It’s of little strategic importance
for us. If Pakistan thinks it can control Afghanistan where Britain, Russia and
America at the peak of their power failed, wish them luck.
The sharply polarised political debate on the
nuclear deal was the most significant instance of the so-called holy national
consensus on foreign policy breaking in India.
But the larger consensus remains
intact. It is not healthy for a democracy, and particularly not when it has a
strategic community that has had even greater continuity than its establishment
economists, defying all changes of government, leaders, ideology.
That is why the time has come to
question, or at least intellectually challenge, some other aspects of this lazy
“consensus”. Even at the risk of inviting the charge of apostasy, therefore,
the time might have come to question the prudence of our unquestioned,
un-debated idea of engaging in a dirty little cold war with Pakistan in
Afghanistan once the Americans withdraw.
Today, everybody seems to be
accepting the idea that Afghanistan is of great strategic significance to
India, and we can neither cede it to Pakistan, nor leave them to fill the power
vacuum after the Americans. Similarly, that this is the Great Game country, and
we are back to it, somehow inheriting the mantle of the British power in the
19th century, except that we might have to deal with an additional distraction
called Pakistan. Further, that Afghanistan is a resource (mineral)-rich land
where we have future commercial stakes, and is a gateway to Central Asia,
making transit rights of such paramount importance.
There is some truth to some, but not
all. The larger picture looks very different on closer examination. Also,
engaging in a policy that puts us permanently and violently at odds with the
Pakistanis is an idea that is being accepted much too readily. As if this is
our destiny. As if we have no choice.
All of this, frankly, is lazy,
self-serving rubbish, dished out by a strategic establishment that suffers
terminally from a cold war mindset, and does not quite know, like all bigger
powers (the US included), when to declare victory, and when to cut its losses.
The more curious thing is, some of
this is happening under a prime minister who never tires of exhorting his
policy-makers to “think out of the box.”
What kind of strategic importance does
Afghanistan have for India now? Yes, we need transit to Central Asia. But to
reach Afghanistan, we have to first persuade the Pakistanis to grant us
transit. The more we jostle with them for influence in Afghanistan, the lesser
the chances of their being so nice to us. Yes, Afghanistan is resource-rich and
the Chinese may get there if we are not there. But what are we, meanwhile,
doing with our own mineral resources? So many of our mines are shut, or not
accessible. We might get a hundred times more value by either fighting, or
bribing (as everybody eventually does with insurgents in Afghanistan), our own
Maoists to be able to exploit our own mines. And the Chinese will get there
before us anyway.
And yes, there will be a power
vacuum in Afghanistan. It will still be a country of great strategic
importance. But for whom, is the question. It will be of no to us. None
of our supplies or trade come to Afghanistan. None of our bad guys hide there.
No Afghan has ever been involved in a terror attack on India. In fact, almost
never has a terror attack on us been even planned in the more precise Af-Pak
region. They have all been planned and executed between Muzaffarabad, Muridke,
Karachi and Multan. Almost never has an Afghan, Pakhtun, Baluch, Tajik, any
ethnicity, been involved in a terror attack in India. It’s always been the
Punjabis. Ask anybody in the Indian army who has served in Kashmir and he will
tell you that the intruders he fought were exactly of the same ethnic stock as
the bulk of the Pakistani army he may have to fight in a real war: the Punjabi
Muslims.
Yes, as we said earlier, Afghanistan
is still a country of great strategic importance. But for Pakistan, and
certainly not for us. Pakistan has a long, unsettled border with it and a
more-than-latent irredentist Pathan sentiment on both sides of the Durand Line
that it dreads spinning out of control as (and if) Afghanistan breaks up along
north-south-west ethnic lines. From tribal ties, to funny trade-links, like gun
and drug-running, an unsettled Afghanistan will be a permanent thorn in
Pakistan’s side when six divisions of its army are already not able to get the
measure of the armed anarchy in FATA. Why should India then get into this
unwinnable mess? More importantly, why should India give the Pakistani army and
the ISI just what they need, a great, holy, moral justification to pour into
Afghanistan to “fight the Indian challenge”?
Leave Afghanistan to the Pakistanis. If the
Pakistani army thinks it can fix, subdue and control Afghanistan, after the
British, Soviets and Americans have failed to do precisely this at the peak of
each one’s superpower-dom, why not let the Pakistanis try their hand at it? If
they pour another ten divisions and half of the ISI into that hapless country
now, isn’t it that much of a relief for us on our western borders? What could
serve our strategic interests better than having the Pakistanis discover a
permanent strategic threat/ challenge/ opportunity along their western borders?
Won’t that be some relief?
If the Pakistani army thinks it can
succeed in a mission in which their mightier predecessors, the British and the
Soviet empires and the Americans failed, good luck to them. Because it will
fulfil the fantasy of “strategic depth” they have nursed since they were rocked
by totally fictional visions of massive Indian tank assaults through the desert
cutting their mainland into two during General Sundarji’s Operation Brasstacks
in 1987.
It is since then that the Pakistani
strategic establishment has been seeking “strategic depth” in Afghanistan. Now,
if any army wants to seek the “depth” of Afghanistan for its armour, vital air
force assets, or even nukes, good luck to them. In fact, it would be
interesting to see how the rest of the world, particularly the Americans, would
react if such a thing was even contemplated.
Far from being a security asset
ever, Afghanistan, for the Pakistani army, will be exactly what it has been for
any other invading army in its history: a permanent Waterloo in slow motion.
So shall we leave the Pakistani army
and ISI to their own devices in Afghanistan? Whether they fail or succeed, it
will confirm only one widely held view in the global strategic community: that
howsoever dashing it may be tactically, the Pakistani military-intelligence
establishment’s strategic thinking emerges not from its brains but that some
place lower down in human anatomy. Maybe then, the best way we can serve our
own strategic interests in Afghanistan is to stay out of their way.
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