Talibans are a big strange for India

 

An agreement signed between the United States and the Taliban on February 29, 2020, marks a milestone in America’s longest-ever war. Accordingly, the majority of U.S. troops are expected to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2021. In turn, and if this agreement is successfully implemented, sections of the Taliban could be expected to play a larger role in Afghan politics. This is hardly desirable for a country like India. Indian assets in Afghanistan have been targeted by the Haqqani group, a major Taliban faction. India has also been able to invest in Afghanistan’s future partially because of the presence of U.S.-led troops and the relative stability it brought. With this stability at risk, India needs to urgently reposition its priorities. In these fast-changing times, this paper identifies the risks to India’s continued presence in Afghanistan and recommends a set of strategies to mitigate them. The first risk has to do with terrorism. While the U.S.-Taliban agreement states that the Taliban will prevent terrorist outfits from operating on Afghan soil, there is little clarity on how the agreement will be verified and enforced. The second risk has to do with the growing influence of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which shares an undeniable link with the Taliban, especially the Haqqani group. The third risk to India’s long-term interests in Afghanistan has to do with the increasing political instability in Kabul. Notwithstanding a power-sharing agreement signed between Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and former chief executive Abdullah Abdullah, on May 17, 2020, it is clear that such alliances cannot be taken at face value. An interlinked set of mitigation strategies could help India protect its interests:

 • Broader Diplomatic Engagement: India should consider appointing a special envoy dedicated to Afghan reconciliation. The envoy can ensure that Indian views are expressed at every meeting, broaden engagement with the Afghan government and other political actors, and reach out to certain Taliban representatives.

 • Continued Training and Investments: India should provide more military training to Afghan security forces and invest in longer-term capacity-building programs. It should actively support and invest in the National Directorate of Security (for example, by providing training and sharing intelligence). Finally, given the continued levels of violence and the impact of the coronavirus on the Afghan economy, India should expand its development assistance. 

 • Working With and Through Others: India should look to broaden its engagements with Iran and Russia, explore opportunities for cooperation (as limited as they might be) with China, and find common ground with the United States on Afghanistan’s future. This does not mean forcing competing interests to align; it means investing in a wider diplomatic initiative with the view to carve out areas of convergence.

Assessing Risks

 Assessing risks is a risky business. The fields of social and cognitive psychology have a considerable body of literature on how risks are perceived and dealt with. There is general agreement that people in a particular empirical field “simplify reality” according to their schemata or how they choose to organize knowledge.20 Such would be the case even with Indian decision-makers reading of India’s role in Afghanistan. Further, the reality in question is dependent, as Robert Jervis has often reminded his readers, on perceptions.21 While the precise relationship between perceptions and reality is a question better left to academic debate, what is important from the point of view of a policy paper such as this one is to recognize that such a relationship exists. An entity’s perception of risks is, after all, connected to its interests, which, at least in part, are a function of its perceptions of emerging realities.22 George Kennan’s famous Long Telegram was crucial to set the basis of containment at the onset of the Cold War exactly because he was able to identify that the Soviet leadership “relied on the fiction of external threat to maintain its internal legitimacy.” This “fiction” was the Soviet Union’s postwar “reality.” Hence, there was no point, according to Kennan, in attempting to win Stalin over by cooperation.23 In general, it could be said that India’s aim should be to continue to have the ability to be represented in Afghanistan for a long time to come. A “degree of stability and security” allowing “us [India] to be engaged” in Afghanistan is how Rakesh Sood, a former Indian ambassador to the country and former special envoy for disarmament and nonproliferation, summarizes the fundamental elements of Indian interests.24 What is it, then, that puts these interests at risk, especially at a time of withdrawal and peace negotiations? For Indian decision-makers, there is a well-founded schema of the risks to India’s interests. Whether observers agree or disagree with the validity of these risks, they are as real to India as the Trump administration’s perception that it needs to withdraw from this so-called graveyard of empires. These risks are India’s truths. They can be falsified by scholars and practitioners alike—in Washington, London, Islamabad, Berlin, Doha, and elsewhere—but these crystallized perceptions are a part of the Indian leadership’s simplified realities and cannot be wished away by disagreement. From the Indian perspective, the question is how they can be mitigated. 

