What is needed is hope, and the tangible manifestation of hope is weapons and funds from India to Kabul. If India loses hope and fails to deliver, then Afghanistan will turn into our Czechoslovakia. That’s a scary thought, any which way we look at
Afghanistan is about hope, not practicality. Here it seems the West and India are stuck on two opposite poles, and like the blind men of Hindoostan, both are partly in the right but wholly in the wrong.
As Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai wrapped up his India visit, his repeated request for weapons, it seems, was again going to get bogged down in the corridors of that visual monstrosity that South Block is.
Basically for all intents and purposes, India seems to have given up in Afghanistan when it has no reason to. The request for weapons was dissected in terms of logistical feasibility, not wanting to sour relations with Pakistan and every other angle, but the underlying assumption at least in the media seems to be that it would be throwing good money into a lost cause.
Historically and strategically, this is far from true. Unlike Pakistan, Afghanistan has always had a sense of cohesion. A very simple example of this is the period between 1989 and 1991. Despite the Soviet’s withdrawal and Western predictions of the Najibullah Government’s collapse “within weeks”, the Government slogged it out for a full two years, in some cases actually gaining ground. This was undone when the Soviet Union collapsed and the last sources of finance and logistics dried up. This was not a collapse of Afghan morale or Afghan fighting ability, but rather the collapse of tangibles that supported that fighting ability.
Again and again, despite the motivated propaganda, the Afghan Army has proven itself a competent fighting force. This is not to say it has been without its fair share of problems. But in analysing what the Afghan Army can do, we also need to look at how bad the military situation for the Taliban is — and it has in fact been dire for quite some time now. The key to success lies in finding the tipping point — at what levels and for how long does the Afghan National Army’s competence have to be sustained to exploit the deep divisions, lack of morale and battle fatigue within the Taliban.
When we talk of supplying weapons to Afghanistan we need to keep in mind the calibre, impact and logistics. The International Security Assistance Force that remain (and we now know that at least 6,000 troops will stay back) will stave off any high-level threat from Pakistan. This means Pakistan’s hopes of using its Air Force and artillery like it did in aiding the Taliban in the late 90s, is a non-starter. It cannot afford to take on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation on a conventional battlefield in the open. What Afghan forces need are middle-level capabilities to sustain the current level of counter-insurgency operations, and, this is exactly what President Karzai had sought.
India has two options: Either fight the Taliban in Afghanistan or end up fighting them in India, because once the Taliban pacify Afghanistan they will invariably turn their cultural imperialism outwards. Keeping these militants bogged down in Afghanistan is an imperative, and losing hope is an extraordinarily dangerous policy for India at this stage.
New Delhi must actually measure these arms supply against the non-existent ‘goodwill’ of PakistanIJ As the saying goes: Possession is nine-tenths of the law. If Pakistan ‘possesses’ Afghanistan, no amount of goodwill will prevent the forces of fundamentalism unleashed there from being directed against India. Capability, after all is a tangible; goodwill is not. This was very much the same argument that the too-smart-by-half mandarins made when Tibet was abandoned. The extent of Chinese goodwill it brought India became evident in 1962. Yielding to bullies can be justified in a thousand different ways, but bullies remain bullies and appeasement simply does not work.
One myth that has been propagated is that somehow it is the Pakistani Army that supported and propped up the Taliban and that the civilian Government of Pakistan did not share this enthusiasm. Yet, very cogent evidence points to the fact that it was Benazir Bhutto’s then Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar (a retired Army officer before he joined the Pakistan Peoples Party) who came up with the Taliban strategy as a way of diverting internal fundamentalism outwards.
This is instructive given the tendency amongst apologists of Pakistan in India to hair-split between the Army and the Pakistani people. To be fair, deep differences exist, but these are ideological, not operational. As the Taliban, Kashmir and Kargil episodes show, territorial gain and martial glory have been temptations that no civilian Government in Pakistan has managed to resist. Prime Minister-designate Nawaz Sharif’s public pronouncements are all good, but one thing we need to be clear about is that the de facto Prime Minister was, is, and in the foreseeable future will, remain the Chief of Army Staff.
It is important to note here that 13 years of ‘restraint’ in Afghanistan have not spared our people, diplomats and soldiers from being butchered by terrorists. Pakistan’s ‘goodwill’, therefore, is as mythical a commodity as the unicorn. While it is fine for little girls in pinafores to dream of unicorns, their tangible utility to foreign policy has yet to be proven.
At the strategic level, creating a level of Afghan military dependency on India is a good thing for India in terms of West Asian stakes and energy security as well. By default, the supply lines will have to run through Iran. Equally by default the West can hardly fault India for using this to improve ties with Iran. After all, the end goal — a strong and stable Afghanistan — is not just India’s end goal but also that of the West. Thus, Afghanistan can be both the means and the end.
Finally, Afghanistan represents one of the most potent ideological threats to ‘the idea of Pakistan’ — probably more so than India at this stage. The history of how it came into being means that the Durand line negates Pakistan’s legal control over the northern territories and, combined with the Pakhtunkhwa movement, makes Islamabad’s demands for plebiscite in Kashmir nonsensical. Just as the ‘idea of Pakistan’ used religion to undercut nationalism, Afghanistan ensures that ethnicity can be used to undercut Pakistan’s religious nationalism.
Afghanistan is about so much more than just Afghanistan. What is needed is hope, and the tangible manifestation of hope is weapons and funds. If India loses hope, then Afghanistan will turn into our Czechoslovakia.