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Old Thursday, October 28, 2010
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Exclamation India in Afghanistan - An insightful Report by Foreign Policy Magzine

India in Afghanistan, part I: strategic interests, regional concerns

By Christine Fair
October 26, 2010


India's profile in Afghanistan has been a quiet but looming concern for New Delhi, Washington, Brussels and of course Islamabad with all wondering what is the optimal role for India in Afghanistan's reconstruction in light of the enduring security competition between India and Pakistan. On the one hand are those who want to expand India's presence in Afghanistan through increased Indian training of Afghan civilian and military personnel, development projects, and expanded economic ties. These observers are aware of India's long-standing and robust ties with Kabul and Afghans' generally positive public opinion towards Indians and India. Notably, in late August 2010, Afghanistan's National Security Adviser Rangin Spanta told an Indian journalist, "We would like to expand cooperation with India in order to strengthen Kabul's ability to secure itself."

On the other hand are those that caution against such involvement. This view was articulated forcefully by then-top NATO commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal in his August 2009 "COMISAF's Initial Assessment." McChrystal opined:

"Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan, including significant development efforts and financial investment. In addition, the current Afghan government is perceived by Islamabad to be pro-Indian. While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani countermeasures in Afghanistan or India."

Other analysts see Indian and Pakistani competition in Afghanistan as a new "Great Game" and argue that Afghanistan can be pacified only through a regional solution that resolves once and for all the intractable Indo-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir.

Despite the seeming importance of India's interests in Afghanistan and the regional impacts of the same, there have been few recent studies of these issues. I recently authored a report that analyzes India's current interests in Afghanistan, how it has sought to achieve its aims, and the consequences of its actions for India, Pakistan, and the international efforts to stabilize Pakistan and Afghanistan.

India rising

India's interests in Afghanistan are not only Pakistan-specific but equally, if not more importantly, tied to India's desire to be and to be seen as an extra-regional power moving toward great power status. India has long bristled at the tendency among international analysts to hitch India to Pakistan. India is keen to throw off any comparison to Pakistan -- a state it views as its diminutive and less consequential neighbor. Thus while India's presence in Afghanistan has Pakistan-specific utility it is also about India's emergent ability to influence its extended strategic neighborhood.

American officials are often unaware of how Indians conceive of their neighborhood. Indian policy analysts claim that India's strategic environment stretches to the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf in the west (some will even claim the eastern coast of Africa as the western-most border of this strategic space); to the east, it includes the Strait of Malacca and extends up to the South China Sea; to the north, it is comprised of Central Asia; and to the south, it reaches out to Antarctica.

Raja Mohan, a doyen of Indian security analysis, explains in compa*rable terms that India's grand strategy:

"Divides the world into three concentric circles. In the first, which encom*passes the immediate neighborhood, India has sought primacy and a veto over the actions of outside powers. In the second, which encom*passes the so-called extended neighborhood stretching across Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral, India has sought to balance the influence of other powers and prevent them from undercutting its interests. In the third, which includes the entire global stage, India has tried to take its place as one of the great powers, a key player in international peace and security."

Thus, in many regards, India's interests in Afghanistan can be seen as merely one element within India's larger desire to be able to project its interests well beyond South Asia.

Why India cares about Afghanistan

There are at least three principle reasons why India has direct interests in Afghanistan.

First, India has had to contend with many significant security chal*lenges that stem from the Taliban's regime in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Pakistan has raised and supported several militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen/Harkat-ul-Ansar, and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami among others, which operate in India. However, all of these groups have trained in Afghanistan, with varying proximity to the Taliban and by extension al-Qaeda. Thus India is absolutely adamant that Afghanistan should not again become a terrorist safe haven.

Second, India is interested in retaining Afghanistan as a friendly state from which it has the capacity to monitor Pakistan and even, where possible, cultivate assets to influence activities in Pakistan. While India is keenly inter*ested in cultivating a significant partnership with Afghanistan, Pakistan busies itself trying to deny India these very opportunities.

Third, devel*opments in Afghanistan and Pakistan have important and usually deleterious effects upon India's domestic social fabric as well as its internal security apart from the well-known problems in and over Kashmir. Indian interlocutors have explained to me that Islamist militancy coexists with a burgeoning Hindu nationalist movement that seeks to re-craft India as a Hindu state. Hindu nation*alists and their militant counterparts live in a violent symbiosis with Islamist militant groups operating in and around India. Islamist terrorism in India and the region provides grist for the mill of Hindu nationalism and its violent offshoots.


