1

Pak India relations Vis-a-vis Afghanistan

The hostility between India and Pakistan lies at the heart of the current war in
Afghanistan. Most observers in the West view the Afghanistan conflict as a battle between
the U.S. and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on one hand, and
al-Qaida and the Taliban on the other. In reality this has long since ceased to be the case.
Instead our troops are now caught up in a complex war shaped by two pre-existing and
overlapping conflicts: one local and internal, the other regional.
Within Afghanistan, the war is viewed primarily as a Pashtun rebellion against President
Hamid Karzais regime, which has empowered three other ethnic groupsthe Tajiks, Uzbeks
and Hazaras of the northto a degree that the Pashtuns resent. For example, the Tajiks, who
constitute only 27% of the Afghan population, still make up 70% of the officers in the
Afghan army. Although Karzai himself is a Pashtun, many of his fellow tribesmen view his
presence as mere window-dressing for a U.S.-devised realignment of long-established power
relations in the country, dating back to 2001 when the U.S. toppled the overwhelmingly
Pashtun Taliban.
Beyond this indigenous conflict looms the much more dangerous hostility between the two
regional powersboth armed with nuclear weapons: India and Pakistan. Their rivalry is
particularly flammable as they vie for influence over Afghanistan. Compared to that
prolonged and deadly contest, the U.S. and ISAF are playing little more than a bit partand
they, unlike the Indians and Pakistanis, are heading for the exit.
Since the Partition of the Subcontinent in 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three wars
the most recent in 1971and they seemed on the verge of going nuclear against each other
during a crisis in 1999, when Pakistani troops crossed a ceasefire line and occupied 500
square miles of Indian Kashmir, including a Himalayan border post near the town of Kargil.
As tensions rose, the Pakistanis took ominous steps with their nuclear arsenal. President Bill
Clinton mediated a solution. In intense negotiations at Blair House in Washington over the
Fourth of July weekend, Clinton persuaded Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to order a pullback
of his countrys forces to the Pakistani side of the line. That concession cost Nawaz his job
and, very nearly, his life. The army commander, Pervez Musharraf, mounted a coup and
sentenced Nawaz to death. Clinton intervened and Nawaz was exiled to Saudi Arabia.
2

It is easy to understand why Pakistan might feel insecure. Indias population (1.2 billion) and
its economy (GDP of $1.4 trillion) are about eight times the size of Pakistans (180 million
Pakistanis generating an annual GDP of only $210 billion). During the period of Indias
greatest growth, which lasted from 2006 to 2010, there were four years during which the
annual increase in the Indian economy was almost equal to the entire Pakistani economy.
In the eyes of the world, never has the contrast between the two countries appeared so stark
as it is now: one is widely perceived as the next great superpower, famous for its software
geniuses, its Bollywood babes, its fast-growing economy and super-rich magnates; the other
written off as a failed state, a world center of Islamic radicalism, the hiding place of Osama
bin Laden, and the only ally of the U.S. whose airspace Washington has been ready to violate
and whose villages it regularly bombs. However unfair this stereotyping may be, its not
surprising that many Pakistanis see their massive neighbor as threatening the very existence
of their state.
To defend themselves, Pakistani planners long ago developed a doctrine of strategic depth.
The idea had its origins in the debacle of 1971, when, in less than two weeks, India
crushingly defeated Pakistan in their third war. That conflict ended with East Pakistan, which
had risen up against West Pakistan, becoming the independent state of Bangladesh.
According to the Pakistanis narrative, the dismemberment of their countrywhich they
blame on Indiamade it all the more important to develop and maintain friendly relations
with Afghanistan, in large measure in order to have a secure refuge in the case of a future war
with India. The porous border offers a route by which Pakistani leaders, troops and other
assets, including its nuclear weapons, could retreat to the northwest in the case of an Indian
invasion.
For the idea to work, it is essential that the Afghan government be a close ally of Pakistan,
and willing to help fight India. When the Taliban were in power, they were seen as the
perfect partner for the Pakistani military. Although widely viewed in the West as medieval if
not barbaric, the Taliban regime was valued in Pakistan as fiercely anti-India and therefore
deserving Pakistani arms and assistance.
After the Taliban were ousted by the U.S. after 9/11, a major strategic shift occurred: the
government of Afghanistan became an ally of Indias, thus fulfilling the Pakistanis worst
fear. The president of post-Taliban Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, hated Pakistan with a
passion, in part because he believed that the ISI had helped assassinate his father in 1999.
3

