Why does India have to play the US game in Afghanistan?

India’s silence on the troubling issue of Pakistan shipping away and stockpiling Afghanistan’s uranium and lithium is mystifying

A year after Taliban forces swept into Kabul -- at the express invitation of former Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- the Kalashnikov-toting militia marked the anniversary of their lightning power grab with a show of force against a handful of Afghan women who were out on the streets of Kabul in open defiance of the Taliban’s diktat on face masks and restrictions on education and jobs.

Beating the women with their rifle butts invited the expected international opprobrium, calling attention to the regressive, misogynist regime’s shameful track record on gender repression. But the international community did little else.

India’s silence is the biggest shock of all. New Delhi, the once staunch critic of the militia which had, at the behest of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, targeted Indian missions and projects at will, is all set to shift gears.

Reduced to a bit player after the Taliban takeover, Delhi is poised to become one of a dozen countries that will re-open their embassies in Kabul, giving the Islamic Emirate a de facto stamp of legitimacy, a step away from formal recognition.

The move is clearly one part of a grand plan to reclaim ground lost when the Pakistan-fronted Taliban ousted the Ashraf Ghani government, with which India had a comfortable equation, as it did with the preceding Karzai dispensation, where the Northern Alliance leaders it had nurtured into a resistance force against Pakistan’s proxies, wielded much influence.

Is India seeking to turn the tables once again by offering the Taliban a chunk of the India development pie? Does the Narendra Modi government believe it can recreate that space by dangling student visas and upping food and medical aid to help alleviate the distress of the ordinary Afghan? Is Washington forcing Delhi’s hand? Or has a gullible Delhi been fooled into trusting the word of the Taliban? Just as Washington and its Afghan-born US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad did, withdrawing all foreign forces a year ago under the Doha Agreement without leaving even a token force to ensure a smooth handover? Does Delhi believe it can use the reported rift between a section of the Taliban and Pakistan to its own advantage?

India’s envoy J P Singh, who has served in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in one capacity or the other for years, set the ball in motion with covert meetings with Islamic Emirate officials in Doha that broke the ice. That was followed by more open visits to the Qatari and Afghan capitals, interacting with Mullah Yacoob, the son of former Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar, and Foreign Minister Mullah Amir Khan Mutakki. Singh’s pre-condition for an Indian resumption of work on Afghanistan’s infrastructure projects was an insistence on security. Singh is harking back to the time when the Indo-Tibetan Border Force, deployed to build dams, the Afghan parliament, and a network of roads, was targeted; the July 2008 suicide bomb attack by Taliban and the Haqqani network on the Indian mission in Kabul that killed over 50 people, including its senior military attaché; and the 2016 onslaught on the Indian consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, where the Governor of Balkh and India ally Atta Mohammed Noor personally led the battle against the Taliban. Delhi shut down its Kandahar, Herat and Jalalabad consulates after Pakistan’s false accusations of India fomenting terror from these missions began to gain traction.

Any violence that puts Indians in jeopardy, post the re-opening of the embassy, will make it difficult for the Modi government to justify this Taliban outreach.

Rawalpindi’s Games

Pakistan, back in the game after having to counter successive governments in Kabul that it saw as being inimical to its interests, is unlikely to sit back and allow India to walk back in. Its role in the July 31 American missile attack on Al Qaeda chief Ayman Al Zawahiri, at a safehouse in the heart of upscale Kabul, is a case in point. The safehouse was run by the Haqqani Network, an arm of Pakistan’s intelligence, headed by the Taliban’s de facto deputy leader and Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani. Pakistan – and Haqqani – quick to give up its prize catch, and win brownie points, with the men who matter in Washington.

The ‘kill’ also rams home the message that the Taliban’s predisposition to harbour terrorists, continues. These include not just the anti-Talib Daesh and IS-Khorasan, which routinely attack Shia, Hazara and Sikh congregations, and the Ughyur militia, a.k.a the Turkistan Islamic Party and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) that targets Beijing, but also the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, which has a running battle with the Pakistan Army.

US President Joe Biden justified the Zawahiri settling of scores for 9/11 by claiming that harbouring Al Qaeda was a violation of a secret annexure in the Doha Agreement. And yes, the Taliban’s claim that they were unaware of Zawahiri’s location flies in the face of the fact that Taliban must have known as their lynch mobs went from house to house, hunting down supporters of the previous government. But it’s the use of the Hellfire missile that took Zawahiri out -- which could not have been launched without the full co-operation of Pakistan, perhaps, guided in from Nur Khan airbase in Rawalpindi -- that has set the Indian security establishment abuzz.