How India can achieve these aims

India has sought to establish its presence in Afghanistan from the early days of its independence from Britain in 1947. In 1950, Afghanistan and India signed a "Friendship Treaty." India had robust ties with Afghan King Zahir Shah's regime. Prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979, New Delhi continued to formalized agreements and protocols with various pro-Soviet regimes in Kabul.

While India's role in Afghanistan was constrained during the anti-Soviet jihad, between 1979 and 1989 India reportedly expanded its development activities in Afghanistan, focusing upon industrial, irrigation, and hydroelectric projects. That India was able to sustain this presence attests to the importance that India attached to this relationship and India's willingness to persevere.

After the Taliban consolidated their hold on Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, India struggled to maintain its presence and to support anti-Taliban forces. However, Indian objectives in Afghanistan remained necessarily modest given the constrained environment. India aimed to undermine, as best it could, the ability of the Taliban to consolidate its power over Afghanistan, principally by supporting the Northern Alliance in tandem with other regional actors.

Working with Iran, Russia, and Tajikistan, India provided important (but not fully detailed) resources to the Northern Alliance, the only meaningful challenge to the Taliban in Afghanistan. According to journalist Rahul Bedi, India also ran a twenty-five-bed hospital at Farkhor (Ayni), Tajikistan, for more than a year. The Northern Alliance military commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, died in that hospital after he was attacked by al-Qaeda suicide bombers on September 9, 2001. Through Tajikistan, India supplied the Northern Alliance with high altitude warfare equipment worth around $8 million. India also based several "defense advisers," including an officer of a brigadier rank, in Tajikistan to advise the Northern Alliance in their operations against the Taliban.

Since 2001, India has relied upon development projects and other forms of humanitarian assistance. To facilitate these projects and to collect intelligence (as all embassies and consulates do), India also now has consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif, in addition to its embassy in Kabul. There also are a number of smaller-scale activities throughout Afghanistan. According to U.S., British, and Afghan officials I interviewed over the last several years, India's activities are not isolated to the north, where it has had traditional ties, but also include efforts in the southern provinces and in the northeast, abutting the Pakistani border.
Christine Fair is an assistant professor at Georgetown University and the author of Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States. In part two of this post, she will explore the future of Indian interests in Afghanistan.
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Old Thursday, October 28, 2010
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Default India in Afghanistan Part II

India in Afghanistan, part II: Indo-U.S. relations in the lengthening AfPak shadow


By Christine Fair
October 27, 2010


Despite deepening security threats from both the Taliban and other Pakistan-based proxies operating against Indian personnel and institutions in Afghanistan, thus far India has remained committed to staying in Afghanistan. India has its own concerns about the ultimate settlement in Afghanistan given that such a political settlement will likely come about through some sort of a twinned process of reconciliation and reintegration of former Taliban fighters back into Afghanistan's political landscape.

Surely this will be a prominent matter of discussion when U.S. President Barack Obama undertakes a state visit to India next month. As one Indian commentator recently wrote:

"The real criterion for measuring success [of the Obama visit] would lie in assessing whether or not the two leaders have reached consensus on defining the dangers that their, and other, countries face from the Af-Pak area and how they intend to tackle it. They must agree on a mechanism for arriving at such assessment and there is only one way of doing it. What is needed is a trilateral forum of consultations consisting of the U.S., India, and Afghanistan. "

In some measure, India should be assured that the Obama administration's assessment of the "Pakistan challenge" more closely mirrors that of India than that of the Bush administration, which remained doggedly committed to its Panglossian assessments of Pakistani President Parvez Musharraf's various promises to contend with the terrorism menaces based in and from Pakistan. However, as Bob Woodward lays bare in Obama's Wars, while the Obama White House has a better appreciation of the challenges with Pakistan it lacks any significant strategy to contend with them.

Moreover, Obama has much to prove to the Indians following a shaky start. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to China first -- not India. Both Obama and Clinton made various statements attesting to the primacy of China in the U.S.'s Asia strategy. India was piqued by the Obama administration's lack of attention, having become habituated to the incessant wooing of the Bush administration, which urged the United States to alter its entire nonproliferation regime to accommodate the controversial Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear deal. The deal was important to Washington ostensibly to constrain China. Ashley Tellis, the architect of the deal, explained the importance of such a move in 2005:

"If the United States is serious about advancing its geopolitical objectives in Asia, it would almost by definition help New Delhi develop its strategic capabilities such that India's nuclear weaponry and associated delivery systems could deter against the growing and utterly more capable nuclear forces Beijing is likely to possess by 2025."

