Indian Defence Review

No matter who wins the US Presidential elections, both candidates have affirmed their intention to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014, unless, of course, a major escalation takes place or the situation re-enacts itself.  But, given the mood and tact in the Pashtun provinces, the aim of the Taliban – led by a Mullah Omar who has still not been discovered – and Pakistan’s ISI – a wily organization that has the color of a chameleon – the plan along the Durand Line and north-west Pakistan is to lull the USA into believing that all is quiet on the western front, thereby enabling the planned withdrawal of the mightiest army with the mightiest weapons on the face of the Earth.  Thus would the USA and a desperate Taliban both be able to declare victory and flash “mission accomplished” signs – a win-win outcome by obvious transpiration.

The US, of course, would claim that their aims of minimizing the insurgency and simultaneously propping up the Afghan military forces have succeeded, which will make them further claim that the threat of terrorism to the USA has receded, thereby leaving no indication that US forces are needed half-way around the world, thus allowing the USA to save tens of billions of dollars in military deployment every year in Afghanistan – money that the USA desperately needs to control its own deficits and stimulate employment at home.  The Taliban, of course, would claim to be the heroes of the world, by asserting that they earlier kicked out the strong-arm Russians, and now the high-and-mighty Americans, giving themselves an aura of invincibility.

While both the USA and Taliban would declare victory, India and much of the Western world would lose.  The fact of the matter is that a withdrawal by USA from Afghanistan may end up ranking among the worst decisions any US government could make from a strategic perspective.  At a time when the USA has military bases in more than three dozen countries or more, getting out of Afghanistan without maintaining reasonable deterrent capability there would be absolute folly.  It is likely that the Taliban may regroup, and one day aim to take their revenge on the Americans for having made them flee their own homes and lands.  Recall that even when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the refugees into Pakistan were far fewer than what happened this time around.  But, beware the revenge of an Afghan: an ancient Afghan proverb has it “I took my revenge in a hundred years, and I took it soon.”  The willy-nilly Americans have no concept what can hit them again when they least expect it!  Having suffered two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and having gotten tired of them, will they have the muscle and motivation to send out their army again if some type of repeat of 9/11 were to happen?  Or would the USA lump it?  It is more likely that the USA will encourage proxy wars, which may or may not yield the desired outcome.

For decades, the USA distrusted and forsook Indian advice.  Starting from the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan, the US did not believe India’s warnings that (i) Najibullah’s government would fail, (ii) the Taliban would come to power (1996), (iii) that the Taliban would be oppressive, (iv) that the Taliban were planning terrorist attacks against USA, especially after the Kandahar airplane hijacking event.   For all this, the US paid a heavy price, all the time thinking that its intelligence in Pakistan and friendliness with Pakistan would counter-balance any unwanted event.   Moreover, prisoners that External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh released during the Kandahar hijacking of December 1999 became directly involved in the planning of 9/11, but the US was on the wrong side of history at the time in 1999 and was still favoring Pakistan over India, notwithstanding Bill Clinton’s make-believe visit to India in 1998.  The US apparently did not learn from year to year, but were apparently seduced enough by their double-agents in the ISI, who alwaysconcocted fiction any time the USA began to gather doubts about them, partly because the US always wanted to hear what they hoped for.  Even today, the USA is distrusting Indian security advice, and is again listening to advice that it wants to hear – that the Taliban is not a threat anymore — and that Afghan forces will become strong enough to defend themselves by 2014.

However, Afghanistan has been a complex, politics-ridden country since Mohammed Daoud deposed King Zahir Shah in 1974.   The politics is further tainted with blood and murder — andhatred, torture and revenge — reflecting the basest behavior attributable to humans.  The US can’t understand this directly unless they learn to trust someone in the region.  However, the US now wants to trust no one in the region, has apparently had enough in Afghanistan after successfully toppling the Taliban in the first place in 2001, is now mentally ready to pull out, and still seeks to partly balance India, who has no major lasting friend anymore, and definitely not the Soviet Union.