Can Delhi accept the radical militia’s assurances of safety at face value? And what room for manoeuvre can it hope to have with a Washington that increasingly relies on Pakistan, which, through Haqqani, has first-mover advantage in Kabul? Working overtime to repair the damage to ties with the US caused by dislodged PM Imran Khan, Pakistan’s army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa has dusted off his army’s longstanding cooperation with the US, after a 20-year gap. What’s more, the West’s war with Russia once again gives it critical geopolitical advantage, its airbases being used to supply arms to Ukraine.

India can take some comfort in the fact that Pakistan, hoping to revert to its strategy of using Afghanistan for ‘strategic depth’, has not found it as easy this time around. The Afghans are a proud people who do not take kindly to foreign diktats. The enforced incarceration of Taliban leaders in Pakistani jails has been neither forgotten nor forgiven -- Mullah Barader being a case in point. That has manifested itself in recent months in repeated attacks on the Pakistan Army in the mountainous, uncharted territory that straddles the Pakistan-Afghan border from safe havens in Afghanistan by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, set on a mini-emirate in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that was absorbed into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The Taliban’s freeing of TTP prisoners from Afghan jails boosted the ranks of the TTP to 4,000 fighters. Pakistan’s attempts to use the ‘good offices’ of the Taliban to get the TTP to agree to a ceasefire have failed. With differences over the Durand Line as the agreed border defying a solution, Bajwa knows that unless the US restores funding to his army, it can ill-afford a war of attrition.

Delhi’s Constraints

India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, picking his way through this complicated web of ‘friendlies’, met with former Northern Alliance leader and chief interlocutor on the Doha dialogues, Abdullah Abdullah, when the latter was in Delhi recently. He was cleared by the Talibs to confer with Indian officials and the new US special envoy on Afghanistan, Thomas West. Doval’s meeting with his Russian counterpart, and talks in Samarkhand on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in mid-September where PM Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Shehbaz Sharif could meet, will likely centre on the way forward on Afghanistan.

But as a new anti-Taliban leader emerges in Ahmad Massood, the articulate son of legendary Tajik leader Ahmad Shah Massood, India chose to pour cold water on any aspirations to arm his National Resistance Front, when he met Indian officials, at an unnamed location, and reached out repeatedly to Delhi through emissaries like former Afghan vice president and intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh.

Neither has made a secret of their disenchantment with India and the international community for abandoning them to their fate. Their homes in the Panjsher Valley were strafed by Pakistan Air Force jets as the Taliban moved in last August. Distraught Panjsheris recounted to this reporter how their hideouts and mountain passes and once secure underground tunnels were attacked as they scrambled to get their ageing parents and kin to safety. Their meagre stockpiles of arms in their homes not enough to outlast the well-armed Pakistan Army advance force. Saleh’s brother, dragged out of his home and killed, was just one of the many who paid for their Tajik lineage.

After keeping the fight alive in the Panjsher for 60 days in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban takeover, the National Resistance Front, which brings together once-feared warlords -- Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum based in Turkey, Hazara chief Mohammed Mohaqiq, Herat’s strongman Ismail Khan, Tajik leader Ata Mohammed Noor and India-based Ustad Abdul Sayyaf -- is dying a slow death.

As the recent uptick in attacks on Kashmiri Pandits by homegrown terrorists operating in and around Srinagar shows, the false peace of the last two years, arrived at after back-channel talks between Doval and then ISI chief Lt. Gen Faiz Hameed, with the blessings of Gen. Bajwa, is clearly over.

The Uranium Danger

Indian officials invested in Afghanistan say that not building an anti-Taliban force like the National Resistance Front, when there is every possibility that the Taliban – now making all the right noises as it seeks investment from South Asia’s largest economy -- could be sucked back into Pakistan’s long game to destabilise India, would be an error.

That the Emirate of Afghanistan has sought to position itself as Pakistan’s equal and signalled that it may not play Pakistan’s game may give India some comfort. But unschooled in governance, the Taliban regime’s inability to secure Afghanistan’s resources is worrisome. Under pressure from Iran, water from the Kamal Khan dam in Helmand province was released, when drought-stricken farmers needed the water for parched fields. Far more alarming is Pakistan’s de facto control of Afghanistan’s mining resources, particularly uranium. On most days, trucks are backed up for miles on the border crossings of Spin Boldak, Torkham and Angoor Ada. Angoor Ada is a little-known corner of Paktika province that is being used by Pakistan to quietly transport Afghan lithium, uranium and coal. Afghan coal is being sold at 30% of the international value to the Pakistan Army, which allegedly fronts dozens of mining companies. Pakistan has taken control of the uranium mines to boost its nuclear stockpile. China has its eye on Afghanistan’s vast lithium reserves, and on the Amu Darya oil and gas project.

The US has picked its poison in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Why does India have to blindly follow suit?

(Neena Gopal is a senior journalist and former Foreign Editor of Gulf News who has reported from various hotspots in South Asia and the Middle East, including Afghanistan. She is also the author of ‘The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi’)