Imagine that Bangladesh, in the interest of upgrading its security, decides to forge a strategic alliance with Pakistan centered on the training of a hundred thousand new troops which it believes are needed to safeguard its internal and external security. What would be the reaction in India? Let us discount the fact that India does not face any insurgency from Bangladesh-based saboteurs, that Bangladesh, a militarily insignificant country, would never be a match to the awesome Indian military power, that the government of Sheikh Hasina enjoys the closest of relations with India, yet it is easy to foresee the reaction of the Indian media, establishment and the political class to such an alliance. Without exception it would be depicted as a devious Pakistani plot backed by China to encircle that country. A gigantic diplomatic effort, punctuated with military threats, would be mounted to dissuade Bangladesh from pursuing this course.
If the Pakistanis, with the Durand Line still under question from the Afghan side, a thousand mile long porous border impossible to control, nearly 30000 killed in wanton acts of urban terror inside Pakistan, a raging insurgency in Balochistan allegedly fuelled from outside, interpret the Indo-Afghan strategic alliance in similar terms, are they to blame? That Pakistan needs to recognise the peculiar demographic tapestry of Afghanistan in defining its interests is a valid point. The return of a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan strategically tied to Pakistan is no longer a viable proposition. In that event the massive Western investment in that country would be seen to have been wasted which even a superpower in retreat will not countenance. Also, the anti-Taliban coalition is in a far stronger position than in 1996. Other regional states have their own reservations about the restitution of the pre-2001 political dispensation in Afghanistan.
Equally untenable is the goal of installing a government in Afghanistan which is beholden to India for its security. From the Pakistani perspective it would be considered an undisguised, if not a crude attempt, to bequeath Afghanistan to the Northern Alliance underpinned by India’s military power. Essentially, Pakistan, the most directly affected party in this whole episode, is being invited to accept India as the regional hegemon and to adjust its policies and interests accordingly. Two questions arise: is this going to work and secondly and more crucially, is this the best way to clean up the mess in Afghanistan? The United States is spending $12 billion a year to train the Afghan security forces. According to the Washington Post of September 4 the attrition rate in the Afghan National Army during 2010 was 32% which means that one in three soldiers deserted. During the first half of this year, 24000 Afghan soldiers walked away. By the end of 2011 the attrition is expected to touch 24% for the year ie, one in four soldiers. At this rate not much of the Afghan National Army would be left for India to train.
The current state of war readiness of Afghan security forces reflects poorly on a decade of efforts by the finest military in the world and expenditure of tens of billions of dollars. The Indo-Afghan strategic alliance assumes that the Indian trainers will succeed where the Americans did not. It is well understood that Mr Karzai does not have much by way of independent decision making but one would have credited him with some common sense. How did it occur to him that a nation, which for centuries has rejected the hegemony of three great empires, the British, the Soviet and now the Americans, will suddenly agree to become an Indian protectorate?
By making this move Karzai has succeeded in losing whatever little credibility he was left with in Pakistan. The latter’s doubts over the Afghan President’s commitment to a negotiated settlement now stand confirmed.
These shortsighted maneuvers will make matters more difficult for all stakeholders who would do well to listen to the advice of the man who knows Afghanistan better than most. Writing in the Telegraph recently Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain’s Afghan envoy from 2007 to 2010, while ridiculing NATO’s claims of victory in Afghanistan, described the current strategy of replacing western soldiers in the forward operating bases with Tajiks as pure “fantasy” since they would be as alien to the southern Pushtun tribes as the Americans and the British. There was still time, the envoy enjoined, to correct the errors of the past ten years but that would require “a Herculean effort of American-led diplomacy, to bring together all the internal parties to the conflict – not just the various brands of Taliban – and, so as to apply outside in pressure for peace, all the regional powers.”
Therein lies the path for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan. For Karzai to look for protection from India against a sizeable segment of his own people is not the way to put closure to a particularly unfortunate chapter in that country’s troubled history. Whether the British envoy’s authoritative voice is heeded would be known during the forthcoming international conference in Istanbul.
The writer is Pakistan’s former Ambassador to the United Nations and European Union. He can be contacted at shaukatumer@hotmail.com