Talks with Taliban
To begin with, there is the question of talks with the Taliban, which India has thus far refused. In the recent past, the Modi government has shown some flexibility on the issue, by sending a “non-official” representation to the Moscow talks with the Taliban. After a visit to Delhi in January by Mr. Khalilzad, Army Chief General Bipin Rawat even suggested that India should “jump on the bandwagon” of engaging the Taliban.
However, direct, open talks between India and the Taliban at this point would serve little purpose for either side. For India, it would mean casting aside a consistently held moral principle and speaking to a non-state actor that espouses terrorism. While backchannel talks between intelligence agencies and the Taliban have been conducted for years, recognising the Taliban as a legitimate interlocutor for India at this point would be a betrayal of India’s values without any visible gains. India’s policy for the past two decades is to deal with the government in Kabul, and this will hold it in good stead if the Taliban were to eventually be a part of the government there.
The truth is, 2019 is not 1989, and much has changed inside Afghanistan as it has in the world outside. While Afghan security forces have suffered many losses in the past year, it is unlikely that the Taliban would today be able to overrun and hold Kabul or any other big Afghan city as it did before. It also seems inconceivable that a “full withdrawal” of U.S. troops will include giving up all the bases they hold at present. Given technology, social media and the progress in education in Afghanistan since 2001 (the number of secondary graduates rose from 10,000 to more than 300,000 in 2015), it is also unlikely that the Taliban will be able to control the hearts and minds of Afghans if it were to revert to its brutal ways. Nor could it run policies that endanger Indian interests in the country, given the special place India enjoys, amongst thousands of Afghans who have studied in India, youth and women supported by Indian development projects, and hundreds of military officers trained in the country.
Every one of the 17 presidential tickets announced also has an “India-friendly” face on it, and India must leverage its influence across the spectrum. With presidential elections put off for the moment, India could work with these Afghan leaders to support a ‘Grand Jirga’ that ensures that the maximum number of representatives from across Afghanistan articulate their post-reconciliation vision.
India is also host to a sizeable population of Afghans who live, work and study in the country, and an outreach is important. After all, when the Vladimir Putin government brought Taliban representatives and Afghan leaders to the table for the ‘Moscow process’, it was under the aegis of an association of Afghans resident in Russia. It was public support for talks with the Taliban that gave the reconciliation process legitimacy, and it is necessary that public opinion on issues like democracy, women’s rights, education and the media also be allowed to hold sway. The world must see Afghans as they see themselves, and not according to the often-skewed ideas generated at conferences on Afghanistan’s future that sometimes don’t even include an Afghan representation.
Finally, both India and Pakistan have a shared responsibility in building a dialogue over Afghanistan post-reconciliation. It is necessary that officials on both sides find a way to sit across the table on Afghanistan some day.
Take the long view
Despite all the many reasons for despondency, it is necessary that Indian strategists don’t lose sight of the bigger picture — India’s longstanding relationship with the people of Afghanistan. This is a relationship nurtured by every government in New Delhi, with more than $3 billion invested by India since 2001, which has reaped manifold returns in terms of goodwill and friendship across Afghanistan. Defeatism or a lack of ambition for the India-Afghanistan relationship at this juncture would be much more detrimental to India’s interests than anything the Taliban’s return to Afghanistan’s political centrestage can do.