The biggest near-term foreign policy challenge looming over India stems from US President Joe Biden’s latest efforts to extricate American troops from Afghanistan after two decades of fruitless war. The US withdrawal, expected within the first half of this year, could amount to a US defeat more momentous than in the Vietnam war, because of the Pandora’s Box of problems it will open in the region.
It will significantly impact upon India and Asia because of Afghanistan’s strategic position as a geographical crossroads in the region. The situation is exacerbated by political tensions involving the Middle East, Iran, Pakistan, India, Russia and China, which were brought to a boil by Islamic terrorism and America’s disastrous military interventions.
Under an incomplete Afghan peace deal negotiated with the Taliban in Qatar by the previous Trump administration, the US committed to complete troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by 1 May 2021. In exchange, the Taliban apparently pledged to end all activities of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and Islamic State. The underlying expectation was that the Pakistan military and intelligence services would ensure that the Taliban keeps its word. There is also a somewhat magical belief that the Taliban could be folded into a new inclusive Afghan regime that would include parts of the current Ashraf Ghani government. Further, the new regime’s national military would make space for decommissioned fighters from the Taliban.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has reiterated these ideas with a few changes and is putting pressure on Ghani to accept the inevitable. He expects Turkey to host further Afghan peace talks starting in April and including Ghani’s delegates and the Taliban. Unusually, Biden has retained Trump’s Afghanistan envoy, Zalmay Khalizad, and there is every possibility that almost all US and NATO coalition troops may leave Afghanistan by this summer.
Under Biden’s peace plan, talks in Turkey would replace Ghani’s Afghan government with an interim administration under a power-sharing deal with the Taliban, pending elections under a new constitution. Of course, election victory could deliver paramount power to the Taliban.
This may be good politics for Biden but will be destabilising for Afghanistan because the suggested unified Afghan government looks like a fig leaf to cover a US defeat. The likely outcome is that a greatly emboldened Taliban will transition into full control of Afghanistan, unless Biden maintains enough troop levels to protect the others in the new elected regime.
Blinken’s recent letter to Ghani gave him a veiled ultimatum to break his so far stubborn resistance to sharing power with the Taliban. But Russia has stepped in quickly to hold peace talks among Afghan factions this month in Moscow before the Biden peace plan comes into play. It has invited Qatar, China, Pakistan and Khalizad in an attempt to take leadership in this process.
A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan can be expected to become a hornet’s nest, because the theocratic regime may not eliminate Al Qaeda, IS and other jihadist groups. It will no longer be beholden to Pakistan’s intelligence services, because it will have acquired power with American acquiescence and without help from Islamabad. In this event, there is every chance that the Afghan Taliban will encourage Pakistan’s Taliban to end all vestiges of democracy in Pakistan.
A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan can be expected to become a hornet’s nest, because the theocratic regime may not eliminate Al Qaeda, IS and other jihadist groups. It will no longer be beholden to Pakistan’s intelligence services, because it will have acquired power with American acquiescence and without help from Islamabad
Such outcomes would increase the risks of terrorist infiltration into Kashmir many times over. It would be a big problem for everyone in the region. Iran’s borders with Afghanistan may be destabilised, because the Sunni Taliban theocrats are resolute enemies of Shia Muslims. China will be strongly concerned about jihadist Islam re-entering its Xinjiang region, where it is suppressing Uyghur Muslims to stamp out radicalism. Washington and some Europeans are already accusing it of committing genocide of Uyghurs. The world will also have to watch in horror as the Taliban crush women’s rights again.
From the region’s viewpoint, it would be better if Biden kept a substantial number of US troops in Afghanistan, but he has no good choices. America cannot be expected to bear the burdens of Afghan civil wars for another decade or more. Therefore, Delhi will have to find accommodations with the limitrophe powers, particularly Pakistan and China, to ensure that Taliban influence does not spill outside Afghan borders and into India after the Americans leave.
A useful lever against Taliban domination in Afghanistan would be refusal to provide reconstruction and development funding, if the theocracy shuns democracy and victimises women. Indian companies would gain greatly from a stable Afghanistan but not if the Taliban are in control.