In Kabul, a strategic defeat for the US
India now has no choice but to engage openly with the Taliban. Invite a delegation to Delhi
The elaborate United States (US) draft “Afghanistan peace agreement”, and its impatient letter to Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, once again reveal the strategic defeat of the US in a country that has been “the graveyard of empires”. America’s new desire to shift the onus of resolving the Afghan mess from its shoulders alone to a group of countries, including India, only starkly profiles its Afghan failure. The Joe Biden administration will doubtless justify this collective approach as part of its commitment to multilateralism to address international issues. This does not, however, disguise its ongoing desperation to extricate itself from a 20-year-long morass of its own making.
The three-part draft containing ideas for a new constitution, the establishment of an interim government — called “the Peace Government” to take the global mind away from the wheel turning full circle two decades after the Bonn agreement set up an interim administration — and principles for a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire are hardly realistic in many crucial elements. It claims to represent “a variety of ideas and priorities of Afghans on both sides of the conflict”, but reflects US concerns and aspirations for Afghanistan in their very selection and enumeration. In the absence of corroborative evidence, it is difficult to visualise how the Taliban and the Kabul authorities will take a giant leap of faith for peace, with the former abandoning fundamental sources of strength and the latter their current political offices.
The Taliban’s strength is derived from the success of its armed cadres. Aided by Pakistan, the Taliban first demonstrated that the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces could not crush it. This also meant that NATO could not prevent the spread of Taliban influence and, in many cases, control of a significant portion of Afghan territory.
A principal reason for the Taliban’s strength lay in its bases in Pakistan which, because of the US policy of self-denial, remained protected. Later, as US forces withdrew, armed Taliban elements kept the Afghan security forces under pressure, preventing the Afghan government from achieving stability. Will the Taliban, now, agree to the imposition of crippling conditions, including abandoning its foreign (read Pakistani) bases, draining the effectiveness of its armed cadres?
This question is all the more pertinent if it is put in the context of the US proposal that the constitution of the Afghan Republic is to be “the initial template from which the future Constitution will be prepared”. Many Taliban leaders may construe this as a way of the international community seeking to pressure them ab initio in abandoning the founding principles of the Islamic Emirate. Will the lure of becoming full participants in the Peace Government be sufficient to make many in the Taliban senior leadership consider pulling up their roots?
The president of the Peace Government is to be decided by the “two parties”. Let alone the Taliban, it is most unlikely that even the Kabul political elite will accept Ghani in that office. Thus, the US letter to Ghani virtually asks him and his administration to do the honourable deed of falling on their swords for Afghanistan’s future. Ghani and his colleagues have given no indication of a desire to do so, despite the caution that if US troops withdraw by May, the Taliban will irresistibly gain ground. Vice-President Amrullah Saleh is certainly not the kind of person who will fold up — his courage and ghairat (honour) will never allow that. The fate of the US advice on them is, therefore, uncertain even if Abdullah Abdullah, former president Hamid Karzai and professor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf encourage them to accept the inevitability of an interim government.
These imponderables are largely intra-Afghan. In addition, there are others which stem from the proposed group of countries — Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, India and the US — to “discuss a unified approach to supporting peace in Afghanistan”. The US wants the United Nations (UN) to convene a meeting of this group believing that these countries “share an abiding common interest in a stable Afghanistan and must work together if we are to succeed”. Iran’s inclusion is because of Biden accepting the reality of the positive or negative role it can play in Afghanistan; Russia, China and Pakistan will welcome Iran. Reports indicate that India’s inclusion was resisted by China and Pakistan, with even Russia conceding only India’s “eventual deeper involvement in dedicated dialogue formats”. Is the group’s membership now a closed issue or will Russia demand the inclusion of Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbours apart from Saudi Arabia?
India is the only country of the group of six that has stubbornly and rigidly avoided formally and openly accepting the Taliban. Can it continue to do so any longer? Over the past few months, India demonstrated that it counted with the Kabul elite even while it stressed its continuing support to the Ghani administration. The larger strategic aspects of the India-US relationship and India’s utility to help move sections of the Kabul elite in a direction which the US would want is responsible for its inclusion. But India’s justified satisfaction over this development cannot mean that it should continue to turn its back on the Taliban, despite the unsavouriness of its ideological positions and the violence it perpetrates. It should use the opening provided by this US initiative to urgently invite a Taliban delegation and convey its positions on Afghanistan and the region directly to it.