Read full article... it is worth it.
THE INDIAN "debate" about Afghanistan is narrowing down to a single agenda: ensuring the security of hundreds of Indian nationals involved in Indian projects in that country. Since the killing of Maniappan Ramankutty in November last, the Government began substantially augmenting the paramilitary forces deployed in Afghanistan. It reportedly decided on deploying the CRPF in Afghanistan even ahead of Suryanarayana's death last week.
It took the Dutch parliament an agonising six months to make up its mind whether a few hundred troops could be sent to Afghanistan. The "debate" deeply divided the Dutch public. An entire team of parliamentarians from the House of Commons travelled to Afghanistan at great risk to their personal safety before the parliamentary select committee could decide what conditions and preconditions had to be fulfilled before British troops were despatched to southern Afghanistan under the commitment to NATO. (Of course, senior British journalists separately travelled to Afghanistan for making their own assessment.)
India, regrettably, is yet to reach that level of sophistication in policy-making — its tragic experiences in Sri Lanka nearly two decades ago notwithstanding. Secondly, Afghanistan is — it has been for a long time and may well remain for the foreseeable future — an enigma. Ambiguities shroud every "incident" like the one involving Maniappan or Suryanarayana. Things are never quite what they may appear to be. This is inevitable when intrigues double up as politics. What Selig Harrison wrote in his classic work Out of Afghanistan — that the Soviets actually blundered into Afghanistan in 1978 — has since been borne out by the declassified archival materials of the Cold War period in Moscow and Washington. A perception was deliberately created by the Western intelligence that they were using Afghanistan as a battlefield to threaten long-term Soviet strategic interests.
That is to say, there must be greater clarity as to who killed Maniappan and Suryanarayana. All that can be said with a measure of confidence is that they were political murders (which does not make them any less horrendous). Intriguingly, Hamid Karzai did not blame the Taliban for Suryanarayana's murder. Actually, for the past few days Kabul has been excited about the new overtures being made by the United States and Mr. Karzai to the Taliban leadership for a genuinely serious political dialogue aimed at working out a credible power-sharing arrangement.
The discourse in India has been to point to the possibility of a Pakistani intelligence hand in the killing of Indian workers in Afghanistan. The possibility is fast becoming a probability. With that, the "case file" is all but closed. And, it is time to move on to modalities of augmentation of the Indian security presence in Afghanistan.
While speaking of a Pakistani animus to an Indian presence in the sensitive Afghan border regions, would we countenance with equanimity Pakistani nationals appearing in their hundreds on India's border regions with Nepal or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka? Yet another question arises. Without compromising the commitment to "reconstruct" Afghanistan's economic infrastructure, is it not possible for Indian activities to sidestep for the present the highly explosive region bordering Pakistan and instead concentrate on the west, north, east, and the centre of the country till such time as there is less volatility in Pakistan's Balochistan or Waziristan regions?
0 comments:
Post a Comment