Beyond the Great Game: Afghanistan

[HRK]

The Australia India Institute Chanakya Papers
Beyond the Great Game: Afghanistan Post-2014
Frederic Grare, William Maley, Amitabh Mattoo
This paper was originally published by the Australia India Institute.

Pakistan’s contradictory strategic shift

Pakistan is by far the most active regional player in Afghanistan and the one whose policies are likely to have the most destabilising effect. In many ways, Pakistan is still pursuing in Afghanistan the objectives it set out at the beginning of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Islamabad is still trying to prevent the involvement of Afghan refugees in Pakistani politics and to promote a friendly government in Kabul to diminish Indian influence.

Pakistan’s pursuit of these objectives in spite of its deteriorating internal security and tarnished international image has left it relatively isolated diplomatically. As a result, Pakistan has to weigh the benefits of each possible move against its potential impact on its domestic security situation, as well as on the larger regional and international dynamic. In that context, it cannot ignore, for example, that (rightly or wrongly) the India-Pakistan rivalry will increasingly be the prism through which Afghanistan is considered internationally as the United States reduces its role.

Pakistan’s policy has been to strengthen its non-state assets as a way of securing political leverage in Afghanistan, and to use them, on occasion, to attack Indian assets or to target those seen as not advancing Islamabad’s interests. But in early 2012, Pakistan’s Foreign Office publicly declared a ‘strategic shift’ in its thinking on Afghanistan and announced a new policy, promoting its own version of an inclusive reconciliation process and actively reaching out to elements of the Northern Alliance.This has not, however, been reflected in a diminution of violent activities in Afghanistan by groups close to the Pakistan military such as the Haqqani network. Domestic factors nonetheless play an increasing role in Pakistan’s Afghan policy and partly explain its declared strategic shift. The Indian monitoring website South Asia Terrorism Portal estimates that terrorist attacks killed 50,379 people in Pakistan between 2003 and 2013, peaking in 2009 when 11,704 people were killed.32 The September 11, 2001 attacks marked a quantitative and qualitative change in the terrorist attacks that affected Pakistan. Under pressure in Afghanistan, Islamist movements began to seek refuge in Pakistan and started operating from lawless or less controlled parts of the country, with or without the complicity of the state security apparatus. Furthermore, parts of Pakistan provided fertile soil for the kind of messages that the Afghan Taliban had been preaching in the 1990s

The Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, TTP) and other militant groups had started targeting federal and local political institutions in the early 2000s. But anti-state organisations only began to coalesce after the Red Mosque incident, a July 2007 standoff between militants and Pakistani security forces. For months leading up to the incident, radical militant organisations had accumulated weapons in the compound of an Islamabad mosque, a few hundred metres away from the headquarters of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency. After months of equivocation, the army finally intervened, killing about 100 militants in its assault. Attacks against the army, the ISI, and other sections of the military—a phenomenon never observed before—began almost immediately. The ensuing cycle of attacks and retaliations became even more acute in 2009, when some militant movements (TTP and TNSM) captured a substantial part of the Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The army was able to push back the militants, who sought refuge in Afghanistan and have operated from there ever since.

Today Islamabad seems to fear two kinds of developments regarding Afghanistan.

• The manipulation of the Pakistani Taliban by Afghan intelligence agencies. The link between the Afghan security apparatus and the TTP was apparently confirmed on October 11, 2013, when Latif Mehsud, a leader of the Pakistani anti-state Islamist militia, was captured in Afghanistan by US forces while allegedly in the custody of the Afghan army.

• Collusion between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban:35 Such apprehension has justified a paradoxical attitude vis-à-vis the Afghan Taliban, whom Pakistan is willing to use, but does not trust.

As a result, Pakistan’s conception of a friendly Afghan government has evolved. A friendly Afghanistan remains an Afghanistan under close Pakistani control, but Pakistan’s security establishment is too pragmatic to ignore the possibility that, at least for the time being, the Taliban may not be capable of seizing power alone. As a result, Pakistan no longer officially supports the idea that the Taliban should form the Afghan government alone. This strategic shift reflects Pakistan’s perception that the Taliban are no longer a reliable proxy, although Islamabad still believes that the Afghan Taliban would most likely secure Pakistani interests in Kabul.

