Even as the British approach alternated between an aggressive forward policy and a relaxed closed border policy, the constant element was containing Russian influence in Afghanistan. As an inheritor of the British legacy in Afghanistan, Pakistan plays this “Great Game” with India. The generals in the Pakistan army have been convinced of the need for a friendly regime in Kabul to not allow India a foothold on its western border. In essence, Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy has been overtly focused on denying space to India.
This is important to remember while reading Avinash Paliwal’s wonderful new book My Enemy’s Enemy: India In Afghanistan From The Soviet Invasion To The US Withdrawal . The book tries to decode the drivers of India’s Afghanistan policy in a relatively more contemporary context.
Paliwal does an excellent job in explaining India’s policy options as a continuous internal debate between two groups—conciliators and partisans—inside the policymaking establishment. Conciliators argue for engagement with all factions inside Afghanistan, including those known for their pro-Pakistan inclinations. Partisans, on the other hand, feel that India should remain loyal to its natural partners (or factions outside Pakistan’s influence).
Whether the conciliators prevail or the partisans depends on, Paliwal says, three intertwined factors:
a) New Delhi’s desire to strike a balance between Afghanistan and Pakistan,
b) the international political environment, and
c) the domestic politics of Afghanistan.
The second and third are obvious. The first one is not so and here Paliwal’s arguments have to be carefully read in the light of the aforementioned drivers of Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy.
So, for Paliwal, India’s relatively unrestrained support of Afghanistan vis-à-vis Pakistan today can be explained by the rise of partisans in New Delhi’s power corridors. The partisans have also been helped by the fact that the power balance between Kabul and Islamabad is heavily skewed in favour of the latter and any desire for a balance between the two will mean India siding with Afghanistan. When the power balance was not so skewed, India did not side with Afghanistan on, say, the Pashtunistan issue. But are there alternative explanations available for India’s policy shifts other than a desire to maintain a balance across the Durand Line?
Paliwal himself reminds us that even Afghanistan has equivocated on Kashmir. Afghan rulers haven’t exactly sided with New Delhi in India-Pakistan rivalries. One reason may be that Afghanistan wanted to win Pakistan’s support by showing loyalty in such instances. But winning Pakistan’s support should not have been a great Afghan concern if it really could match Pakistan militarily.
The balance, which India apparently desires across the Durand Line, actually never existed, regardless of New Delhi’s policy choice. An inheritor of British military institutions, Pakistan had entered into America’s Cold War alliances in the 1950s. At the same time, it had close relations with China. The only time there was some sort of a balance between Pakistan and Afghanistan was after the Soviet invasion—a period when India’s Afghanistan policy mattered little to change the equation on the ground. Moreover, India has never voiced its support in favour of the Afghan position on the Durand Line. And this has remained so irrespective of whether conciliators or partisans held the fort.
It is true that India has been, at times, more accommodative of pro-Pakistan factions like the Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami. But there are other ways to look at these choices. While India was opposed to the mujahideens until Mohammad Najibullah was in power, it was quick to shift to the side of mujahideens like Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud in 1992. This was because Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had made its support for Hekmatyar very clear. Similarly India’s limited engagement with factions in Taliban have been with those groups which wanted to reduce their dependence on Pakistan.
This does not mean that India’s engagements in Afghanistan have been a zero sum game with Pakistan—and Paliwal is justified in reaching this conclusion. India’s approach has simply been to secure a regime which doesn’t act against New Delhi’s interests. A regime dependent on Pakistan could not have guaranteed that because of Rawalpindi’s own colonial outlook on Afghanistan. New Delhi has had to contend with this aspect of Rawalpindi’s policy even while trying not to reduce Afghanistan to a playground for India-Pakistan rivalry.
Paliwal’s cholarly approach and depth of knowledge cultivated from years of study and from interviews conducted with as many as 65 individuals with real insights makes this book the best ever written on India-Afghanistan relations. Paliwal also deserves our commendation for a painstaking documention of the Indian intelligence’s side of the story on Afghanistan. He indeed has set a very high benchmark for scholars working on this bilateral in the future.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.