Terrorism 

The first set of risks has to do with the possibility of international and regional terrorism. One of the four guiding principles mentioned in the joint declaration between the United States and the Afghan government includes “guarantees to prevent the use of Afghan soil by any international terrorist groups or individuals against the security of the United States and its allies.”25 However well-intentioned these words might be, there is little clarity on how these guarantees will be upheld. After all, the factions to be reconciled will also include those elements who have fronted the ISI’s war against India from within Afghanistan. The evidence supporting this claim is overwhelming.26 The Haqqani group, which continues to be the best armed and trained Taliban faction, has engineered and carried out attacks against Indian assets, including the Indian embassy in Kabul. “The US media,” argues Myra Macdonald, “reported that Washington believed the ISI had provided support for the attack.”27 Given the close connections between the ISI and the Haqqani leadership, it is highly likely that a reconciled Haqqani group will continue with its anti-India agenda.28 Sirajuddin Haqqani, a deputy leader of the Taliban, asserted in the New York Times that it is important to “maintain friendly relations with all countries and take their concerns seriously,” but this does nothing to assuage the concerns of Indian security officials.29 As those who have long studied the Haqqani group confirm, the relationship between the group and the ISI is “still strong.”30 Lastly, the security vacuum created by the U.S.-led drawdown of forces has resulted in the rise of the Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K), a branch of the self-proclaimed Islamic State operating in South Asia and Central Asia. This group’s ability to attract radicalized individuals, including those from India, and recruit well-trained defectors from Taliban and Pakistani militant groups is a very real threat to India’s future in Afghanistan and the region more broadly.31 An attack on a gurdwara (a place of worship) in Kabul, in March 2020—for which the IS-K claimed responsibility32—is the most telling example of the very real security risks to India’s footprint inside Afghanistan.33 That one of the four IS-K operatives who stormed the gurdwara complex were from Kerala, in the south of India, makes this threat all the more pressing for Indian officials.34 Pakistani Influence The second related set of risks has to do with the ISI’s increasing influence in Afghanistan. The nexus between the Taliban (especially the Haqqani group) and the ISI underscores Pakistan’s increasing influence within the country. The Taliban leadership may not always see eye to eye with the Pakistani state and the ISI, but the ISI’s influence over the Taliban is undeniable.35 “They are our powerful

Mitigation Strategies: Broader Diplomatic Engagement The Case

 Successive Indian governments have been consistent in lending support to an Afghan-led reconciliation process. In 2011, the Congress-led government of then prime minister Manmohan Singh took what was considered a “leap of faith” when it supported such a program.92 India’s commitment continues to the present day. In a letter delivered to Ghani a day before the Khalilzad-Baradar pact was signed, Modi wrote, “We also remain committed to our principled position of support for an inclusive Afghan-led, Afghan-owned and Afghan controlled peace and reconciliation process.”93 The strategy of working primarily through the Afghan government has, for a long time, been an unrealistic one. That Ghani and Abdullah cannot agree on a unified vision for the state, and until very recently on a national government, is not surprising. In a bizarre development, on March 9, 2020, both Ghani and Abdullah held parallel presidential swearing-in ceremonies in Kabul. Although Ghani was declared the winner of the 2019 presidential election by the country’s Independent Election Commission, Abdullah cried foul and created his own “inclusive government.”94 Even Khalilzad could not broker peace between the two Afghan leaders, argues Abdullah Khenjani, the former editor-in-chief at Tolo TV, an Afghan television station.95 For Pompeo, according to a longtime Afghan watcher, “Ghani lost credibility” as a result of the increasingly divided state of politics in Kabul. There is, according to this expert, “a significant cooling” in the U.S.-Ghani relationship. He argued that though “you won’t see the Afghan administration crumble,” new configurations will emerge in this time of instability.96 The failure of Afghan leaders, some experts argue, has not only negatively impacted the credibility of the Afghan political class but also “its legitimacy.”97 The May 17 agreement may have returned a degree of legitimacy to both Ghani and Abdullah, but whether or not this will actually lead to stability is questionable. Given the acrimonious recent past, whether or not they will be able to agree on matters of national importance, such as dealing with the Taliban,98 or broader governance issues like the appointment of provincial governors, are political tests that cannot be banked on. In sum, for India, the urgency of adopting a broader diplomatic strategy is as pressing today as it was before the Ghani-Abdullah agreement. Afghan insiders like Khenjani, who have historically been well disposed toward India, argue that “New Delhi waited too long on the peace process” and that despite its “enormous leverage and capital” in Kabul, it consciously pushed itself to “irrelevance.”99 An attendee at the signing ceremony in Doha argues that India’s official position—that it will work only through the Ghani-led government and not “annoy” it—has “distanced” India from a process that is shaped only in part by CARNEGIE INDIA | 15 Ghani.100 Ghani and Abdul

so the thing is Taliban will attack India for sure because several years ago most of the Indian Islamic kings are from afghan. 

and now Taliban got help from India enemy nations such as China and Pakistan they might plan to attack Indias most crowded cities.

a article by Madhukrishnan