Why did India matter so little when US troops withdrew from Afghanistan?

It was a peculiar situation. Despite witnessing the worst historical lows in its bilateral relationship with the US, Pakistan was the most critical player in Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks the White House, the department of defence, and the state department, considered Pakistan as the lynchpin for any strategy to fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. NATO and the US needed Islamabad’s support to enter Afghanistan, to halt the Taliban insurgency (that was covertly being supported by Pakistan), and to talk to the Taliban to ensure a honourable exit.

Pakistan received nearly $19 billion since 2002 as economic and military assistance and an additional $13 billion as reimbursements from the Coalition Support Fund in order to allow transit to Afghanistan and the use of Pakistan’s naval and airport facilities for coalition troops and equipment transfers. India on the other hand, despite having positively overhauled its relationship with the US during the Bush presidency, figured marginally in Washington’s “Af-Pak” canvas.

Despite regular consultations, neither New Delhi nor Washington knew how to work together in Afghanistan.

When India had expressed interest in training the Afghan National Army in 2001–02, Washington baulked in order to secure Pakistan’s support. By the time the US realised that Pakistan was an unreliable ally in Afghanistan, India had lost interest to step in militarily given its ongoing peace talks with Islamabad.

Though the two countries tried hard to find common ground for promoting democracy in Afghanistan and helping in the reconstruction of the war-torn country, this trend of political bad timing continued throughout the war. The political mismatch between New Delhi and Washington would have been highly comic had Afghanistan’s situation not been as scary and tragic as it was.

But more than the initial US-Pakistan alliance, it was the US withdrawal that worried India. Just like the Soviet case, premature drawdown of the coalition forces from Afghanistan had the potential to put Pakistan in the driving seat in Kabul. India was worried that the tragedy of 1992 might repeat itself as a farce in 2014, and [Hamid] Karzai (and later Ghani) might meet with Najibullah’s fate.

Similar to its 1987 request to Moscow, New Delhi asked Washington to go slow with the withdrawal. But much like the 1980s, when Pakistan mattered more to the Soviet Union despite India being the bigger South Asian partner, the same was the case with the US. India was important, but not critical. Though the coalition military umbrella offered India a security blanket to reengage with Afghanistan, and helped bringing down the levels of infiltrations in Indian-administered Kashmir, there was little in common between Indian and American perceptions about Afghanistan. Beginning with the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force]’s efforts to rebuild Afghanistan (an endeavour that had full support of US president Bush especially after 9/11), and Washington’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, to the reconciliation drive launched by London in 2010, India had political and conceptual differences on nearly all these issues.

Focused on defeating Al Qaeda, the US had little intention to undertake serious nation building in Afghanistan. The “Light Footprint” model or “Nation-Building Lite”, as it was called, required few boots on the ground and even less money. In the first donor’s conference in Tokyo, for instance, Washington pledged a meagre $290 million in aid and was outbid by Iran that pledged $540 million. In February 2002, the then US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld stated that a large peacekeeping force outside Kabul was not necessary. Soon after, in 2003 the US declared war on Iraq and shifted most of its resources to the Middle East.

Such neglect of Afghanistan was dangerous from an Indian perspective.

It meant that the US involvement in Afghanistan would be marred by failures and would eventually pave the way for Pakistan to influence domestic Afghan politics. The situation evolved along expected lines. Within a short span, the Taliban had unleashed a potent insurgency against the coalition forces. In 2006, despite building pressure to counter the Taliban, then US secretary of defence Robert Gates (Rumsfeld’s successor) asserted that the NATO/ISAF would not conduct long-term counter-insurgency (COIN) operations in Afghanistan. The new US President Barack Obama ordered a troop surge in 2008 and began looking for a way out. The US decision to withdraw by 2014 was formally announced in 2011.

According to a senior Western official posted in Kabul in 2008, “the idea of the surge was not really to fight an insurgency, but to put pressure on the Taliban and secure a honourable exit”. India was unimpressed. Even staunch partisans, to whom alignment with the US seemed like the “correct” response in the shadow of 9/11, grew wary. Former Afghan deputy foreign minister Jawed Ludin ruefully recalled that “one of our [Afghanistan’s] regrets has always been that India was a passive player with regards to America’s intervention in Afghanistan.

I just couldn’t believe that there wasn’t that much strategic consultation and interaction between India and the US on Afghanistan. In fact, I was the one who facilitated the first trilateral engagement between the three countries [in 2012] and I realised in that meeting how distant the two countries were.”

The changing Western approach towards Afghanistan impacted India’s foreign policy calculus. India had increased its support for Karzai and began appreciating differences between the various Taliban factions and the complex nature of their relationship with Pakistan. This policy learning was as much an outcome of India’s own desire to better understand Afghanistan’s internal dynamics, as much it was steered by the realisation that the West lacked the political will to counter the Taliban on a long term basis.

A decisive shift towards reconciliation at the 2010 London conference merely confirmed what India feared the most, which was a format of talks that could give Pakistan strategic leeway to set the terms of talks (one of which was reduced Indian presence in Afghanistan).

Immediately after the London conference, India began hectic behind-the-scenes lobbying with various Afghan, regional, and international stakeholders to steer the reconciliation initiative away from Pakistan. Quickly adjusting to the fact that talks with the Afghan Taliban was inevitable, India signed the Strategic Partnership Agreement with Kabul in October 2011 and endorsed an Afghan-led reconciliation. New Delhi’s conciliatory policy shift, led by Manmohan Singh, [Shivshankar] Menon, and [Satinder] Lambah, thus, was an exercise to dilute the so-called “Western model” of reconciliation, and to make it an Afghan-owned enterprise, however difficult it may be.

India’s statements at the UN reflected its changing stance on reconciliation. From blaming the UN for not terming all Afghan militants as “terrorists”, India developed a nuanced terminology of whom to blame and how when debating the Afghan situation at the UN. It eventually accepted that the Afghan Taliban were not terrorists even if they were not to be valued at par with the Afghan government. Evolving regional advocacies by China, Russia, and Iran also pushed India into adopting a conciliatory stand.

Worried about a spillover of Islamist militancy within its borders both China and India saw increasing convergence whereas Russia, which had never really viewed India as the strategic lynchpin in Afghanistan, began tilting towards Pakistan and eventually tactically collaborated with the Taliban to counter the rise of ISIS in Afghanistan. Throughout this phase, Iran continued with its own interventionist approach towards Afghanistan. Similar to Pakistan (though of a limited nature) Iran supported certain Afghan Taliban elements. Ironically, unlike its political outbursts against Pakistan, India decided to remain quiet about Iran’s interventionism in Afghanistan.

Excerpted with permission from My Enemy’s Enemy: India In Afghanistan, From The Soviet Invasion To The US Withdrawal, Avinash Paliwal, Harper Collins.