India came out of its Afghan closet this evening, when it promised Afghan President Hamid Karzai it would assist in the “training, equipping and capacity building programmes for Afghan national security forces”.
The line, tucked away inside the strategic partnership document signed by Karzai and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is significant because it enhances India’s role in the Af-Pak region by several notches, that too at Afghanistan’s request.
While Delhi has been training Afghan police and even army jawans in recent years, these have been in small numbers and very much behind a cloak of reticence.
But 10 years after US forces threw out the Taliban from Kabul, Delhi seems to have finally emerged from its reticence, by promising to deliver what Afghanistan wants.
This, combined with the $2-billion aid that Delhi has already promised during the PM’s recent visit to Kabul, makes India one of the biggest donors in Afghanistan.
Until the last minute, Indian officials were shying away from confirming whether the strategic partnership agreement would be signed or not, pointing out that it had nearly happened when the PM had gone to Kabul. Then, it had been pulled out of the pile of agreements that were signed with Karzai.
This time, though, there was no hesitation on the part of the Afghan president. With the killing of former president and peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani last month, Karzai’s office on Sunday openly accused a Pakistani citizen of carrying out the suicide attack. Other Afghan officials said the killing had been masterminded by the Quetta Shura, a group of Taliban leaders headed by Mullah Omar, who lived in the Pakistani city of Quetta.
Rabbani’s killing, as well as American accusations of the Pakistani spy agency, the ISI, being involved in the Afghan attacks through its proxies, the Haqqani terrorist network, seems to have turned Karzai towards Delhi.
At a media briefing this evening, the prime minister commiserated with the people of Afghanistan, saying they had “suffered enough (and deserved) to live in peace and decide their future themselves, without outside interference, coercion and intimidation”.
Karzai responded by saying he hoped that Afghanistan would, one day, live like the rest of South Asia in peace, where “radicalism was not used as an instrument of policy”.
But Delhi, while it prepares to ramp up its engagement, has decided it will go it alone. Meaning, there will be no joint projects with the Americans or the French or the Russians — though all these countries have been asking India, the biggest power in the region, to join hands and leverage their efforts.
“There is too much at stake, too much instability in the region. We are happy to help the Afghans on the security as well as economic front, because they are our friends. But India is very clear that it will not send soldiers to Afghanistan. We will not put boots on the ground,” a senior Indian official said on the condition of anonymity.
Besides the strategic partnership, two other memoranda of understanding (MoUs), on the development of hydrocarbons and mining were also signed this evening between the visiting minister Waliullah Shahrani and minister of state for mines Dinsha Patel. Clearly, India is keen to strenghen its security and political partnership with trade and economic ties, which have been in the forefront this past decade. India’s aid amounts to $2 billion, making it one of the largest donors in Afghanistan.
Significantly, Delhi is keen to integrate the Afghan economy with India’s economy specifically and South Asia as a whole, giving meat to the PM’s dictum of “breakfast in Delhi, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul”. The PM’s forefathers, businessmen all, travelled this very route for decades until a great wall was dropped on the India-Afghan relationship, first by the partition of the sub-continent and much more determinedly when the Taliban overthrew Afghan president Najibullah in 1996 and took charge of Kabul.
But with the freeing of Afghanistan for the past 10 years, Delhi has been systematically using the economic route to reconstruct war-torn Afghanistan in an effort to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans. It has spectacularly succeeded, as several Afghans testify, making the India-Afghan relationship UPA-2’s most successful foreign policy experiment.
That is why the MoUs on hydrocarbons and mining are interesting. Not only have the Chinese invested $1.5 billion in the Aynak copper mines in Afghanistan already, SAIL has also shown interest in exploiting that country’s mineral resources. “It has never been clearer,” the senior Indian official said, “In times of economic recession, the exploitation of natural resources plays a very important, strategic function not only for India but also for the country in question, in this case Afghanistan.”
