India will have to fight its own battle in Afghanistan

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit at Chicago on May 20-21 had set out an exit plan by which its International Security Assistance Force will be withdrawn from combat operations in Afghanistan by the end of 2014. NATO forces will, however, remain as part of a training and support role.

A decade-long war in Afghanistan, which is at the doorstep of south Asia — it is now strictly part of South Asia because of its SAARC membership — seems to be winding down but not over. A war can be declared to have ended if the enemy is defeated.

When it began in the aftermath of 9/11, the enemy was al-Qaeda, which was, in turn, supported by the Taliban. Neither NATO nor the US, which has been in the lead, has declared that al-Qaeda or the Taliban have been defeated despite the killing of Osama bin Laden. It has been called a war against global terror, which is a very vague term because the enemy is not clearly identified.

Whether the war aims have been achieved or not is a debating point, which should engage not just those involved directly in the war but also those in New Delhi. India cannot pretend that the war in Afghanistan is someone else’s war. In 2001, then foreign minister Jaswant Singh and the BJP thought that India’s terror concerns from across the border would be addressed by the American presence in Afghanistan. It was only after the terror attack on Parliament in December 2001 that it became clear to Indian experts and the government of the day that the Americans and the West were fighting their battle in Afghanistan and that India will have to fight its own.

The bigger picture still eludes the pundits in Delhi. What is the meaning of the presence of more than a hundred thousand-strong Western forces in Afghanistan 50 years after the British colonial armies left the subcontinent? It is true that the West had struck Afghanistan in response to a terror attack from al-Qaeda supposedly backed by the Taliban government in Kabul. There is no need to quibble about the fairness and morality of the West’s war in Afghanistan. There is no morality in wars. There are issues of who is strong in the international arena.

India in 2001 was still a strategically insignificant country in the international scenario. There was no request for Indian troops to fight the al-Qaeda-Taliban combine, though two years later there was pressure for India to send troops to Iraq. Had India been in the fray in Afghanistan, it would have made logical sense to be in Iraq as well. The US had to keep Pakistan’s sensitivities in mind and keep India out of Afghanistan. New Delhi was assigned the role of contributing to economic reconstruction like building roads. India also was kept at the margins in all the international conferences on Afghanistan.

The 2005 India-US agreement in Washington regarding the civil nuclear deal between the two countries was a turning point in leveraging the Indian position in the region. This was, however, only a recognition of India’s growing economic clout in the world — notwithstanding the fragility of the economy at the moment — as reflected in the India visits of American presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama. This has not, however, changed the ground reality in South Asia. India, the emerging economic giant, remains a marginal player in Afghanistan and South Asia.

This discrepancy between its economic and strategic muscle should make strategy experts in India to sit up and take note of the global balance of power in military terms. NATO, which is basically a European unit, has extended its footprint to South Asia. The Americans have been around for a longer time because of their close alignment with Pakistan during the Cold War era.

In realistic terms, India cannot protest against the US or NATO forces because there is not much it can do about it. All that it can do is to rationalise their presence in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. SAARC member-countries cannot be expected to look to India to play a lead role in the affairs of the region. The situation may change in another decade or quarter-century. It will be useful if India begins to think as to how it can bring about the change.