Renouncing exclusive support for the Taliban is also Pakistan’s attempt to redefine a ‘strategic Afghanistan’ by brokering a power-sharing agreement in which its proxies would dominate the east and the south of Afghanistan in exchange for their non-interference in the areas dominated by other ethnic groups. The ‘national unity government’ that would emerge from such an agreement would be not be strong enough to preclude some space for Pakistani manoeuvring.

But this new approach, even if it is not just for show, is not without risk for Pakistan and could exacerbate the threats it is trying to eliminate. If the Afghan Taliban is frustrated in its aspirations to gain power in Kabul, it could join hands with its Pakistani counterparts to seek a limited version of ‘Pashtunistan’ based on an ideological version of Pashtun nationalism. This scenario is rather unlikely in the present context, but the fact remains that an operational alliance between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban would create a serious challenge for Islamabad and, as a result, a real risk of war between Afghanistan and Pakistan

Pakistan has thus trapped itself in a situation from which it will struggle to exit. The current policy vis-à-vis the Pakistani Taliban, is sustainable only as long as the Afghan Taliban is preoccupied with the war in Afghanistan. Similarly, a power-sharing agreement as promoted by Islamabad makes sense only if Pakistan is capable of preventing an alliance between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. This seems so far to be the case, but cannot be taken for granted should the Afghan Taliban regain its autonomy or should the security situation deteriorate further on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Given Pakistan’s current policy in and discourse on Afghanistan, and despite the official rhetoric, the continuation of a low-intensity conflict in Afghanistan is an insufficient but necessary condition for Pakistan’s security.

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[Tshering22]

Interesting read. However, it is time that Pakistani leadership understand that a stable Afghanistan is not alone Pakistan's contract but the stake of all regional players. It is a sovereign country with its own people and people that want development.

You are most welcome to develop Afghanistan, but it will be a collaborative regional effort. Once NATO moves out, it will need the efforts of not just us or you, but also Russia, Iran and China.

Afghans are fed up of their country being used as the official battlefield of Asia.

Let's help them out truly without fighting each other.

 

[HRK]

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India’s dilemma
India’s anxieties about political developments in Afghanistan have deep historical roots. As India’s former ambassador to Kabul, Gautam Mukhopadhaya, remarked, ‘the territory of modern-day Afghanistan has historically been a staging ground for almost every overland military expedition into India.’38

According to Mukhopadhaya, today’s security concerns revolve around two specific issues:

• The prospect of a return of the Taliban and its likely impact on militant Islamic fundamentalism in the region in general and Pakistan in particular

• What [India] perceives to be the Taliban symbiotic relationship with a revanchist military nexus in Pakistan that India holds responsible for a series of security challenges, political reversals and terrorist incidents that (involving Afghanistan alone) include the use of jihadi forces nurtured in the region by Pakistan against India.39

These two considerations have long informed Indian policies in Afghanistan. New Delhi has supported the international coalition’s military intervention in Afghanistan as a way of preventing the Taliban from returning to power. It has also backed the inclusion of other external actors, such as Iran, Central Asia, and Russia, to prevent the further expansion of Pakistan’s influence in the country. India has also committed around $2 billion in development aid to Afghanistan and generated goodwill for itself in all segments of Afghan society. In 2011, Kabul and New Delhi signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement in which India committed to train and equip Afghan security forces.

The US drawdown is, however, generating anxieties in New Delhi. It will deprive India of an important guarantee in Afghanistan and could over time create a security vacuum there. In order to mitigate the withdrawal’s impact, India has encouraged Karzai to sign the BSA with the United States.

The risk of a political vacuum is also real. With the exception of the Taliban regime, India has always supported whatever government was in place in Kabul and is unlikely to change this posture, no matter who wins the elections in 2014. But New Delhi cannot ignore the flaws of the existing political system and understands that the international presence, more than anything else, has preserved its existence so far.

