India gets a spot at the table

MK Bhadrakumar

Former Ambassador

THE visit by Ministry of External Affairs officials, led by senior diplomat JP Singh, to Kabul on June 2 and his meeting with high-ranking members of the Afghan interim government signify the commencement of India’s diplomatic engagement with the Taliban regime. New Delhi messaged its readiness to do business with the Taliban. India is treading the footfalls of major regional states.

The Taliban are sons of the soil and nobody’s proxy. That’s why the compassion and empathy in Doval’s remarks come as a breath of fresh air.

How Russia took this pathway is edifying. When Jamal Nasir Garval arrived in Moscow as the Afghan chargé d’affaires appointed by the Taliban authorities and was accredited by Russian foreign ministry in March, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called it ‘a step toward resuming full-fledged bilateral diplomatic contacts’. She qualified that it was still too early to talk about recognition. On April 29, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the Afghan chargé d’affaires had already started work in Moscow.

Last Tuesday, Tass reported that Garval would attend the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (June 15-18), an event known as ‘Russian Davos’, usually hosted by President Vladimir Putin, where, as in previous years since 1997, the business programme will focus on the global and Russian economies, social issues, and technological development.

Instead of viewing the Taliban through the prism of US-style exceptionalism, Russia began treating the Taliban officials as estranged natives of our region who returned home. Last Wednesday, the Russian foreign ministry website (in Russian language) featured a press note titled ‘On the current situation in Afghanistan’, which flagged that the Taliban Movement, as an organisation, is not considered a terrorist organisation in the UN, and sanctions only apply to certain individuals.

Referring to the recent regional tour by US Special Representative Tom West, during which he met some Afghan political emigres in New Delhi and Istanbul, the Russian commentary openly lamented that Americans ‘lack fresh ideas on the Afghan track’ and are still relying ‘on those who personify the failure of the 20-year US democratisation experiment in Afghanistan… who abandoned their people during the most difficult period of the transition of power and, as a result, lost influence in the country’.

This plain-speaking coincides with a furtive western campaign to tighten the UN sanctions further ‘to make the Taliban hurt’ — to borrow from Human Rights Watch. The game plan is to corner and punish the Taliban after having failed to lure it as a surrogate regime serving the West’s geopolitical interests in and around Afghanistan and Central Asia. The new cold war conditions give an added sense of urgency, as evident from the surprise visit to Pakistan by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in the run-up to an upcoming UN Security Council meeting on Taliban sanctions. Baerbock said the Taliban ‘brought incredible suffering and hunger’ to Afghan people and the country is moving in the ‘wrong direction’, which had consequences for the international community.

Baerbock’s mission was to gauge Pakistan’s receptiveness to a new coordinated and coercive approach to the Taliban, based on an estimation that the GHQ in Rawalpindi is looking for coercive leverage against the Taliban in a way that it hasn’t in the past. The western powers count on an opening if the Pakistani military recalibrates.

The US Institute of Peace did kite flying recently that Washington and Islamabad can jointly press the Taliban on a range of political issues important to US priorities, and Pakistan can help by ‘publicly signalling that the Taliban’s recognition is off the table… It can also downgrade the diplomatic treatment of the Taliban and align its messaging on counterterrorism issues with that of the US government’.

This is where the remarks by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval at the Regional Dialogue in Dushanbe recently, weighing in on Indian thinking, come into play. He choreographed a revamped Indian policy dripping with realism and accent on strengthening Afghanistan’s capability to counter terrorism and terrorist groups, while exuding optimism that with collective efforts of the Regional Dialogue members, Afghanistan can be transformed as a prosperous and vibrant nation.

Afghanistan should not be destabilised again and the focus ought to be more on humanitarian mobilisation and other assistance. It is a veritable rejection of the situation in the Panjshir Valley and the shenanigans of certain external actors to kickstart a new civil war. Doval highlighted the need for representation of all sections of Afghan society so that the collective energies of the largest possible proportion of the population feel motivated to contribute to nation-building. Yet, he refused to be prescriptive, and thereby reposed India’s abiding faith in the innate Afghan culture to seek truth and reconciliation.

The Taliban is toying with the idea of holding a Loya Jirga. Former Afghan government officials who fled Kabul are returning, to be welcomed by the Taliban, including in the most recent days a former official from the national security council, a General who used to be the defence ministry spokesman and a deputy minister. Farooq Wardak, former minister of education, who had served under both Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, is the highest-level former official to return to a warm welcome. He said, ‘Most authorities are thinking about returning… A person’s dignity is in his own country.’

The past two decades have revealed that the West understood neither the Taliban nor Afghanistan. The stereotypical portrayal of the Taliban as zealots was far from accurate. The movement commanded more popular support than what western narratives conceded grudgingly. The Taliban are sons of the soil and nobody’s proxy. That’s why the compassion and empathy in Doval’s remarks come as a breath of fresh air.

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