India's political and economic presence in Afghanistan is often viewed as a Machiavellian ploy aimed against Pakistan and a new book analyses what truly drives India's Afghanistan policy.
"My Enemy's Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal" by Avinash Paliwal provides a comprehensive analysis of India's strategy debates and foreign policymaking processes vis-a-vis Afghanistan, from the last decade of the Cold War to the 1990s Afghan civil war and the more recent US-led war on terror.
Afghanistan was central to this (temporary) thaw in India-Pakistan ties - both as a curse and a potential blessing, he writes.
"It had been a curse because of the powerful but unimaginative trope that Afghanistan is a proxy battlefield. Pakistan's support to the Taliban in the 1990s, and India's counter-balancing strategy of arming the anti-Taliban United Front, was perhaps the peak of such shadow boxing," the book, published by HarperCollins India, says.
But it had also been a potential blessing because resolving differences on Afghanistan required little political capital from both sides, and cleared the way for communicating about other ostensibly intractable issues such as Kashmir, Balochistan, and cross-border terrorism, it says.
The central question that concerns this book is: is containing Pakistan a key factor driving India's Afghanistan policy?
Despite having a vision of a strong, stable, sovereign, and territorially united Afghanistan, India's policy course has witnessed changes big and small over the past three and a half decades, writes Paliwal, a lecturer in Diplomacy and Public Policy at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
Referring to former vice president Hamid Ansari's statement in 2003 that a 'neutral status' is the best option for Afghanistan's persistent problems, he says, "However, in contrast to this alleged aim of neutrality, between 1996 and 2001, India was staunchly against the Taliban regime and provided political, financial, and military support to the anti-Taliban United Front (UF), popularly known as the Northern Alliance."
Marking a policy change with the entry of the coalition military machine in 2001, India voluntarily stopped such partisan support and attempted to engage most Afghan political factions, the author says.
According to him, the three causal drivers of India's Afghanistan policy, i.e. desire to strike a balance between Afghanistan and Pakistan, international political postures, and Afghanistan's domestic politics (the origins of which lie in the pre- and post-independence political history) are mostly in confluence but can also be at odds with each other.
The author says that a fulcrum of global power play for decades, and a theatre of conflict, competition, as well as aspiration, Afghanistan is of critical strategic interest for India, and captures the magnitude and multitude of changes in India's foreign and security policy over the years.
Although there are explanations for Pakistan's behaviour towards Afghanistan, India's Afghanistan policy has elicited analogies of 'great game' and 'proxy warfare', or simply, strategic desire for access to material resources in that region, as causal explanations, Paliwal writes.
If anything, India's role in Afghanistan's international history (particularly from the mid-1960s onwards) has been overlooked, he says.
The book is divided into three parts: debating neutrality, debating containment, and debating engagement. Each part deals with three different phases of Indias role in Afghanistan.
The first part, debating neutrality, consists of two chapters that examine the history of India's relations with Afghanistan and how the latter figures in the former's popular imagination.
The second part of the book, debating containment, delves into events that led India to more or less embrace the proxy- war format vis-a-vis Pakistan in Afghanistan during the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century.
The third part of the book, debating engagement, analyses India's approach towards Afghanistan after 9/11.
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