India could benefit from China’s initiative

Islamabad cannot play a double game with Beijing on Afghanistan

China has taken a diplomatic bull by the horns by hosting a foreign ministers’ trilateral with Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is seeking solutions to two problems. One, to get Kabul and Islamabad on the same page on almost any issue. That this is difficult should not be a surprise given that Pakistan is supporting an insurgency, the Taliban, to overthrow the Afghan government. In most cases, this would be a weak basis for cooperation. The other is to build cross-border infrastructure in Afghanistan. The Afghan landscape is littered with wonderful-sounding connectivity projects — Lapis Lazuli corridor, Five Nations Railway and the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline — which have never gone beyond the drawing board.

It has been an overriding Indian strategic interest to help Afghanistan reduce its dependency on Pakistan and give it more resources to tackle the Taliban. Both of these would be enhanced by Chinese investment. Despite Beijing’s closeness to Islamabad, the track record of China in Afghanistan has been one of promoting regional stability rather than hewing blindly to Pakistan’s line. Beijing has repeatedly sought to promote regional understanding on Afghanistan. It proposed India-Afghanistan-Pakistan talks in 2006. Since then it has hosted a variety of talks that have included Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Taliban and the US. Afghanistan is a regular part of the agenda of Russia-India-China meetings. None of these efforts have borne any success.

Islamabad was vague about what it thought of China helping rebuild Afghanistan. After all, security for such projects would have to be guaranteed by Pakistan, the primary external supporter of the Taliban. When the US had proposed a similar plan, Islamabad undermined it. It will find it much harder to play that double game with its “all-weather friend”, China.