JOIN USAmerican President Donald Trump’s enunciation recently of his Afghanistan strategy, whose central pillar is a marked shift in Washington’s approach towards Pakistan, has probably ushered in the most crucial, and probably the most dangerous phase, in the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. While paving the way for the deployment of more American troops in Afghanistan, Trump has publicly criticised Pakistan for offering safe haven to “agents of chaos” and vowed not to remain “silent” over Pakistan’s duplicitous act of “housing the very terrorists” that the US has been fighting.
Trump’s admonishment is the first ever public admission by the top-most US government leader of the fact that Pakistan has been playing a destructive and dubious role in Afghanistan by providing support and sanctuary to terrorists. As expected, Trump’s new Afghan strategy has been praised by both Indian and Afghan governments for increasing troop numbers, doing away with arbitrary timelines of withdrawal and for upping pressure on Pakistan.
A war that began 16 years ago in October 2001 with the hunt for the al-Qaeda masterminds of 9/11, has turned into a fruitless and directionless counter-insurgency campaign to keep Afghanistan’s fragile democracy alive amid a brutal Taliban insurgency, supported and financed by Pakistan’s ‘deep state’. War-torn Afghanistan faces a dangerous convergence of political instability, institutional weakness, endemic conflict and zero-sum competition for geopolitical influence. The Taliban has steadily increased its control of Afghan territory in the rural areas, and its leadership continues to enjoy a sanctuary in Pakistan.
Furthermore, other regional powers are increasingly trying to fish in Afghanistan’s troubled waters. If Moscow has been ingratiating itself to Islamabad in the hope that a spill-over of Taliban’s radical influence into Russia’s southern provinces can be prevented, then Beijing has inveigled itself into several multilateral peace processes aimed at political reconciliation with the intractable Taliban. In fact, Trump has inherited a far more challenging situation in Afghanistan than his predecessor did in 2009.
The US Defence Secretary, James Mattis, was outspoken when he told a Congressional hearing in June this year, “We are not winning in Afghanistan.” That is why Trump felt the need to convince the war-weary American people by saying that “I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle,” further adding that the “consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable” since it “would create a vacuum” to be exploited by the ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Rather than on any ideological, security or economic convergence with the US, Islamabad has invariably kept the broader focus of US-Pakistan relations on the dynamics of India-Pakistan relations. The Pakistan army remains obsessively preoccupied with countering India, which it considers an existential threat to Pakistan. India is perceived to be using Afghanistan as a base to foment anti-Pakistan activities, particularly supporting separatists in Pakistan’s Balochistan province.
Afghan political leaders are also perceived to be involved in this proxy war. As emphasised by the US National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton after the Trump speech, this flawed perception is used as a justification by Pakistan’s security establishment for relying on state-allied terrorist groups and facilitating the creation of a ‘friendly’ government in Afghanistan. Due to this logic, Pakistan has found itself strongly aligned with China, whose relations with India remain cold and fractured.
India has been involved in the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. It has spent around $2 billion since 2002 on various development projects. But this all is anathema to Islamabad. The Pentagon report on Afghanistan, released in June this year, has unmistakably pointed out that “Pakistan views the outcome of Afghanistan to be in its vital national interest and thus remains driven by its India-centric regional policy objectives.” This is very problematic for the Trump administration since Washington and New Delhi are developing convergence on regional security issues, including Afghanistan.
During Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s June meeting with Trump in Washington, the Afghan issue also came up for discussion. As the joint press statement said, in order to rebuild Afghanistan and security in that country, India and the US would “maintain close consultation and communication” to coordinate their policies. India’s beneficial offerings to the Afghan people have usually been a downplayed factor in the lexicon of America’s Afghan strategy.
Trump’s appreciation of India’s significant contribution and invitation to do more for the development of Afghanistan is certainly a bold and welcome move but the language in his speech seems to have introduced an unpalatable dynamic in bilateral relations. While underlining India’s status as an important partner for the US, Trump ended up linking trade policy outcomes with India’s current Afghan policy. His assertion that “India makes billions of dollars in trade with the United States and we want them to help us out in Afghanistan” has raised eyebrows in New Delhi. It also suggests that Trump believes India is free-riding in Afghanistan.
However, pumping in more economic resources in Afghanistan is not going to be an easy proposition for the Modi government as India has its own economic challenges. It must be hoped that the exact specifics of the Trump administration’s expectations from New Delhi would be spelt out and harmonised with India’s delivery capacity and threshold for absorbing Pakistan’s vindictive response.
(The writer is Assistant Professor, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Sardar Patel University, Jodhpur)