India knows that its political and economic support can only slow the erosion of the Afghan state’s authority, not stop it.

The deterioration of Pakistan’s domestic security creates a new problem for India. The relative congruence of the Taliban and Pakistan’s security establishment had led India to support anti-Taliban elements, mostly represented by the so-called Northern Alliance, and thereby contain Pakistan indirectly in the 1990s. Pakistan’s weakness is, however, as much a problem for India as it is for Pakistan. New Delhi’s policy could reinforce in Pakistan the elements it is trying to eliminate.

As a consequence, India seems content with a low level of tension on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Similarly, it maintains its own pressure on Pakistan and ensures a low level of violence in Jammu and Kashmir, but refuses Afghan requests for combat aircraft and other heavy equipment to avoid provoking a direct confrontation between Afghanistan and Pakistan. India does struggle, though, to move beyond an essentially tactical approach to managing Afghanistan.

 

[HRK]

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Iran’s quiet Taliban diplomacy

Iran’s policy in Afghanistan has long been shaped by the ideology of the 1978 Islamic revolution. Throughout the period of the Soviet invasion from 1979 to 1989, Tehran sought to empower the Shia community. Since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, however, which came just months after the Soviet withdrawal, relations between Iran and Afghanistan have been a story of pragmatism and adaptability, a function of the geopolitical changes in the region as well as in Iran’s relation with the United States.

After the Soviet withdrawal, Iranian interests clashed with those of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which sought to undermine the Najibullah government in order to extend their influence and, in the Saudi case, spread a Wahhabi perspective across Central Asia. Iran responded by exploiting language to unify the Persian-speaking non-Pashtun communities as a counterforce against the Pashtuns supported by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. It also consistently called for national reconciliation in Afghanistan and the formation of an inclusive, multi-ethnic government. With the advent of the Taliban, Iran intensified its political and military engagement with both Shia Islamist groups and the Northern Alliance. After the overthrow of the Taliban regime in November 2001, Iran found itself in a favorable position to expand its influence in Afghanistan. In the wake of the September 11 attacks and at the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, Tehran provided extensive intelligence and logistical cooperation to the United States in an effort to oust the Taliban. But Iran’s inclusion in the ‘Axis of Evil’ by the Bush administration in January 2002 ended all Iranian attempts to cooperate explicitly with the United States in Afghanistan.

Iran today pursues two partly contradictory objectives in Afghanistan:

• To prevent Afghanistan from being controlled by a radical Sunni movement, be it the Taliban or another extremist militia or group of militias

• To prevent Afghanistan from being used as a launchpad for the United States or any regional power (for example Saudi Arabia or Pakistan) to attack or undermine Iran.

To prevent Afghanistan from being used as an anti-Iranian platform, the Islamic Republic has over the years formed relationships with Afghan actors capable of and willing to keep anti-Shia and anti-Iranian elements—in particular the Taliban—at bay. But Iran’s main concern during the Karzai administration, has been the presence of foreign military bases, especially American ones. This concern was magnified by the signing of the joint declaration on a long-term security partnership between Afghanistan and the United States. These two concerns have produced a contradictory policy in which Iran simultaneously supports the Karzai regime and provides some military hardware to selected insurgents in order to drain US resources and limit the possibility of a US military intervention against Iran from Afghanistan.

Tehran strongly supports the Karzai-backed reconciliation process initiated in Afghanistan under the auspices of the High Peace Council. Its gradual realisation that durable peace in Afghanistan and Iran’s own security could be achieved only if all Afghan groups could find a way to share power led to a further rapprochement with the Taliban. This last Iranian move signals a lack of confidence regarding the future of Afghanistan after the Western drawdown, but could take a new significance in the coming months. Should the pragmatism demonstrated by the new Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, lead to an agreement on the nuclear issue, the anti-US component of Iran’s Afghan policy could be significantly diminished.

