New Phase In Afghan Great Game As India Mulls Expanding Presence

News from Afghanistan has been of a rather mixed nature: the Taliban are to resume stoning women to death for adultery (when did they ever stop?), and then we Pakistan’s defence minister Khwaja Asif accusing the Taliban of not doing enough to curb terrorism from their soil. Case of pot calling the kettle black. From an Indian point of view, we had an MEA delegation in Kabul led by the chief of the Af-Pak-Iran division, JP Singh.

Some would call it a new phase in the Afghan Great Game but well known Pakistan-Afghan watcher and commentator Sushant Sareen argues that Government of India has decided that the path forward is to engage the Taliban, “Engagement is not endorsement. There are many issues on which we find some Taliban practices abhorrent but we are not going to let that stop engagement. At the same time, we are not going to be breaking the international consensus. We have our own compulsions and our own requirements for which we think we need to engage the Taliban,” he said on The Gist programme.

Sareen says there are “humanitarian imperatives, people to people imperatives that we have to cater for, for which we will engage with the Taliban, and if that helps ease the lives of ordinary Afghans so much the better. But it also underscores the point that India will deal with whichever government is in power in Kabul.”

That the Taliban have shown themselves as ready to engage, and India sees a need to safeguard its relationship with the Afghan government are two sides of the same coin. Humanitarian aid from India has been flowing into Afghanistan for some time and when it comes to development assistance, unlike other countries, India ensures the Afghans decide what they want.

“So our developmental projects produce the maximum bang for the buck.”

Million dollar question: can India trust the Taliban given that they have been seen as Pakistani proxies for over 20 years? The Taliban also attacked India inside Afghanistan. But Sareen believes the way to look at it is that “there is no end game in Afghanistan. The end game is the beginning of a new great game. And frankly, eventually there will be some problems which will crop up between the Taliban and the Pakistanis. And that will open doors for us.”

This was the case in the 1990s and is the case now: witness the two sides exchanging gunfire across the Durand Line in recent weeks. And Sareen argues, it’s a natural course to see ‘my enemies enemy as my friend’. So the moment an Afghan fights with the Pakistanis, the first thing he does is reach out to India, and India is always ready. The Taliban also want to show that they are not Pakistani proxies, that they are the masters but yes, they needed the Pakistanis when they were not in control.

But now that they are in control, they have their own agency and they don’t need Pakistan. So they are not going to follow Pakistani dictate. And the best way to show that is to reach out to India. How else does one show that ‘I’ve broken the shackles of slavery’, to use the very evocative phrase of Imran Khan.

Sareen notes that “I think the determination which was made in New Delhi was that, look, let’s test it out. So we waited. We we took our time. And then finally, when we realized that, yes, security will be ensured. So all of our concerns will be addressed. The government decided to open a technical mission. It’s not a full fledged embassy, but it is you know, we have boots on the ground which is a kind of turnaround to the kind of doom and gloom scenarios that were painted in August of 2021.”

Sareen believes that one could see a couple of Indian consulates opening up, one or two for now. Some travel restrictions are likely to be eased, especially for medical tourism, maybe for education. That’s the hope. There is also a possibility of India once again getting involved in some of the developmental work inside Afghanistan.

Now, all of this is going to happen despite the fact that India has serious concerns over some of the policies and practices of the Taliban, especially in relation to women. These are very abhorrent practices but it’s not going to be a deal breaker. The sense one gets is that the Taliban have ensured that Afghan soil is not going to be used against India. The question is whether this will be the case two years, four years, five years from now because while the Pakistani groups are not present in Afghanistan, there are other equally problematic groups that are present there. They are not operational in India. It is a couple of other such groups, more international jihadist groups, which also target India. And a lot of their propaganda is believed to be coming out of Afghanistan.

“What happens a couple of years from now or will the Taliban become more moderate, more in tune with the rest of the world or will they become more jihadist in their worldview?” Sareen wondered, “because that is going to be a real challenge, which is why I think if you have a presence in Afghanistan, then you can get a better idea of of what direction things are moving.”

What about the Haqqanis? Sareen points out that “They are part of this Taliban group, and are of course, one faction, but I think it’s very clear nobody wants to break the kind of Taliban consensus, if you can call it that. Nobody wants to break that. There will be jostling for space. People will try and, you know, push their own agendas, their own values, their own priorities. They will make alliances within certain factions to push things along. All of that is likely to happen. But there is no indication as yet that it’ll descend into any kind of internecine warfare. I think that is not happening. There are no signs of that happening. There is no inclination of that happening. And ultimately of everybody kowtow to the emir.”

So it’s the Emir of the Taliban and his clique which call the final shots. So, yes, people will see what they have to say. They will plug whatever line they have to plug. But the final line comes from Kandahar, and then everybody kind of sends them. Yeah, it’s like the Pakistan army model. You know, we solve this. Yes. Don’t do that.

The Pakistanis are delusional, they live in a world of make believe, alternate realities which they construct for themselves. And then they think that everything is hunky dory. They think they are really smart people. Yeah, they are smart but tactically, they are duffers. Strategically you look at everything the Pakistanis are involved in. They’ve always had mark on their face at the end of it. Afghanistan is yet another example and multiple times they’ve done these mistakes in Afghanistan, always thinking that they they own the Afghans. They continuously made that distinction that the TTP and Taliban are two separate groups. They’re not they’re the same. Right. It’s a different brand name.

Tensions have kind of ratcheted up but I don’t think it’s going to lead to an open conflict. But they will make war like noises. They will lift some of the restraints which they used to put up. And at the same time, they keep making it gritty. Both sides will play this game with each other to some extent. I think that relationship is quite broken and as things move forward, they’re only going to deteriorate. The Taliban are also now looking for options outside of so, for example, reports that the Taliban are planning to invest something like $35 million in Chabahar port.

As for the Chinese, I think there isn’t much that the Chinese are doing. They are there. They are trying to show that they have a presence. They kind of rattled the cage by saying, okay, fine, now we are going in for lithium mines like they were in for copper mines 20 years ago. Nothing has happened. I am not so sure how the Chinese are actually going to invest billions of dollars to develop some of those mines, because given the kind of unsettled conditions there are, if you develop a mine, how the hell are you going to take this stuff out?

We don’t know how this great game is actually going to play out. We can speculate but what matters is that India is no longer sitting on the sidelines. We are a player but nobody knows what exactly the game is going to be, or how exactly it is going to unfold.