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Let Kabul go its way
http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2014/06/09/let-kabul-go-its-way/
By M K Bhadrakumar – June 9, 2014
The Time magazine report on the Pakistani Taliban’s strike on early Monday at the Karachi international airport aptly noted that the attack has been “a brazen demonstration of its [Taliban's] powerful reach… as terrorists proved their ability to penetrate deep into the country’s commercial nerve centre, far from their tribal strongholds.” (here).
One cannot but agree with that estimation. The report also suggested that Uzbek and/or Chechen terrorists were involved. If so, the dividing line between certain groups known as Pakistani Taliban and the al-Qaeda has disappeared.
This is yet another deadly reminder for Pakistan as to what can happen to its internal security unless it moves heaven and earth to bring the new leadership in Kabul and the (Afghan) Taliban to a settlement within the limited time available till the US drawdown by end-2016.
The best hope for Pakistan hinges on three factors. One, the release of the 5 prisoners from Guantanamo Bay amounts to a confidence-building measure, which the Taliban has been seeking as a precondition for entering into serious peace talks.
Two, both Dr. Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, the two contenders in next week’s runoff, have hinted that they will robustly seek peace talks. Three, the Taliban have been somewhat circumspect in its attitude toward these two leaders, quite unlike their dismissive stance toward President Hamid Karzai, which suggests a degree of anticipation on its part regarding the new dispensation in Kabul on August 2.
India too has to make a crucial choice here — not to plunge into a turf war with Pakistan on Afghan soil and instead do whatever it can from the sideline to encourage Pakistan to push for a negotiated settlement between the Taliban and the new Afghan leadership.
On the contrary, any Indian misadventure will surely end in a quagmire from which it will be difficult to extricate and it will be much more painful and costly than the IPKF saga in Sri Lanka in the mid-1980s, as India’s homeland security will also be in the crosshairs. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it will most certainly prove an Albatross, which he can do without.
Whereas, a section of opinion within India seems to be raring to go. It is harboring illusions that the defunct Northern Alliance enterprise of the 1990s can be revived and, even more funnily, that other regional powers such as Russia and China are itching to tie up with India for waging an anti-Taliban war in Afghanistan.
Our analysts are whistling in the dark to assume that a new Cold War is round the corner and once the US moves out, Russia and China will simply move in. Whereas, life — and the Russian-American relationship — is far more complicated than that, and geopolitics takes unexpected turns.
True, Russia and China have their own vital interests to safeguard. But then, they also happen to have multiple options to reach that end, including their friendly relations with Pakistan, and their instinctive preference is going to be for the political and diplomatic option — with strong security underpinnings put in place first in their own backyards, of course, to insulate themselves from negative fallouts.
The sad part is that the Afghans have also somehow got this impression that Modi’s government is aspiring to fill the security gap in Afghanistan. Curiously, some strange meaning is being read into Modi’s choice of the new National Security Advisor as if it presages a muscular Indian foreign policy in Afghanistan.
How did they get such notions? It seems to me that some Indians only could be planting these fantasies on the Afghan mind without checking out with the NSA first.
The plain truth is that only fools will rush in, given the grave imponderables of the Afghan situation. To begin with, It needs to be understood very clearly that the American interest in funding the Afghan economy will be diminishing once the troop drawdown is complete in end-2016. In fact, the US Congress has already begun slashing the funds for Afghanistan this year. The Obama administration’s capacity to persuade the Congress to loosen the purse strings will be even less in the coming years.
Now, a war cannot be fought in a vacuum. Does money grow on trees in India so that we have so much of it that we do not know what to do with it, and we’d rather blow it up in the Hindu Kush, happily replacing the US as the main source of funding for the Afghan war economy?
