Opinion Towards a grand summit

However,the stasis that had gripped India’s security policy in recent months and some fine manoeuvring by the Pakistan army threaten to marginalise Delhi in Phase Two. The resurgence of the Taliban (thanks to the sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan) over the last couple of years has begun to test the resolve of Kabul as well as the international coalition.

We don’t know if the London conference’s attempt to reach out to the Taliban leadership and induce its fighters to rejoin the mainstream at the local level will work. What we do know is that there is no avoiding the Taliban in Phase Two.

Delhi’s failure to respond to the changing situation in Afghanistan might cause huge set-backs for India; not merely of the kind that Turkey administered,by refusing to invite Delhi to the Istanbul conference at the prompting of Islamabad. India must recognise that the Pakistan army has dramatically raised the stakes in Afghanistan over the last one year. Rawalpindi senses that a big moment in Afghan politics is at hand; and hopes to leverage it to the fullest extent against India.

As the world reaches out to the Taliban,we can be sure of two things: that the Taliban leaders will play hard to get; and the Pakistan army will offer to bring the boys around. And the price,Delhi must expect,would necessarily involve Pakistan’s many issues vis-a-vis India.

Delhi of course can continue to sulk; it could keep reaffirming its determination not to engage the Taliban and its friends in Rawalpindi. If the ISI does promote another attack in the not-too-distant future,anger might well overwhelm the residual capacity in Delhi to strategise about Pakistan. If Delhi’s post-1998 foreign policy put India on an upward spiral of expanding leverage in all directions,the lack of strategic imagination on Afghanistan could now push it onto a downward spiral of self-induced isolation.

Any new Indian initiative on Afghanistan must involve the following elements. One,Delhi must express strong support to Karzai’s effort to reach out to the various Pashtun fighters in southern and eastern Afghanistan. India must offer to put up its own resources — financial,political and diplomatic — for promoting the Afghanistan peace process.

Two,Delhi must recognise that there can be no durable peace in our neighbourhood without addressing the aspirations of the Pashtuns,who form the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and are the only ones fighting Kabul and the international coalition.

Three,India has more reasons than anyone else to appreciate the complex overlap between Pashtuns and the Taliban. India has sought good relations with all the major ethnic groups in Afghanistan; but its ties with the Pashtun community remain under-developed. Delhi then must make a special outreach to the Afghan Pashtuns.

Four,it makes little sense for India to deny,as it has,that there is a linkage between Pakistan’s eastern and western frontiers. Anyone familiar with the unfortunate story of Kashmir during the last sixty years knows that Pakistan used the Pashtun tribals on its western frontier to launch the first two wars against India during 1947-48 and 1965. In recent years the extremist groups that the ISI nurtured against India have worked seamlessly with the Afghan Taliban. Instead of denying the linkage,Delhi must prepare to think about its problems with Pakistan and Afghanistan in an integrated manner.

Five,India must also make a special effort to address Pakistan’s fears — irrational as they might seem in Delhi — that it is meddling on its western frontiers. There are also apprehensions that suggest India wants to destabilise Pakistan in a two-front war. The Indian army’s “cold start” military doctrine completes this picture in the current Pakistani narrative.

Six,in order to deal with Pakistan’s concerns about the Indian role in Afghanistan and its fears of India mounting a pincer attack,Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must invite Presidents Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari to Delhi for a trilateral summit.

The purpose of the trilateral process must be to settle all outstanding issues and pave the way for enduring peace in the north-west of the subcontinent. Such a peace can only be founded in a settlement that guarantees legitimate borders for Pakistan on its turbulent frontier to the west and the deeply contested one in the east. In return,Delhi and Kabul will expect that the infrastructure of jihadi terrorism in Pakistan will be permanently dismantled. As they begin to address intractable political issues,the three sides could agree on a comprehensive trade and transit agreement that generates enough regional prosperity to reinforce a peace settlement.

If its diplomacy is paralysed by the fear of another attack,India will invite many more. Acting boldly Delhi might have a chance to alter the very political dynamic at the source of these attacks.

The writer is Henry A Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and

International Relations at the Library of Congress,Washington DC

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