Any U.S. retrenchment from this position on China would leave India exposed.

India continues to watch with concern as Washington continues to ply military assistance to Pakistan while remaining unable or unwilling to compel Pakistan to abandon militancy as a tool of foreign policy and to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure that has inflicted such harm upon India and other countries the region. Worse, India fears that Washington will provide funds and access to weapon systems that are more appropriate to target India than Pakistani insurgents. In the wake of the recently concluded U.S.-Pakistan strategic dialogue, more defense wares will be on their way to Pakistan. India's Defense Minister A.K. Antony summarized India's concerns during a September 2010 trip to Washington: "We feel that even though the U.S. is giving arms to Pakistan to fight terrorism, our practical experience is (that) it is always being misused. They are diverting a portion against India," Antony had said during his visit here.

Will India stay the course in Afghanistan? Planning for the "day after"

Obama's (largely misconstrued) announcement that U.S. troops will begin drawing down military forces from Afghanistan in a conditions-based fashion in July 2011 has been widely read as "sever and saunter," or perhaps even "cut and run" among Afghanistan's neighbors. The Obama administration's assurances that the United States will remain committed to Afghanistan's development and transition have had little palliative impacts upon these calculations. India is no exception. Obama's commitment to ending the military commitment to Afghanistan has triggered a vigorous domestic debate within India about its future role in Afghanistan.

Indians are right to worry about how they will continue their programs and initiatives in Afghanistan as the United States and other international military forces reconfigure their posture away from active military operations in the future. Indian personnel have been under steady attack in Afghanistan.

After the 2008 attack on India's Embassy in Kabul, the Indian Express ran a poignant editorial that captured this dilemma. The author wrote:

"After the Kabul bombing, India must come to terms with an important question that it has avoided debating so far. New Delhi cannot continue to expand its economic and diplomatic activity in Afghanistan, while avoiding a commensurate increase in its military presence there. For too long, New Delhi has deferred to Pakistani and American sensitivities about raising India's strategic profile in Afghanistan."

Some Indian analysts have articulated an explicitly military option for India in Afghanistan. Dr. Subhash Kapila, writing in December 2009, explains, "India has wrongly shied away from a military commitment in Afghanistan for two major reasons. The first was the American reluctance to permit Indian military involvement in Afghanistan out of deference to Pakistan Army sensitivities. The second reason was the political and strategic timidity of India's political leadership who have yet to recognize that being a big power would involve shouldering military responsibilities to reorder in India's favor the security environment in South Asia." He argues that since the U.S. exit is a question of when not if, India must begin preparing extensive contingency planning for the "day after" of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.

In August of 2008, Pragati (an online, independent Indian defense publication) dedicated an entire issue to debating whether or not India should send troops to Afghanistan. One author argued that India should expand its civilian effort as well as forge a military option. Shushant T. Singh, one of the contributors to that issue, explains, "A significant Indian military presence in Afghanistan will alter the geo-strategic landscape in the extended neighborhood, by expanding India's power projection in Central Asia."

Shanthie Mariet D'Souza, in the same issue of Pragati, urges India to stay the course and push to train Afghan National Security Forces over the objections of the United States, NATO, and Pakistan. At the other extreme are those who worry that the benefits of any Indian presence in Afghanistan are outweighed by the cost. (India has already been forced to expand its security forces' presence in Afghanistan to secure the civilian efforts underway.) Proponents of scaling back argue that India should do so when the United States and other coalition partners reduce their kinetic operations and retract their military footprints beginning in July 2011.

The stakes for India are higher than some may appreciate. India's efforts to shape the outcome in Afghanistan with its own security interests will be important evidence that India has what it takes to be a power of any consequence outside of South Asia -- much less globally. If India cannot effectively shape the course of events in its own "immediate neighborhood," how can it credibly lay claim to its great power aspirations at home or abroad?

Christine Fair is an assistant professor at Georgetown University and the author of Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States. In part one of this post, she considered India's historical interests in Afghanistan.
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Old Friday, November 12, 2010
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AOA, if u kindly tell me abt foriegn policy magazine from which u have taken these articles. is that available in lahore or published from where? i mean from where i can have it? or whether its montly, yearly or weekly
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