Melanne Verveer, America’s top diplomat on women’s rights and gender issues worldwide, lobbies and cajoles, wheedles and exhorts governments the globe over from her sixth floor office in the State Department in Washington DC, aware that she must use every tool in the book to improve the lot of women. Inevitably the talk turns to Afghanistan. Despite the dubbing as old fodder of the Wikileaks expose on Pakistan’s double jeopardy vis-à-vis Afghanistan a few weeks ago, Washington can talk of little else.
Across the US capital, in fact, the sense of a siege within — and without — is overwhelming. The economy refuses to respond to the massive injection of stimuli. The deficit has already touched $1.47 trillion and unemployment figures threaten to reach 10 per cent. As much as $345 billion has already been spent on the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan — this, as the body bags relentlessly return home and the media notes, is America’s longest running war in the last hundred years. The silver lining is the end of the Iraq war, although even here at least 50,000 US troops are still staying on.
But the most significant change to a pair of Indian eyes is the American elite’s growing disenchantment with China. At this time last year Obama was preparing to go to Beijing, during which visit he agreed with Hu Jintao that a Sino-American oversight of South Asia was both welcome and necessary. These days the Americans deny the very idea of an intended Sino-US condominium; Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “G-2” acronym, so redolent of the changing global power structures a year-and-a-half ago, is now anathema in the US capital.
Clearly, there’s nothing like a country, so Third World until yesterday and now the world’s second largest economy, to concentrate the mind. Ever since the Chinese warned the US Navy in July not to carry out naval exercises with its treaty ally, South Korea, in the Yellow Sea, claiming 200 nautical miles of water as sovereign territory — and forcing the US Navy to back off — the political class across Washington has been fulminating against Beijing.
At least in China, US troops are not dying or getting seriously wounded everyday, as they are in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, US policy-makers say they are fully aware of the nature of the beast. “We know that Pakistan uses asymmetrical warfare, or terrorism, as an instrument of its policy, both against international troops as well as against Indian workers in Afghanistan. We believe that the use of this policy is a core part of its security doctrine.”
But the Americans have also been clearly told by Pakistan army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani that Islamabad will not change its Afghan or India policies irrespective of monetary gain or military pressure. Pakistan felt threatened by India’s large presence in Afghanistan, Kayani said, and believed there was such a thing as “too much aid”.
Kayani, in fact, had emphasised that if the US wanted its endgame in Afghanistan to succeed, the US would have to recognise Pakistan’s “legitimate aspirations” in that country. This “strategic understanding” — a term Kayani now used, having discarded “strategic depth” as a remnant of the Cold War — meant that Pakistan, not India, would have to be acknowledged as the primary player in this region.
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Towards this end, Kayani had demanded a free trade accord between Pakistan and the US as well as a civil-nuclear deal on the lines of what America had done for India in 2008.
Steve Cohen, a top South Asia expert at the Brookings think-tank, put it succinctly: “Afghanistan is a short-term concern for the US. The major objective is to reduce our presence and ultimately withdraw. Of medium-term interest is Pakistan, a much more important country with nuclear weapons as well as the ability to leverage terror. India is a long-term interest because India’s rise affects the global balance of power.”
The State Department view echoed Cohen: US troops were in Afghanistan for the short haul, increasingly focussed on training Afghan national forces to requisite levels as had been done in Iraq; they were waiting to come home. It was Pakistan, a fragile state with nuclear weapons and threatened by terrorists to boot, which was the far more important country.
Pakistan’s geostrategic location means that 80 per cent of US weaponry and all other supplies meant for Afghanistan have to be routed through Karachi. (The Russians have only allowed non-lethal supplies to pass through its territory.) There is so much at stake in the Af-Pak badlands that even if the US very much wants to work with democratic India in Afghanistan — and had suggested the joint setting up of an agricultural university around Kabul some months ago — it is censoring its policies because of Islamabad’s sensitivities.
Now, as Obama prepares to come to India, and from all accounts has nixed a visit to Pakistan, the truth is that the US is happy for India to up its economic engagement in Afghanistan — but will not let Kabul ask Delhi for help with training its security forces.
As Afghan national security adviser Rangin Dafdar Spanta said recently in Delhi, “we want to significantly expand our cooperation with India.” But he refused to add in what direction.
The future could have been so different — from armies of Indian women NGOs fanning out across the Afghan countryside and gladdening the heart of Melanne Verveer, working closely with Afghanistan’s parliamentarians after the September 18 election, training officials, analysts and bankers of the Kabul Bank (which has just had a run on its money), retraining Afghan policemen in India (as many as 1,000 policemen underwent training in 2002-03) and expanding security training to soldiers and officers so that US/Nato forces could declare victory, hand over security to the Afghans, and go home.
The Indian economy, still growing at nearly 9 per cent, would happily join in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Clearly, though, the US establishment doesn’t seem to want any of it.
Back in Washington, the future already seems here. Mid-term elections in November, followed by another major review of America’s Afghan strategy in December, could write the epitaph for any further risk-taking on the Afghan chessboard. From the Af-Pak frontier to the Middle Kingdom, this would be a good time to change the rules of the great game. Pity is that Obama, who rewrote his own election strategy several months ago, seems to have slipped his nerve.