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By streiff Posted in Afghanistan | Foreign Affairs | India | Pakistan | the great game — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Geopolitics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

From India Defence:

Indian television news channel 'NDTV' reports that a team from the Indian Army will be actively training the Afghan National Army (ANA) later this year. The team is heading to Kabul in the upcoming months.

The Indian Military team will be in Afghanistan as soon as May end to conduct infantry and education corps related training. Another team is to be dispatched to Uzbekistan in the next six months for a similar training programme. Besides teaching English to the troops, it will train them in weapon handling, map craft and fundamental battalion procedures.

'NDTV' quotes "top military officials" as making the revelations to the news channel.

The decision is bound to raise eyebrows in Rawalpindi, which forever has thought of Afghanistan as a Pakistani colony and has been following the "strategic depth" policy for over 3 decades with reference to Kabul.

Since 2001, several Indian military delegations have visited Afghanistan but this is the first time a full-fledged military team will be stationed there. India already has BRO jawans in Afghanistan engaged in various security missions.

The decision to send the team to Kabul was taken in February, and on last Friday the annual Army Commanders' conference also approved plans to send a similar team to Uzbekistan reports NDTV.

Although India is one of the largest contributors to UN peacekeeping forces around the world it is for the first time in the past decade that India is getting involved in a non-UN military mission.

Afghanistan is a important country in the region and security and stability in Afghanistan is critical for stability in India and South Asia as a whole.

Read on.

There are a number of extraordinary things happening here.

• India has decided that Afghanistan doesn't have to fail. A failed Afghanistan is a strategic null set for India merely turning the clock back to 2001. A functioning Afghanistan with ties to India is a strategic coup for India and quite possibly a strategic coup de grâce to Pakistan.
• Though the story tries to give the impression that India doesn't act militarily outside UN missions, the qualifier "in the past decade" is key. In fact, India acts vigorously to impose its will. In 1987 it intervened in Sri Lanka on behalf of the Tamil guerrillas. In 1971, it invaded East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in support of a rebellion there. A Indian military mission to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan is more than merely sticking a finger in the eye of Pakistan. It is an acknowledgment, of sorts, that India now views Central Asia as being within its sphere of influence.
• The Indian role in Afghanistan appears to be outside the CENTCOM/ISAF command structure.

This has the potential to change the strategic calculus in that area. Indian involvement is quite possibly driven by the realization that Russian power in the Central Asian republics is waning, the US has been unable, for a host of reasons, to establish itself and India sees a need to offset growing ChiCom influence. While they clearly intend to supplant us in the region, it is hard to say that is a bad thing. The region needs decades of interest and investment in order to move up to the level of an economic basket case. There is no evidence that we have the staying power to do that. As the Indian presence increases, there will be more military-military contacts and increased interoperability exercises. This will serve to pull the US and India closer together.

And it has enormous impact on Pakistan. If India succeeds in Afghanistan then the ability of Pakistan to challenge India militarily is gone for good. Maybe this will induce Pakistan to join South Africa in that exclusive club that has developed nuclear weapons then voluntarily disarmed. Maybe not...