Afghan peace dividends

MK Bhadrakumar
Former Ambassador

In retrospect, India fought a hybrid war in Afghanistan in recent decades. Its claim to ‘peace dividends’, therefore, becomes a moot point. Hybrid war, also called the ‘grey zone’, is an ill-defined notion. It concerns power being employed to achieve national objectives in a way that falls short of physical conflict due to the ambiguity of international law, ambiguity of actions and attribution, or simply because the impact of the activities does not justify a response.

The end of the Afghan war should have been seized as a God-sent opportunity to turn a new page in relations with Pakistan. It is still doable.

Pakistan alleged last week that intelligence agencies had intercepted communications between terrorists and their ‘handlers’ in Afghanistan that India was behind the lethal terrorist attacks on two of its military installations in Balochistan on Thursday,  in which at least 13 terrorists and seven security personnel, including an officer, were killed. India has denied any such involvement. Rightly so. 

This bad blood has appeared just as India-Pakistan hostilities lately appeared to be mellowing. Pakistan gave the green signal for the transportation of India’s humanitarian aid (50,000 tons of wheat) by trucks through its highways for delivery to Afghanistan. It is an incredible development — Pakistan becoming the de-facto facilitator for Delhi’s overpass to the Taliban regime in Kabul. Evidently, no terror camps have appeared on Afghan soil to threaten India following the Taliban takeover. On the contrary, an estrangement between the Taliban (or some faction within its leadership) and Pakistan surfaced. India has no reason to worry now that Pakistan is the new sheriff in Kabul. 

The factors that purportedly accounted for India’s turf war in Afghanistan have dissipated. Such a positive trend emboldened the President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow to stress to Prime Minister Modi during the recent India-Central Asia summit that the time has come for the TAPI gas pipeline project. Moscow has called it a ‘politically attractive’ idea. However, there is no TAPI possible without good neighbourly behaviour by India and Pakistan. 

Security analysts estimate that the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan has actually spurred cross-border terrorism against Pakistan. Fingers are pointed at the Pakistani Taliban. But Thursday’s events in Balochistan were ‘coordinated attacks… of a level of complexity that may well be unprecedented for the group,’ as security analyst Michael Kugelman at the Wilson Centre noted. Possibly, the terrorists took help from external sources that are hostile toward Pakistan and bent upon fuelling antagonism between Islamabad and Kabul. The Afghan intelligence operatives who mentored the Balochi separatists previously acted with revenge mentality.  

Afghanistan remains unstable. Last Monday, Moscow forewarned the Taliban about the likelihood of an organised resistance to its rule appearing by summer. Definite intelligence inputs would have prompted such a warning. Moscow expressed readiness to host reconciliation talks between Taliban and Afghan opposition. Russia is worried that extra-regional powers could be stirring the Afghan pot. There was evidence of involvement of radical elements from Afghanistan and the West Asian region in instigating violence and destabilising the government in Kazakhstan recently, which necessitated a brief Russian intervention. 

On another plane, taking advantage of the preoccupations in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran — Ukraine crisis, Winter Olympics, nuclear negotiations in Vienna, etc. — Washington has pushed the envelope to intensify its engagement with the Taliban government. The rationale advanced is that ‘Afghanistan is hanging by a thread’ and engagement with the Taliban has become an unavoidable requirement for rendering humanitarian aid. Without a doubt, the talks in Oslo a fortnight ago between the Taliban and the US have gone a long way to legitimise the interim government in Kabul. 

On Wednesday, the US Treasury Department quietly ‘tweaked’ the sanctions regime against the Haqqani network by authorising international banks to transfer money to Kabul for humanitarian purposes, including to ‘state-owned Afghan depository institutions’. The revised regime permits transactions involving the Haqqani network across a broad spectrum ranging from ‘sharing of office space’, donor coordination meetings, etc. to ‘payments of taxes, fees, or import duties to, or the purchase or receipt of permits, licences, or public utility services from the Taliban, the Haqqani network, or any entity in which the Taliban or the Haqqani network owns.’  

Washington is in a hurry to put in place underpinnings for its dealings with the Haqqani network. Last Monday, President Biden announced the decision to nominate Qatar as a ‘major non-NATO ally’. On Wednesday, Taliban announced direct flights connecting Kabul with Doha. That eases travel for American diplomats based in Doha handling Afghan affairs. Qatar is also stepping in to run Afghan airports and regulate its airspace. 

India’s security establishment likely anticipated all this. Delhi’s robust Central Asian initiative falls in perspective. No doubt, from present indications, the main theatre of the ‘hybrid war’ unfolding in Afghanistan is going to be the Central Asian region that borders the US’ arch rivals — Russia, China and Iran. The great beauty about ‘grey zone’ conflict is that it is affordable, and, therefore, sustainable through an extended, open-ended period of time. For example, the US will now be spending only a tiny fraction of the one billion dollars a week that it spent for 20 years in Afghanistan. 

From the Indian viewpoint, however, there is a different paradigm in play here, at a time when the government is cutting back spending even in the agriculture sector, where the ‘real India’ lives and millions of Indians survive by a thread, when every penny counts, no matter under what expenditure head. The end of the Afghan war should have been seized as a God-sent opportunity to turn a new page in relations with Pakistan. It is still doable.