Thinking About Afghanistan

Thinking About Afghanistan

The United States has a deep interest in the emergence of a stable, modernizing, economically integrated, peaceful South Asia—by which I mean the region that is centered on India, but which also encompasses Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan. [...] In strategic terms, the Afghan war is in some ways a sidebar to the main event in the region. Elsewhere in South Asia, in Pakistan and in India, American influence is at best indirect. Even so, these regional American interests at issue in the Afghan war are very powerful; to confirm this, consider the alternative of Pakistan’s failure at the Taliban’s hands.

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Interesting argument, even though I don't entirely buy it:

• If the reason for pushing forward in Afghanistan is to somehow protect US interests in India or Pakistan, why not get India or Pakistan directly and transparently involved in the project? (India in fact already recognizes Afghanistan as something to tackle, and I remember reading somewhere that India has already invested a billion-odd dollars in Afghanistan, mainly for infrastructure development. Why not just help this investment along?)
• Historically speaking, this isn't very different from the British argument for entering Afghanistan: "The Tsar is coming!" --> "We must protect our investments in India" --> "Let's 'protect' the Afghans to protect our investments." Of course, most of the foot-soldiers to fight in Afghanistan were Indian; after all, it was our future that was being "safeguarded"!
• The many Taliban-esque groups that exist in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan, including, apparently, in the heartlands of the "enterprising culture of Punjab", have complicated ties with the villages and cultures from which they spring. Military presence alone cannot tackle the root of the problem. [Since I have no ideas on what can actually tackle the problem, I'm not going to say anything further.]

That said, there are a few things in the article that I like and want to emphasize:

1) The fact that there has to be a functional peace between India and Pakistan for all of South Asia to prosper. (There are Indians out there who disagree with this, and I think they are just plain wrong.)

Because of India’s economic dynamism, and because of the common, enterprising culture of Punjab that straddles the Indo-Pak border, if that border were opened, and if the two governments normalized relations (they do not require a romanticized or complete peace, only a pragmatic and functional one) a broad, positive, and durable political-economic change would likely occur in South Asia within a generation.

It is along this modernizing pathway that American policy should concentrate its most ambitious investments.

2) The fact that this functional peace requires a stable Pakistan. (There are Indians out there who disagree with this, and I think they are just plain wrong.)

American officials and outsiders like myself often wring their hands about Pakistan. The Army and intelligence services in that country are a powerful and regressive force, as evidenced by their self-defeating support for the Taliban and other Islamist networks. Civil-military relations in Pakistan are very poor and constitute, since independence, a dismal history of chronic interventions and failures. Constitutional democracy in Pakistan, while technically present, is badly undernourished; it often seems on the verge of imminent collapse.

I think it's in India's best interests to not to anything that will interfere with the development of a stable, civil society in Pakistan. And I think it's in both India's and Pakistan's best interests to work together to help Afghanistan along. This has to be done carefully, without stepping on any toes, and without doing anything that may infringe local sovereignty. (And this is something we Indians have to be particularly sensitive to. We are often seen as overbearing and imposing, even on those occasions when we actually do have good intentions. Call it the "curse of the regional hegemon," or more accurately, the "curse of being the playground bully.")

Think me naïve or sentimental, but I think concrete civil assistance efforts by regional actors, mediated by the presence of neutral international parties, are better in the long run for all parties—the Afghan people and government, the Pakistani people and government, the Indian people and government, the United States, and all the other countries neighboring Afghanistan. Certainly better than playing whack-a-mole in the mountains.

Honestly guys, why can't we all just get along and live happily ever after? Aren't bhangra and cricket stronger than superglue in binding cultures together? (And yes, I know there is an India-Pakistan cricket match going on right now, and yes, I know not all Pakistanis and not all Afghanis and certainly not all Indians do bhangra :D )