On why "India should avoid military involvement in Afghanistan, no matter what the temptation or compulsion or provocation"

As published by the Mint on Jan 2, 2014, at http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/HGwDVRXYIdacHrnFn0T7RI/New-Year-resolution-for-India-Stay-out-of-Afghanistan-mess.html?google_editors_picks=true

New Year resolution for India: Stay out of Afghanistan mess

India should avoid military involvement in Afghanistan, no matter what the temptation or compulsion or provocation

It would be stupidity on a truly monumental scale if India—for whatever imagined strategic, economic, or anti-terror pay-offs—ends up sending troops into the Afghan quagmire. Photo: Reuters

This might seem like a strange, even bizarre, suggestion as a New Year resolution for India. Afghanistan is hardly top of mind in the Indian public consciousness. There are far more pressing issues, to do with corruption, economic policy, and so on. Besides, nobody thinks we are about to get into the Afghanistan mess.

But there is every possibility of this changing dramatically in 2014. For this is the year the US is set to withdraw maximally from Afghanistan. Of course, the US and its allies are not getting out completely—permanent US/NATO bases will remain. But the American troops, pruned down from a peak of 101,000 in 2011 to about 20,000 by 2014-end, will play a supporting role to Afghan forces. The latter will be the lead player when it comes to ensuring law and order, and in particular, the security of all the foreigners out there ostensibly on a humanitarian mission to save Afghanistan from the Afghans.

The big question is: can Afghanistan withstand the Taliban onslaught after the “draw down” of the US and NATO forces? There have already been innumerable instances of so-called “turncoat attacks”, where local recruits trained to staff the Afghan national army have launched surprise attacks on US/NATO personnel. There doesn’t seem to be a foolproof way of securing local security forces from Taliban infiltration. And if there is such a process, it is doubtful that too many local recruits would come through the filter as trust-worthy. If enough don’t, you may not have an Afghan army large enough to take over from the departing foreign troops.

But public opinion, especially in the US, and also in all its major allies with troop deployments, is strongly against continued military involvement. Hence the draw down and the 2014 deadline. Understandably, there is a growing nervousness about what will happen to all the “outsiders” in Afghanistan—and the investments of all the outsiders, not all of them American—once the security apparatus is in the hands of the Afghans themselves.

This is where India comes in. India already has a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghanistan, under which it has guaranteed military assistance to the latter. Currently, this is restricted to sale of weapons, training, logistics and infrastructural support. This is in addition to substantial civilian assistance: Afghanistan is India’s largest foreign aid recipient, and India has invested close to `10,000 crore or $2 billion in various reconstruction projects. This might seem small when measured against the investments of other countries, but it is inevitable that this figure will expand given the intensifying war for the planet’s mineral resources.

Various estimates put Afghanistan’s mineral reserves at $1.5-2.5 trillion. It has huge reserves of copper, iron, cobalt, gold and a vital industrial metal, lithium, which is used in batteries for mobile phones and laptops. In fact, the Pentagon has described Afghanistan as “the Saudi Arabia of Lithium”. Apart from being resource rich, Afghanistan is also a crucial “land bridge” whose control is essential for securing lucrative pipelines and transport corridors needed to plug the untapped natural resources of the other mineral-rich countries in the region to the global economy. So, irrespective of how many of its own troops it has on the ground, the US is not about to loosen its grip on the land-locked nation, which is vital to its long-term interests in the region.

Many see the conflict in Afghanistan more as a resource war that began by masquerading as a revenge mission, and is now masquerading as a humanitarian intervention. India, which has long dropped any pretensions to an independent foreign policy, has been more than amenable to serving as America’s surrogate in the region—a role that, much to its irritation, had for long been assigned to Pakistan.

Our foreign policy mandarins—let’s not read too much into India’s churlish behaviour in the Khobragade episode—have for long derived their greatest kicks from inching India closer and closer toward displacing Pakistan as America’s preferred ally in the region. This was seen most spectacularly in the triumphalism around the India-US nuclear deal. It is also seen in the rising frequency of hawkish anti-China pieces emitted by various think tank experts.

India’s closeness to the US, the argument goes, suits the interests of both the nations. While India, constantly harassed by Chinese incursions into its territory, can use the leverage provided by a strategic partnership with the world’s only superpower, the US can do with a reliable geo-political henchman in the region who can keep China’s growing ambitions in check.

It is well known that many of these think tanks are funded directly or indirectly by the American government or business groups. And there is every reason to believe that 2014 will see a growing clamour from them calling upon India to play the role it has traditionally played for Western imperial powers (which it did most impressively in the two World Wars): supply cannon fodder. Of course, this is not the language in which the clamour will find expression.

Rather, the case will broadly take the form of an appeal to India’s supra-nationalistic ego and economic ambitions. The arguments will begin by presenting the US withdrawal as an “opportunity” for India, which, we will be informed, is now being called upon by the world to play a “greater role”. Thanks to this greater role, our troops in Afghanistan will expand India’s “power projection” beyond the sub-continent, and into Central Asia.

What’s more, it will boost India’s war against terror by allowing us to directly target its “jihadi base” in Taliban territory. The most compelling argument, naturally, will be to do with Kashmir, with reports already predicting that once the foreign troops start going home, all the jihadi militants in Afghanistan will turn their attention to Kashmir. The best way to avoid this scenario is by pre-empting it—which would entail sending our troops to Afghanistan to eliminate the jihadi elements at the source.

Public opinion, of course, may still not endorse dispatching Indian meat to the Afghan slaughterhouse. But then, what are intelligence agencies for? And the burgeoning national security beat where unsubstantiated claims from anonymous sources can be—and have often been—passed off as news? Given a terror attack or two, masterminded, presumably, by elements enjoying sanctuary in the badlands of Af-Pak, and a rightwing regime in New Delhi with a predilection for pandering to testosterone-driven jingoism, it is not inconceivable that enough hysteria might be generated so that India does the “needful” as per Washington’s requirements.

Indian troop deployment in Afghanistan, if it comes to pass, would be the worst foreign policy blunder since the 1962 war with China—also, incidentally, a tragedy induced by hubris—making the IPKF fiasco in Sri Lanka seem like a mildly unpleasant picnic in comparison.

India’s Afghanistan policy till date of soft power projection, which has meant restricting itself to support roles (as opposed to combat ones) in the military domain, and financial aid combined with infrastructural investments in the civilian domain, has worked excellently for us. This is all the more reason for us not to be misguided into an act of strategic overreach. First the Soviets burnt their fingers in Afghanistan. Then the people of the US and Pakistan paid heavily—and are still paying—for the overt and covert military adventurism of their governments in this region.

It would be stupidity on a truly monumental scale if India—for whatever imagined strategic, economic, or anti-terror pay-offs—ends up sending troops into the Afghan quagmire. With large swathes of Pakistan already beyond the control of the state, the consequences for India are too nightmarish to even contemplate. The ministry of external affairs would, therefore, do well to adopt this as a New Year Resolution: India shall avoid military involvement in Afghanistan, no matter what the temptation or compulsion or provocation.