The new political and diplomatic situation—in which the antagonism between the international community and Iran would be reduced following an agreement with Iran on nuclear power—would not necessarily lead Iran to a change of its multiple alliances strategy, but would affect its impact and significance. The dialogue with the Taliban and the support for reconciliation in Afghanistan serve more as insurance against Sunni extremism and potential instability along Iran’s eastern border. Cultivating sympathetic figures among the Taliban may also be a hedging strategy should the situation further deteriorate in Afghanistan after 2014. Fears of a potential intervention will persist, however, if some US troops remain in Afghanistan. Relations between Iran and the United States are therefore likely to remain the main driver of Iran’s policy in Afghanistan.

 

[HRK]

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Central Asia: In search of a policy

The risk posed by the drawdown in Afghanistan to its Central Asian neighbours is more difficult to assess, as is their potential role in the future of Afghanistan. The post-2001 expectations of the Central Asian countries that a successful US intervention in Afghanistan would ‘lead to an economic recovery that would advance the development of all the states in the region’ have undoubtedly been frustrated. The security impact of the drawdown is, however, more questionable.

The worst-case scenario that the ‘elements of Afghan chaos spread across borders to the weak, corrupt and poorly governed Central Asian states, whose populations share religious and ethnic ties with groups fighting in Afghanistan [leading to] a wide conflagration, collapsing states, widespread violence and rising drug trafficking, a nightmare for U.S. strategists seems to have little connection with reality. For the analysts Scott Radnitz and Marlene Laruelle, the three factors that could lead to a spillover with disastrous consequences would be the infiltration of militants, refugees, and ideological inspiration. They conclude, however, that the Western drawdown is unlikely to change existing circumstances. NATO is currently unable to prevent Afghan militants from slipping into neighbouring Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. Yet Central Asia has not seen any massive inflow of militants pouring across its borders. Nor is it clear that Afghan militants are willing to target Central Asia. All indications so far suggest that the Taliban are unwilling to go beyond Afghanistan’s borders. Similarly, Central Asian governments have so far not accepted and seem unlikely to accept massive flows of refugees in the foreseeable future. As for the supposed ideological sympathy, it has had little opportunity to develop because Central Asian governments have relatively successfully imposed their own ‘official, national and ethnic interpretation of Islam to bolster a sense of national identity’ while repressing jihadist movements.

The risk of becoming the victim of an Islamist spillover is in fact for Afghanistan, not Central Asia. In the 1990s, most jihadist movements active in Central Asia took refuge in Afghanistan after they were expelled from their countries of origin. Once in Afghanistan, they joined the local Islamist movements and participated in the civil war. Such a movement is unlikely to happen after 2014, since most of the existing jihadist groups have already been pushed out of Central Asia and the local conditions for their resurgence are conditioned essentially by the capacity of these states to prevent civil unrest.

Central Asian Islamist groups will indeed continue to operate from Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where they no longer enjoy the same freedom as they did a decade ago, thanks to US drone attacks and Pakistani pressures. There is therefore a risk that the Central Asian states, especially Uzbekistan, may be tempted to develop spheres of influence of their own in the Afghan provinces adjacent to their respective borders in order to prevent penetration by such groups. It remains to be seen whether they will do so in cooperation with or in opposition to the Afghan insurgency. But the number and nuisance capabilities of Islamist groups that could potentially threaten the Central Asian states are limited. The risk of Central Asian interference in Afghanistan is much greater than a risk of instability spreading from Afghanistan to Central Asia.

 

[HRK]

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China: from non-involvement to containment

Although increasingly presented as a major actor in Afghanistan, it is unclear how China will be affected by the drawdown. China’s interests in Afghanistan are essentially negative—preventing instability from spreading to Xinjiang—and its policies have been so far remarkably cautious. Beijing has essentially tried to remain on good terms with all relevant stakeholders. As the China expert Michael Swaine asserts, ‘Beijing has positioned itself as supportive of Afghanistan’s long-term stability and prosperity though limited political, economic and diplomatic assistance.

