Behind the smiles

Afghanistan's shadow on Indo-US relations

The joint press conference by Minister for External Affairs S Jaishankar and visiting United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken was apparently a comradely exercise, but there were nevertheless deep cleavages in view between the Indian and the American perspectives on regional security in particular. The precipitate US withdrawal from Afghanistan — a decision taken by President Joe Biden and being implemented at the moment — was clearly a continued irritant. The Indian perspective is that it will create major instability in South Asia and beyond. Mr Jaishankar did not criticise the decision directly, saying merely that it was already taken and diplomacy must look forward — but that in itself will be seen as a sign of dissatisfaction.

It is true that both insisted there was “much more convergence” on Afghanistan than there was a divergence in viewpoints. Yet the subtext was not so happy, particularly given the Taliban’s rapid advance through large parts of Afghanistan in recent weeks and credible reports of atrocities and reprisals. Mr Jaishankar argued implicitly that the Taliban could not be trusted with negotiations when he noted that “peace negotiations should be a negotiation and lead to peace”. Mr Blinken instead represented the optimistic view of the current US administration that “presumably the Taliban wants its leaders to be able to travel freely in the world, sanctions lifted”, and that “abusing the rights of [Afghanistan’s] people is not the path to achieving these objectives”. To Indian eyes, this was a particularly odd argument to make the very week that the Taliban’s deputy leader was given a visibly warm welcome by the foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China on the former’s official visit to that country.

Mr Blinken’s visit, if anything, sought to redefine the Indo-US relationship away from security cooperation and towards a broader, “softer” set of issues led by the Covid-19 pandemic and joint responses by democracies to such emergencies in the Indo-Pacific. He stressed the Quad was not a military alliance, which is also how India prefers to describe the grouping, and that there is a wide slate of possible cooperative activities that the Quad can undertake, from vaccines to infrastructure to supply chain resilience. This is a worthy goal. The question, however, is how much of this can be operationalised at short notice. The Quad summit earlier this year, for example, promised that the US would help manufacture the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in India for export to Southeast Asia and elsewhere. This has not yet materialised. Cooperation on infrastructure has also been slow to get off the ground in spite of efforts by Japan and by the US in the past. The fact is that the Quad’s raison d’etre has primarily been to manage Indo-Pacific security in the context of a rising China. But given that the immediate threats are in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, India’s contribution to this security provision is minimal because of its current security doctrine. Whether New Delhi likes it or not, Washington’s eyes have turned eastward from Afghanistan, and, therefore, more pressure will be put on the Indo-US partnership than hitherto.