No doubt that Mohammed Daoud, Prime Minister of Afghanistan from 1953 to 1963, and President of Afghanistan from 1974-79, was good for India from a security perspective till as long as he contested Pakistan’s suzerainty over the Northwest Pashtun provinces of Pakistan.  In 1961, Pakistan closed its border with Afghanistan because Daoudpressedthe Pashtun issue.  This made Afghanistan reliant on the Soviet Union for commerce.  For the Soviet Union, it was a great windfall that Afghanistan was willy-nilly falling into the Soviet orbit after a hundred years of the Great Game.  Daoudthen became disliked in the USA after he received armaments from the Russians in 1961 at heavily discounted prices.  With those arms in 1962, Daoud sent troops into Pakistan in 1962 in the Bajaur province that was easily routed by the far superior and better-skilled Pakistani forces.  USA obviously supported its CENTO and SEATO ally, Pakistan, in that conflict, especially given that CENTO and SEATO were overtly anti-Soviet in principle and action, notwithstanding that Afghanistan had—and has—a genuine claim to the Pashtun regions of Pakistan.

The past is not easily forgotten in the mountains straddling the Durand line, and Zulfiqar Bhutto actively and militarily supported Islamic fundamentalists who were expelled by Daoud in the mid-seventies.   Thus, Pakistan was involved in the internal affairs of Afghanistan even before the Russians walked in on December 1979.  Ironically, when the communist party influence in Afghanistan reached alarming proportions around 1977-78, the West and Pakistan suddenly sought to shore up Daoud, but by then it was too late.  While Daoud sought closer relations with the West to keep the Soviet influence at a distance, the alarm bells rang in Moscow: Afghanistan was becoming perilously close to slipping from Soviet influence owing to the sudden turnaround and independence of Daoud.  But, the communist and Islamist influence had by then matured in Afghanistan, and the famous Saur revolution culminated in a coup engineered by the Communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan with help from the Afghan military, resulting in the brutal assassination of Daoud and his family in April 1978.

The period of 1978-79 was a watershed on both sides of the Durand Line: Zulfiqar Bhuttto was hung, and Afghanistan saw the Taraki-Amin regimes come and go.  Whereas Amin supported the Soviet invasion, the Soviets backstabbed him only a few days later and endorsed his assassination. Subsequently, the Soviet Union did everything it could to tighten its grip over Afghanistan – leading to the Soviet invasion of December 1979 and installation of the Soviet-controlled regime of Babrak Karmal, of the Parchamite faction.   The Russians stayed for as long as they could, hoping to quell Islamist insurgence and anti-communist forces.  But, Babrak Karmal was dispensed with by the Soviets in 1986 and taken to the Soviet Union after the Soviets became disillusioned with him, being replaced in due course by Mohammad Najibullah, a fellow Parchamite.

Gradually, the Soviets reduced military aid to Afghanistan after withdrawing in 1988, and after the USSR collapsed in 1991, military aid to Najibullah’s regime also stopped altogether, andNajibullah resigned in April 1992 as per the UN decision in the matter of the continuation of his government.   Then, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was one of the earliest leaders and founders of the Mujahiddin, and headed the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, succeeded Najibullah.Needless to say, the USA was happy at their Mujahiddin taking over the reins of power in Kabul.  But the Taliban – another mujahiddin faction — waged a relentless civil war against Rabbani’s Frontbetween 1992 and 1996.  The Taliban toppled Rabbani’s regime in 1996 (and Rabbani was eventually assassinated many years later by a suicide bomber in 2011), whereas Mohammed Najibullah was mutilated and executed by the Taliban in 1996.  Because India had strongly supported Najibullah, India then threw its support – in 1992 itself — behind the United Front of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a childhood neighbor of Najibullah.

Massoud supported Rabbani in the civil war against the Taliban.  So, when the Taliban came to power in 1996, Massoud was in the opposition, but ended up becoming an ally of the United States in its battle against the pro-ISI Taliban.  Eventually, 9/11 brought India and the US to the same side of the battle, and the two found themselves with like objectives for the first time in 50 years!

U.S. Marines return fire on enemy forces in Marjeh, Afghanistan. Marines are securing the city of Marjeh from the Taliban.