With Karzai in office, India seized the opportunity to increase its political and economic
influence in Afghanistan, re-opening its embassy in Kabul, opening four regional consulates,
and providing substantial reconstruction assistance totaling around $1.5 billion, with an
additional $500 million promised within the next few years.
Indias presence is still, even now, quite modest. According to Indian diplomatic sources,
there are actually fewer than 3,600 Indians in Afghanistan, almost all of them businessmen
and contract workers in the agriculture, telecommunications, manufacturing and mining
sectors. There are only 10 Indian diplomatic officers, compared to nearly 140 in the UK
embassy and 1,200 in the U.S. embassy. But the Pakistani military, which effectively controls
Pakistans foreign policy, remains paranoid about even this small an Indian presence in what
they regard as their strategic Afghan backyardmuch as the British used to be about
Russians in Afghanistan during the days of the Great Game.
For the Pakistani military, the existential threat posed by India has taken precedence over all
other geopolitical and economic goals. The fear of being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker is
so great that it has led the ISI to take steps that put Pakistans own internal security at risk, as
well as Pakistans relationship with its main strategic ally, the U.S. For much of the last
decade the ISI has sought to restore the Taliban to power so that it can oust Karzai and his
Indian friends.
To achieve this goal, the Pakistani military has relied on asymmetric warfare using jihadi
fighters for its own ends. This strategy goes back over 30 years. Since the early 1980s, the ISI
has consciously and consistently funded and incubated a variety of Islamic extremist groups.
Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid calculates that there are currently more than 40 such
extremist groups operating in Pakistan, most of whom have strong links with the ISI as well
as the local Islamic political parties.
Pakistani generals have long viewed the jihadis as a cost-effective and easily-deniable means
of controlling events in Afghanistansomething they briefly achieved with the Taliban
capture of Kabul in 1996. By the same means, the Pakistanis have kept much of the Indian
army bogged down in Kashmir ever since the separatist insurgency broke out in 1990. The
generals like using jihadis because they help foster a sense of nationalism based on the twin
prongs of hatred for India and the bonding power of Islamic identity.
4

It is unclear how many Pakistanis still endorse this strategy and how many are having second
thoughts. There are clearly those in the army who are now alarmed at the amount of sectarian
and political violence the jihadis have brought to Pakistan. But that view is contested by some
in both the army and the ISI who continue to believe that the jihadis are a more practical
defence against Indian hegemony than even nuclear weapons. For them, support for carefully
chosen jihadis in Afghanistan is a vital survival strategy well worth the risk.
It was in Kashmir in 1947 that Pakistan first used irregular tribal fighters to try to get its way,
sending Pashtun tribesmen over the border to march toward Srinagar, Kashmirs capital city.
Along the way they looted and killed and, among other atrocities, raped and murdered several
European nuns they found in a hospital and a convent. With covert British assistance in the
form of an airlift involving British transport planes, Indian troops eventually drove back the
Pashtun tribesmen. By the terms of a ceasefire signed on January 1, 1949, Kashmir was
effectively divided between India and Pakistan. The two countries would go on to fight
another war over Kashmir in 1965, and it has remained a cause of conflict ever since.
It was not just India that got off to a bad start with the new nation of Pakistan. Afghanistan
also had an uneasy relationship with the Land of the Pure (Pak means pure). Afghanistan
alone opposed Pakistani membership in the UN in 1947. As with India, borders and territory
were in dispute. Afghan leaders had never accepted the Durand line that the British drew in
1893 and, after Partition, Afghanistan was not about to recognize that line as its border with
Pakistan. The Afghan king, Zahir Shah, was especially keen to regain Peshawar, in a valley at
the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, which had once been the summer capital of the Afghan
empire. It had been in British hands since 1845, and was now to become part of Pakistan. To
this day most Afghans look on Peshawar as a lost Afghan city.
Mutual antipathy to Pakistan quickly brought India and Afghanistan together as natural allies
and in 1950 the two signed a friendship treaty. In the years that followed, India and
Afghanistan both attempted to destabilize Pakistan, giving aid and shelter to discontented
Pashtun and Baluchi nationalists. In 1961 Pakistan and Afghanistan went so far as to close
their borders and break off diplomatic relations with each other.
It was only the pressure of growing Soviet influence in Afghanistan in the 1970s that forced
the Afghan government to improve its relations with Pakistan. President Daoud Khan reached
out to Pakistan in 1977 as a counter-balance to the Soviets, and began talks with Prime
Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto with a view to settling their border disputes. In April 1978,
5

