T N Ninan: Frontline pay-off

The general assumption in New Delhi’s “strategic community” is that it is in India’s interest for Americans troops to stay on in Kabul. The theory is that the US is doing the hard work that is beyond Indian military capability, and that US troops are preventing Afghanistan from falling into the hands of a Pakistan-controlled Taliban. That is why the prospect of a US pull-out is viewed in New Delhi with mild alarm. It is also why Pakistan is busy playing its double-game of pretending to be an American ally while undermining its military efforts — Islamabad badly wants the US to leave Kabul. The US knows this, but turns a blind eye because its only real access to Afghanistan is through Pakistan. In this game of double bluff, who is the loser? India, of course.

To see why, look at the pattern of US military aid to Pakistan. The tap was closed after the Indo-Pak war of 1965, and was opened again only when the Soviet Union marched into Afghanistan in 1979. It was closed again in 1988, when the Soviets left Kabul, and then re-opened in 2001 when the US war in Afghanistan began. From 1965 to 1979, Pakistan received less than $0.03 billion as US military aid. That number shot up to $2.2 billion in the 1980s, fell off in the 1990s, and in the years after 9/11 has climbed to a stratospheric $13 billion, with another $2.29 billion promised just last month. Not bad going for a country whose economy is one-eighth India’s in size.

A lot of the recent money is channelled as “coalition support”, but there is no proper audit and even the Americans know that much of the money has gone to buy India-related hardware. So, the direct consequence of Pakistan becoming a frontline state is that its military gets all the goodies that it wants — and most of those goodies are useful only against India.

You could argue that, despite the US arms aid, India can comfortably take care of Pakistan if war breaks out, but that would be to miss the point — which is that if Pakistan were not a frontline state, it would pay a price for its actions, whereas today it has virtual immunity. President Carter cut off everything other than food aid when Pakistan developed a uranium enrichment facility in 1979, and President Bush (Sr) similarly froze arms aid in 1988 because Pakistan was thought to have gone nuclear. Both decisions were undone as soon as Pakistan became a frontline state, in 1980 and again in 2001; so the country has not had to pay the price for misadventures like Kargil or for its nuclear proliferation activity. And, bear in mind the strategic implications of the fact that Pakistan’s dollar reserves today are less than the arms aid it has received in the last decade.

On top of this, the US being in Afghanistan may have Islamised Pakistanis more than might have been the case otherwise. If you go by Pew’s opinion polls, six out of 10 Pakistanis see the US as an enemy, and only one in 10 sees it as an ally. Thank the drone attacks.

What is the alternative? If the US leaves, and Pak-controlled Taliban take Kabul once again, how is it in India’s interest? It isn’t, but too much is made of the Pakistani search for strategic depth — because India can influence events in Afghanistan from that country’s north and west. More importantly, the US and India will find greater strategic cohesion if AfPak is not a spoiler in the relationship, because the real convergence of interests will become more obvious, and get the attention it deserves.