Subsequently, India and the USA began to see much more in common – the aggressiveness of China, proliferation of nuclear technology by A Q Khan, democracy in the world, freedom of religion, and secularism.  And, Indian intelligence tipped off US intelligence about the BBC China that was shipping nuclear materials to Libya.  Today, Karzai is supported by the USA and India, while Pakistan seethes at the insults of Karzai who seeks to rake up the reunification of Pashtun territories when he is strong enough, and decries Pakistani duplicity in the war in Afghanistan.  It must not be forgotten that Afghanistan was the only country to vote against Pakistani membership of the United Nations in September 1947, mainly because Afghanistan objected to Pakistani occupation of Pashtun provinces in the northwest frontier provinces (NWFP) of that time.  Karzai now further deplores Pakistani interference in Afghanistan through its secret aid to the pernicious Taliban.

It goes without saying that Pakistan and the ISI are biding their time to 2014.  Once the USA is back home, it is easier for Pakistan to talk to them (when they are 12,000 miles away) than when they are next-door and literally breathing down Pakistan’s neck.  With the USA gone from Afghanistan, having been bloodied and depleted in many ways, the ISI and Pakistan’s army will have free hand to regain “strategic depth” in Afghanistan, and they may not desist in their aim once the opportunity presents itself.  Pakistan still has a few scores to settle with Afghanistan, and all of it is blood-stained.

Thus, Hamid Karzai could be looking at only months or weeks of additional power after the US withdrawal.  One only hopes his fate can be better than Najibullah’s, who was castrated and left to hang from a traffic light in a public square – a brutal retribution by a truculent people.

Once the Taliban-ISI combine begins to assert itself, the fate of the Afghan forces will fall into doubt.  The USA currently prides itself at training and building the Afghan forces, and hopes that a 50,000 strong Afghan force with American armaments and backing will be able to hold off the rag-tag Taliban.  But what the US does not wager for is that the Taliban is not by itself: it is surreptitiously aided and abetted by the duplicitous ISI, which funnels the same US armaments to the Taliban that Pakistan receives from the US with the avowed assurance to use it against the militant terrorists, but which they would happily use against India if they had to, without batting an eyelid.  Though the Afghan forces may be able to hold off a rag-tag Taliban all on its own, their ability to hold off the Taliban-ISI combine is much less certain.

One must also look at the Afghan Forces with circumspection:  First of all, some 25% are probably Taliban fifth-columnist agents earning military training at the expense of the USA, thus making a bloody fool of the USA; this is, in fact, evidenced by the increasing number of insider shootings of American and NATO personnel inside Afghanistan.  Another 25% will simply drop out and go home once the USA leaves, feeling scared for their survival in a dreadful Afghanistan; another 25% will probably desert their battalions when push comes to shove, not wanting to fight their fellow Afghans in a future civil war, such being their nature, mentality, and caliber.  Thus, the 50,000 strong Afghan Forces could well pare down to one-fourth(12,500) their strength, ending up fighting 12,500 of their own fifth-columnists plus a mad rag-tag group determined to capture Kabul.  The chances in favor of the Afghan Forces is much less in this scenario, especially when tipped by ISI support behind the scenes that the USA will never discover, let alone be able to prove.

Such is the personality of the people on either side of the Durand Line, and the USA has simply mis-read them altogether by applying Western concepts of logic and rationality that are nearly always opposed to Islamic concepts of justice and equality.

What will the result be of a castrated Karzai and a Kabul in the hands of the new Taliban?  Perhaps, the northern Uzbeks under Abdul Rashid Dostum, and the Tajiks under Atta Mohammed Noor will unite to battle the new Taliban-ISI combine.  This would then precipitate into another déjà vu civil war.  The capability of the Uzbeks and Tajiks against the Taliban and ISI is not convincingly superior at all.  But there is the added possibility that a China, which already has military engineer officers in Baltistan, would be simply all too keen to gain a foothold in Central Asia, and will come to the covert rescue of the Pashtuns.  This will bring China closer to the Lithium fields of Afghanistan and the gas fields of Iran.  It can be asked as to why the Chinese will not choose to help Karzai and the northern group rather than the Taliban.  The answer is that Pakistan will dissuade China from helping Karzai.  Consequently, China would become the next secret power in Afghanistan, with another secret aim to suppress all aid from the Muslim fighters in Afghanistan to its own rebels in Sinkiang.  Soon, China and Pakistan would train the Pashtuns to join their axis group of powers.  China would further expand trade with the Pashtuns, giving aid freely as they do in Angola, Zimbabwe, and Sudan, and the Western world would once again have lost a country to the axis forces.  Victory would turn to defeat for the United States.