however, Daoud was overthrown in a Soviet-backed leftist coup, after which India was able
to regain its pre-eminent place in Kabul. Throughout the 1980s India expanded its influence
in Afghanistan, contributing to an ambitious series of development projectsbuilding
manufacturing plants and hydroelectric facilities, as well as supervising numerous irrigation
initiatives.
Pakistan meanwhile began to arm the mujahedin, the Islamic radicalssome, like Osama bin
Laden, from outside the countrywho fought the Soviet occupation. Their recruitment was
always controlled by the ISI, but was originally also funded by the Saudis and the CIA.
Pakistan also began sending the jihadis into Indian Kashmir during the 1980s. As Hamid
Gulthe ultra-hardline former director of the ISI during that periodonce explained to me:
If they [the ISI] encourage the Kashmiris, it's understandable. The Kashmiri people have
risen up in accordance with the UN charter, and it is the national purpose of Pakistan to help
liberate them. If the jihadis go out and contain India, tying down their army on their own soil,
for a legitimate cause, why should we not support them?" Next to him in his Islamabad living
room as he spoke lay a large piece of the Berlin Wall presented to him by the people of
Berlin for "delivering the first blow" to the Soviet Empire through his use of jihadis in the
80s.
In an attempt to limit Pakistans influence after the fall of the pro-Soviet Afghan regime in
1989, India began its support of the Northern Alliance under the command of Ahmad Shah
Massoud, a Tajik leader who also had assistance from Iran and Russia. India continued to
supply Massoud with high-altitude warfare equipment, defense advisors, and helicopter parts
and technicians after the rise of the Pakistan-sponsored Taliban.
The period of Taliban rule, from 1994-2001, was the high point of Pakistans influence in
Afghanistan. India, which did not recognize the regime, was forced to close its embassy and
all its consulates and, with ISI encouragement, Afghanistan quickly became the base for a
whole spectrum of anti-Indian groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, which, in 2008, would
execute the deadly assault on Mumbai.
As the Taliban, supported by regular Pakistan troops, pushed the Northern Alliance into ever
smaller corners of Afghanistan toward the end of the 90s, India as well as Iran continued to
send supplies to the increasingly beleaguered Massoud forces. In 2001 India built a hospital
6

at their airbase in Tajikistan so that there would be a place to which they could ferry wounded
Tajik soldiers for treatment.
India and Pakistans jostling in Kabul dates back to the Cold War and before. When war
broke out after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, India and Pakistan supported rival anti-
communist factions. India sided with rebels opposed to Islamic extremism; Pakistan backed
the group that eventually became the Taliban. Since the Bush administrations 2001 invasion,
however, the US has pressured India to limit its Afghanistan role, to prevent Pakistan from
withdrawing support for the war and cutting vital US supply lines.
With the US now ready to bring its soldiers home, India and Pakistan are again wrangling for
control. Both foresee disaster if the other were to gain the upper hand. Islamabad fears that
India would use Afghanistan to aid insurgents in Pakistans nearby Baluchistan province,
where rebellion has simmered since the 1970s. Pakistan also regards control over Kabul as
vital to its military doctrine of strategic depth under which Afghanistan would serve as a
refuge where its leaders could lead a counterattack in the event of an Indian invasion.
For its part, India fears that resurgent Islamic militancy in Afghanistan will stoke violence in
Indian-administered Kashmir, by providing a safe haven and training ground for militants
like Lashkar-e-Taiba, perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. So far, India looks to be
losing the struggle. New Delhi has earmarked nearly $2 billion for infrastructure projects and
humanitarian initiatives in Afghanistan since the US invasion. The most recent survey on the
subject, a 2009 BBC/ABC News/ARD poll, found that 74 percent of Afghans hold favorable
opinions toward India and only 8 percent feel the same about Pakistan. Yet Pakistan's proxies
seem poised to take over.
Meanwhile, India is loath to bolster its economic engagement with boots on the ground. We
have to be very cautious because we don't want to begin to bear the burden of supporting the
new Afghan government against the combination of the Taliban and Pakistan by offering
security support, said former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal in an interview to
GlobalPost. Their needs will keep increasing.
Consistent with that thinking, earlier this month New Delhi formally rejected Afghan
President Hamid Karzai's request for weapons to help his regime fight the Taliban. Indian
Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid obliquely parroted a refrain commonly spoken by US
7

officials: It is a fragile area, there are stakeholders, there are other people. We don't want to
become part of the problem." Or part of the solution, others contend.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has a head start in the latent battle for Afghanistan. Already, Pakistans
Taliban allies control most of Afghanistan's southern countryside. President Karzai who is
perhaps more friendly toward New Delhi than he is toward Washington faces a likely
defeat in national elections next year.
The Obama administration has perhaps unwittingly helped Islamabad as well. By signalling
its openness to negotiate with the Taliban in June and leaking the possibility of a complete
withdrawal of US troops the so-called zero option. America has further bolstered
Pakistan's hopes of regaining control over the war-torn country.