Delhi regarded with suspicion not too long ago. Is India bracing to change its Afghan policy in accordance with the new mantra that anoints the existence of good Taliban? It could be early to say but the omens are numerous.
For a long time it was the practice with the Indian establishment to look for links for its woes in Kashmir and elsewhere in the country to the gaggle of Islamic fanatics straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, usually sweeping the ISI too into the frame. The last time this formula came into play was with the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Pakistans NSA Ali Mahmud Ali Durrani vehemently denied this assertion when he visited Delhi recently. And his Indian counterpart M.K. Narayanan paid him rich tributes at a dinner speech without any mention of the Kabul attack.
But Narayanan went out of his way to herald quite possibly a brand new stance between the two countries. He said, as far as one could discern, that the fulcrum of terror was now located in the domestic fautlines of both countries. This would seem to justify the several coercive, if dubious, actions taken by many Indian states almost always targeting alleged Muslim terrorists the homegrown variety. No longer the hunt for them in the neighbourhood. It was also a nudge to Pakistan to tackle its domestic war with fanatics.
But what if Pakistan, the UK and the United States, with Saudi encouragement, revived the thesis that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable without involving some of the Taliban groups currently battling governments on both sides of the Durand Line being wooed? How would New Delhi ever come to accept that?
M.K. Bhadrakumar, former point man for Indian foreign ministrys Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan desk, and now an avowed critic of its evident drift, believes that the choices before India are difficult. As the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates too indicated earlier this month: There has to be ultimately, and Ill underscore ultimately, reconciliation as part of the political outcome to this (war). Thats ultimately the exit strategy for all of us. It may not be far-fetched to imagine that Indias new proximity with Saudi Arabia had factored in the kingdoms importance in the resolution of the Afghan tangle if indeed there can be one.
If there were reconciliation with the Taliban, says Bhadrakumar, it would essentially be in the nature of picking up the threads from October 2001 when the US invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban regime. That was when Taliban leader Mullah Omar promised at the eleventh hour from his hideout in Kandahar that he would verifiably sequester his movement from Al Qaeda and ask Osama bin Laden to leave Afghan soil, provided the US acceded to his longstanding request to accord recognition to his regime in Kabul rather than engage it selectively. According to this analyst the US administration ignored the clerics offer and instead pressed ahead with the plan to launch a war on terror.
The unaffordability of an open-ended war in Afghanistan is projected to influence thinking in Washington if the crisis in the US economy deepens, though that threshold is not nigh. The war should be affordable, according to Bhadrakumar, if the new head of US Central Command, General David Petraeus, can somehow make it more efficient, which is what he did in Iraq.
But that would not get the regime in Kabul any respect among the Afghans. Other regional powers, including Russia and Iran, do not see the US or Nato getting out of Afghanistan any time soon. Tehran has been alleging that the US strategy in Afghanistan is essentially to perpetuate its military presence and has raised the ante there. After having supported the US intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 Tehran has reheated an old relationship.
It invited former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who led the anti-Taliban coalition of the Northern Alliance in the 1990s to visit Iran. Receiving him in Tehran this month, the speaker of the Iranian Majlis Ali Larijani told Rabbani that the presence of foreign forces was creating insecurity and is causing rampant drug trafficking.
Russian statements regarding the US role in Afghanistan too have become critical by the day. Moscow seems to have assessed that the US-led war is getting nowhere and blame-game had begun. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov utilised the annual UN General Assembly forum to launch a broadside against Washington.
He said: More and more questions are being raised as to what is going on in Afghanistan. First and foremost, what is the acceptable price for losses among civilians in the ongoing anti-terrorist operation? Who decides on criteria for determining the proportionality of the use of force?
In the changing equations in Afghanistan, India will need the trust of all key players, which include Saudi Arabia and Iran even as they represent opposite ends of the ethnic divide. We all know how everyone who has waded into the territory has come out severely bruised. To turn the saying on its head, the Saudi-led search for good Taliban may add a smarting bruise to the insult India has endured at the hands of the monarch.
By Jawed Naqvi
October 20, 2008 Monday Shawwal 20, 1429
dawn.com
WHEN a couple of years ago the king of Saudi Arabia visited New Delhi for the first time in half a century, he did something so horrific that Prime Minister Manmohan Singhs establishment is understandably keen to cover it up. The king insulted his hosts by refusing to pay a customary visit to the shrine of Mahatma Gandhi, which no other leader had yet dared to do to the revered icon of peace.
He apparently used the fiction that his religion forbade him from visiting non-Muslim shrines. Not even President Pervez Musharraf was so discourteous. When he first came to Delhi for the 2001 Agra summit, he offered flowers at the Rajghat to the man with whom his countrys founding fathers had major ideological differences.
Not by symbolism alone, the kings visit to New Delhi preceded by a few weeks another by a better-camouflaged obscurantist President George W. Bush. And the two are now engaged in divining a vague, alleged difference between good and bad Taliban, presumably in the belief that there are good and bad zealots.