The US would simply be left dumbstruck and impotent to send another full army to Afghanistan.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum left by the US withdrawal is all too likely to be filled by the China-Pakistan nexus.  This is not good for India, and not good for the geopolitics of USA or Russia.  But, what will India do at that time?  The answer is that they will likely do nothing more than they are being able to militarily do right now.

It should be noted that India missed the opportunity of sending a division to Afghanistan in 2001-02 when the USA was begging India.  If India had jumped at the first opportunity, Pakistan’s objections would have been moot when tempers were flaring and George Bush was breathing fire.  As destiny would have it, Pakistan slowly but surely predicated its support for USA on the denial of military access to India in Afghanistan.  And, once again, the USA sought the short-term solution in preference over the long-term solution.  But India behaved worse — like a sissy dragging its feet.  Abandoning Pakistan and aligning with India is clearly in the long-term interests of USA, but the US doesn’t appear to think that far ahead, being handicapped by their long nose, but India is simply scared to think outside itself, being convinced of its inferiority.

And what would have happened if India had its foot in the door in Afghanistan?  It could have sent another division later, such as in 2014.  What would Pakistan or China be able to do about that?  Virtually nothing more than what they are doing now or were doing then, except complain and lodge diplomatic protests.  Not only would a scenario of 40,000 Indian troops in Afghanistan assure Karzai’s survival, but it would simultaneously deny Pakistan strategic depth, deny China the foothold in Central Asia it seeks, deny the Islamic militants and Taliban terrorists the opportunity to once again plan terrorist attacks, or shoot young 14-year old girls for going to school in Afghanistan, or bring down Buddhist statues that are a world heritage.  India could build supply depots and a self-sufficient military base in Afghanistan.  Those Indian troops in Afghanistan could also have helped India outflank Pakistan in a future Indo-Pak war, liberate Baluchistan, and yank the Northwest provinces from Pakistan.  However, this is all speculative and hypothetical now.

Whereas, India should aim to resurrect the Mauryan empire that extended up to the Hindu Koh mountains, which is possible, India is simply incapable of the play with the tenor of its leadership, the personality of its dhotiwalas, the throttling grip of the bureaucrats on the government, the delays in its defense procurements, and now the decline of leadership in the Indian military.  The behavior of India, in essence, is simply not good enough for its survival.  India must pause to ask itself why it isn’t what it wants to be.

The country that controls Afghanistan controls the crossroads of Asia.  For centuries, the routes through Afghanistan intersected with the Silk Road.  The play for Afghanistan now continues between Pakistan and India—as to who will gain an upper hand there — and right now it looks like Pakistan has the longer leg in Afghanistan than India.  Thus, the Great Game of the 19th century continues today in its morphed state.  It is still possible that the next war between India and Pakistan could be over rivalry in Afghanistan.

The one solution in Afghanistan even now is for the US to put off its withdrawal, but that appears unlikely given the internal politics and sentiments in USA that want people in the rest of the world to handle their own affairs.  This also means that the dream of India that USA will break up and capture Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal before it falls into Taliban hands is simply a daydream that will not be realized.  Further, India will have to face the ensuing music when Pakistan, with China’s financial backing, renew their support to LET and the Al-Haqqani network, Harkat al-mujahiddin, etc., to stir trouble in India through severely skewed asymmetric warfare, the like of which India has not seen yet, but which can be imagined is possible.   The damage that India stands to see with an Afghanistan left to itself is far too serious, since the effect will be one that will minimize India.  A withdrawal from Afghanistan by USA, without a break-up of Pakistan by way of wrenching Baluchistan and de-militarizing the Northwest provinces of Pakistan, doesn’t look like a scenario that can in any way be in India’s, USA’s, or NATO’sinterests.