Moreover, China’s Afghan policy is essentially a function of foreign-policy objectives unrelated to Afghanistan. It aims at preventing Afghanistan from upsetting its relations with the larger regional environment in Central and South Asia. China will take care not to let its Afghanistan policy publicly strain its relations with Pakistan, which it still sees as a hedge against hegemony in the subcontinent. At the same time, Beijing will want to ensure that these dynamics do not threaten the dialogue that it is trying to develop with India. Nor does China want Afghanistan to increase its own domestic insurgent threat. China balks at the prospect of a sizable US military presence in Afghanistan for the long term, but it is equally apprehensive about the United States failing in a way that would radicalise the entire region. Finally, China also has economic interests in Afghanistan, including the $3.5 billion Aynak copper mine project and the associated transport and electricity generating facilities.

It is fair to say that despite its criticism of Western policies in Afghanistan, China’s actions have by and large helped advance international goals. To manage the complex set of apparently contradictory interests discussed above, Beijing has adopted a series of policies aimed at supporting the global international effort while avoiding involvement in any military operation. Likewise, it has taken care to remain on good terms with the Karzai regime by offering infrastructure, financial, and humanitarian assistance or political support in the UN, without offending the Taliban. The US drawdown is unlikely to open any window of opportunity for China in Afghanistan, but it could possibly exacerbate some of the existing tensions in Chinese policy. Beijing may be relieved that at most a small number of US forces are likely to remain in Afghanistan, but every other aspect of its strategy in the country may suffer from the US exit.

The degree to which Afghanistan actually threatens China’s security is unclear. The risk for China, as for most of Afghanistan neighbours, is not a post-2014 Islamist offensive, in which hordes of Taliban fighters suddenly cross the border to Xinjiang to transform it into an Islamic state. Rather, the danger is that Uighur nationalists may cross over to Afghanistan to get shelter and training before returning to Xinjiang. The risk is therefore real and limited in number, but concerns about conflict spillover ought to be minimal. Beijing has so far been unable to eradicate Uighur nationalism but has proven relatively capable of controlling its border with Afghanistan and has dealt successfully with the Taliban regime before 9/11 and the Karzai government since the end of 2001.

Pakistan’s fate, not Afghanistan’s, will be central for China’s standing in South Asia. Only ‘a stable, independent, friendly and influential Pakistan can prevent Indian domination of South Asia, weaken Indian influence in Central Asia, and confound any Indian desire to focus primarily on strategic rivalry with China.’ China also needs Pakistan’s intelligence cooperation to suppress domestic Muslim terrorism in Xinjiang. Therefore, although China’s relationship with Pakistan is evolving as its confidence in Islamabad’s capacity to master its own destiny erodes, Beijing is unlikely to do anything in Afghanistan that may harm Pakistani interests. Yet China’s posture is also unlikely to let Pakistan’s policy derail its other objectives in South Asia. It is significant that Chinese officials, who had long refused to discuss Afghanistan with India, referring their Indian counterparts to Pakistan, have now agreed to discuss the matter directly with New Delhi.

China will support the international effort in Afghanistan as long as it respects what Chinese officials call the ‘five supports’ that China sees as being the duty of the international community:

‘First, support an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned process of peace and reconstruction; Second, support Afghanistan’s capacity building, so that it can take over the responsibility of safeguarding national peace and stability as early as possible; Third, support Afghanistan in advancing national reconciliation through its own efforts; Fourth, support Afghanistan in developing the economy during the transition and beyond 2014; Fifth, support Afghanistan in developing external relations on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit, especially enhancing good neighbourly relations and mutual policy trust with other countries of the region.

After 2014, China is unlikely to deviate in any fundamental way from its cautious approach to the Afghanistan problem. Nonetheless, given its investment in the country, the extent to which China will be able to maintain the low profile it has kept for the past decade is questionable. Besides its own direct economic involvement in Afghanistan, it will probably act mostly through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which shares the Chinese position on Afghanistan: politically neutral and convinced that the Afghan conflict cannot be resolved solely through military means, but focused primarily on socioeconomic issues.

 

[Luisstevie]

noooooo