The bitter truth is that if India wants to inherit the Afghan civil war, it will also have to fund the war economy, as the US has been doing for over a decade since its intervention in 2001. What does that entail? Well, Chatham House has a revealing report on what the Afghan war economy looks like.
http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2014/06/09/let-kabul-go-its-way/
By M K Bhadrakumar – June 9, 2014
The Time magazine report on the Pakistani Taliban’s strike on early Monday at the Karachi international airport aptly noted that the attack has been “a brazen demonstration of its [Taliban's] powerful reach… as terrorists proved their ability to penetrate deep into the country’s commercial nerve centre, far from their tribal strongholds.” (here).
One cannot but agree with that estimation. The report also suggested that Uzbek and/or Chechen terrorists were involved. If so, the dividing line between certain groups known as Pakistani Taliban and the al-Qaeda has disappeared.
This is yet another deadly reminder for Pakistan as to what can happen to its internal security unless it moves heaven and earth to bring the new leadership in Kabul and the (Afghan) Taliban to a settlement within the limited time available till the US drawdown by end-2016.
The best hope for Pakistan hinges on three factors. One, the release of the 5 prisoners from Guantanamo Bay amounts to a confidence-building measure, which the Taliban has been seeking as a precondition for entering into serious peace talks.
Two, both Dr. Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, the two contenders in next week’s runoff, have hinted that they will robustly seek peace talks. Three, the Taliban have been somewhat circumspect in its attitude toward these two leaders, quite unlike their dismissive stance toward President Hamid Karzai, which suggests a degree of anticipation on its part regarding the new dispensation in Kabul on August 2.
India too has to make a crucial choice here — not to plunge into a turf war with Pakistan on Afghan soil and instead do whatever it can from the sideline to encourage Pakistan to push for a negotiated settlement between the Taliban and the new Afghan leadership.
On the contrary, any Indian misadventure will surely end in a quagmire from which it will be difficult to extricate and it will be much more painful and costly than the IPKF saga in Sri Lanka in the mid-1980s, as India’s homeland security will also be in the crosshairs. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it will most certainly prove an Albatross, which he can do without.
Whereas, a section of opinion within India seems to be raring to go. It is harboring illusions that the defunct Northern Alliance enterprise of the 1990s can be revived and, even more funnily, that other regional powers such as Russia and China are itching to tie up with India for waging an anti-Taliban war in Afghanistan.
Our analysts are whistling in the dark to assume that a new Cold War is round the corner and once the US moves out, Russia and China will simply move in. Whereas, life — and the Russian-American relationship — is far more complicated than that, and geopolitics takes unexpected turns.
True, Russia and China have their own vital interests to safeguard. But then, they also happen to have multiple options to reach that end, including their friendly relations with Pakistan, and their instinctive preference is going to be for the political and diplomatic option — with strong security underpinnings put in place first in their own backyards, of course, to insulate themselves from negative fallouts.
The sad part is that the Afghans have also somehow got this impression that Modi’s government is aspiring to fill the security gap in Afghanistan. Curiously, some strange meaning is being read into Modi’s choice of the new National Security Advisor as if it presages a muscular Indian foreign policy in Afghanistan.
How did they get such notions? It seems to me that some Indians only could be planting these fantasies on the Afghan mind without checking out with the NSA first.
The plain truth is that only fools will rush in, given the grave imponderables of the Afghan situation. To begin with, It needs to be understood very clearly that the American interest in funding the Afghan economy will be diminishing once the troop drawdown is complete in end-2016. In fact, the US Congress has already begun slashing the funds for Afghanistan this year. The Obama administration’s capacity to persuade the Congress to loosen the purse strings will be even less in the coming years.
Now, a war cannot be fought in a vacuum. Does money grow on trees in India so that we have so much of it that we do not know what to do with it, and we’d rather blow it up in the Hindu Kush, happily replacing the US as the main source of funding for the Afghan war economy?
The bitter truth is that if India wants to inherit the Afghan civil war, it will also have to fund the war economy, as the US has been doing for over a decade since its intervention in 2001. What does that entail? Well, Chatham House has a revealing report on what the Afghan war economy looks like.