If they succeed in their mission, a project assiduously pursued by a dominant section of the Pakistani establishment, India would be willy-nilly offered to choose between a rock and a hard place. There are strong suggestions that this may have been one of the facets of the meeting that Indian and Pakistani national security advisers held in Delhi last week.
After a long time both governments in Islamabad and New Delhi are on the same wavelength with the Americans and the Saudis alike. It has required India to eject its non-aligned worldview, or whatever was left of it since the end of the Soviet Union, in the process abandoning its traditionally close ties with Iran and other third world comrades.
The two anti-Iran votes at the IAEA and recent comments by the Indian prime minister that he would not want Iran to become another nuclear power in the region (while maintaining a farcical smile over Israels undeclared but widely acknowledged arsenal) were part of a calculated manoeuvre. It amounted to a de facto policy U-turn in order to shape a new one in which the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and US-administered Afghanistan are ranged against Iran and whoever else happens to stand in Washingtons way of the hydrocarbons-rich Caspian region.
The bouquet of grovelling compliments that President Bush got from Prime Minister Singh in Washington was of a piece with the new willingness of the current Indian establishment to pay any price to endear itself to the group of countries Delhi regarded with suspicion not too long ago. Is India bracing to change its Afghan policy in accordance with the new mantra that anoints the existence of good Taliban? It could be early to say but the omens are numerous.
For a long time it was the practice with the Indian establishment to look for links for its woes in Kashmir and elsewhere in the country to the gaggle of Islamic fanatics straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, usually sweeping the ISI too into the frame. The last time this formula came into play was with the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Pakistans NSA Ali Mahmud Ali Durrani vehemently denied this assertion when he visited Delhi recently. And his Indian counterpart M.K. Narayanan paid him rich tributes at a dinner speech without any mention of the Kabul attack.
But Narayanan went out of his way to herald quite possibly a brand new stance between the two countries. He said, as far as one could discern, that the fulcrum of terror was now located in the domestic fautlines of both countries. This would seem to justify the several coercive, if dubious, actions taken by many Indian states almost always targeting alleged Muslim terrorists the homegrown variety. No longer the hunt for them in the neighbourhood. It was also a nudge to Pakistan to tackle its domestic war with fanatics.
But what if Pakistan, the UK and the United States, with Saudi encouragement, revived the thesis that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable without involving some of the Taliban groups currently battling governments on both sides of the Durand Line being wooed? How would New Delhi ever come to accept that?
M.K. Bhadrakumar, former point man for Indian foreign ministrys Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan desk, and now an avowed critic of its evident drift, believes that the choices before India are difficult. As the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates too indicated earlier this month: There has to be ultimately, and Ill underscore ultimately, reconciliation as part of the political outcome to this (war). Thats ultimately the exit strategy for all of us. It may not be far-fetched to imagine that Indias new proximity with Saudi Arabia had factored in the kingdoms importance in the resolution of the Afghan tangle if indeed there can be one.
If there were reconciliation with the Taliban, says Bhadrakumar, it would essentially be in the nature of picking up the threads from October 2001 when the US invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban regime. That was when Taliban leader Mullah Omar promised at the eleventh hour from his hideout in Kandahar that he would verifiably sequester his movement from Al Qaeda and ask Osama bin Laden to leave Afghan soil, provided the US acceded to his longstanding request to accord recognition to his regime in Kabul rather than engage it selectively. According to this analyst the US administration ignored the clerics offer and instead pressed ahead with the plan to launch a war on terror.
The unaffordability of an open-ended war in Afghanistan is projected to influence thinking in Washington if the crisis in the US economy deepens, though that threshold is not nigh. The war should be affordable, according to Bhadrakumar, if the new head of US Central Command, General David Petraeus, can somehow make it more efficient, which is what he did in Iraq.
But that would not get the regime in Kabul any respect among the Afghans. Other regional powers, including Russia and Iran, do not see the US or Nato getting out of Afghanistan any time soon. Tehran has been alleging that the US strategy in Afghanistan is essentially to perpetuate its military presence and has raised the ante there. After having supported the US intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 Tehran has reheated an old relationship.
It invited former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who led the anti-Taliban coalition of the Northern Alliance in the 1990s to visit Iran. Receiving him in Tehran this month, the speaker of the Iranian Majlis Ali Larijani told Rabbani that the presence of foreign forces was creating insecurity and is causing rampant drug trafficking.
Russian statements regarding the US role in Afghanistan too have become critical by the day. Moscow seems to have assessed that the US-led war is getting nowhere and blame-game had begun. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov utilised the annual UN General Assembly forum to launch a broadside against Washington.
He said: More and more questions are being raised as to what is going on in Afghanistan. First and foremost, what is the acceptable price for losses among civilians in the ongoing anti-terrorist operation? Who decides on criteria for determining the proportionality of the use of force?
In the changing equations in Afghanistan, India will need the trust of all key players, which include Saudi Arabia and Iran even as they represent opposite ends of the ethnic divide. We all know how everyone who has waded into the territory has come out severely bruised. To turn the saying on its head, the Saudi-led search for good Taliban may add a smarting bruise to the insult India has endured at the hands of the monarch.
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