The stakes in Afghanistan

India should increase its commitment to the country

The recent terrorist attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul has once again drawn attention to the high risks associated with India’s developmental role in Afghanistan. As Indian Ambassador Jayant Prasad told this newspaper, anti-Indian elements in the region have never been able to come to terms with India’s ground-level popularity among the Afghan people. It is a testimony to India’s commitment to the Afghan people that so many Indians choose to work for Afghanistan’s reconstruction and development, against such odds. Rather than ask the question ‘What is India doing here’, as an American general did the other day, the US must ask ‘What can we all do together’ to find a lasting solution to Afghanistan’s problems. Neither India nor the US would want India to get involved militarily in fighting the extremist forces in the region. However, no friend of Afghanistan, least of all the Pakistanis, should object to India’s developmental role. Rather, Pakistan should work with India by making it easy for Indian assistance to reach Afghanistan by road and rail, so that both the South Asian neighbours can aid reconstruction and development in Afghanistan.

India, for its part, must not only continue to invest in Afghanistan’s economic development, it must become far more efficient and effective in delivering development. While important infrastructure projects, including power supply to Kabul, have come to fruition in recent months, Indian assistance and investment are less than what they should be. Even where the money has come, the delays in implementation have hurt the country’s image. As in so many other parts of the world, including India’s immediate neighbourhood, China is overtaking India as a source of investment, and aid. China had virtually no interest in Afghanistan through the 19th and 20th centuries. But in recent years it has raised its profile as an investor, especially in resources extraction, and has backed Pakistan on many issues. China’s interests in the region have already added a new dimension to the never-ending ‘Great Game’ in the Hindu Kush.

But neither external military support nor foreign aid and investment can offer a sustainable path to peace and development in this troubled nation. It is time that the members of the UN Security Council and Afghanistan’s important neighbours, including India, Pakistan, Iran and Tajikistan, come together to find a lasting solution. None of them can hope to benefit from an Afghanistan divided along ethnic lines, or a nation in permanent civil war. There are, even more importantly, larger issues involved in what kind of a nation Afghanistan becomes. Should it remain a modern Muslim nation, like so many of the ‘stans’, and as many in Iran and Pakistan wish their nations to be, or should everyone allow the country to return to the lawless land that it has been through much of its history? Much more than the survival of the Hamid Karzai regime is at stake in Afghanistan, for its own people and for the world.