Avinash Paliwal. Journal of Strategic Studies. Volume 40, Issue 1/2, February 2017.
India’s Afghanistan policy in the 1990s is often termed as a zero-sum game of influence with Pakistan. India’s lack of relations with and open aversion to the Pakistan-supported Taliban regime are highlighted as markers of a ‘proxy war’ or ‘competition’ between New Delhi and Islamabad. Adding weight to this argument is India’s political, moral, and military support to the anti-Taliban United Front (UF), popularly known as the Northern Alliance (NA). In order to undermine the Taliban politically and militarily, India supported anti-Taliban factions in collaboration with Russia and Iran. This hostile posture against the Taliban was rooted in India’s threat perceptions in the part of Kashmir that it administers. Engulfed in a bitter and sometimes violent separatist insurgency since 1947, Kashmir appeared to be on the brink of secession in the 1990s. New Delhi blamed Pakistan for fomenting separatism and abetting, what India considered, terrorism. It claimed that Pakistan was waging a covert Jihad in Kashmir via proxy militant groups such as the Harkat-ul-Ansar and the Jaish-e-Mohammad. These groups, India asserted, were being trained in camps across Pakistan as well as South and East Afghanistan. The ‘Pakistan-terrorism nexus’ became a norm in India’s security calculus, with the Afghan Taliban being viewed as a Pakistan-created entity with little independent agency. The Pakistani military’s commitment to gaining ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan to counter India lent force to this view.
Was India necessarily averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan political factions in Afghanistan during the 1990s? This paper addresses this question by revisiting India’s internal policy debates in early 1990s and particularly in 1996, when the Taliban took control of Kabul. Using fresh primary data that includes interviews with former Indian policymakers, media archives, and official reports, the article shows that there was a policy debate in New Delhi over engagement with pro-Pakistan factions in Afghanistan, including the Taliban. In fact, India engaged, overtly and covertly, with both pro-Pakistan and anti-Pakistan factions soon after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Such a non-partisan approach, however, got challenged in the light of the Taliban’s rise in 1996. Condemned by large parts of the international community for human rights abuses, the Taliban was seen by many in India as an Islamist militant group sponsored by Pakistan. For others, however, it was an ethno-nationalist movement representing Pashtun interests, and not necessarily under Islamabad’s control. Those Indian officials who viewed the Taliban primarily through the ‘Pakistan-terrorism’ lens advocated containment of the group by bolstering anti-Taliban factions. However, others advocated engagement with the Taliban while accepting the ‘Pakistan-terrorism nexus’ as true. The coalition of officials seeking containment of the Taliban, with military means if necessary, came to dominate policymaking in 1996. This was a departure from India’s Afghanistan policy until then. Wanting a stable and united Afghanistan, India had shied away from a partisan approach. Subject to its own political rationalities and far from being a monolith aimed against Pakistan, Indian activities in Afghanistan were nuanced in their motivations and careful in their intent.
In order to provide a detailed analysis of these Indian debates, the next section briefly outlines the historical and structural context in which they took place. The terms employed to address the central question of this paper and their theoretical basis are also detailed in this section. The following section then examines the answers to this paper’s central question in the existing literature. It finds out that previous studies either do not deal with this history adequately, or have assumed, with credible but limited evidence, that India was necessarily averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan factions in Afghanistan. The third section explains why most studies reach this conclusion of a thriving India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan. India had severed all links with Afghanistan after the arrival of the Taliban in Kabul. Emphasis on this fact contributed towards building this narrative of India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan. The fourth section challenges this narrative by delving into the beliefs and advocacies of the coalition of officials that was open to the idea of engaging with pro-Pakistan factions in Afghanistan. Such a pro-engagement approach dominated India’s Afghanistan policy between 1992 and1996. However, as articulated in the final section, the fall of Kabul in September 1996 shifted the balance of power in favour of the coalition of officials who advocated containment of pro-Pakistan factions in Afghanistan, and specifically the Taliban. Based on this analysis the paper argues that Indian foreign policy in Afghanistan during the 1990s was not entirely, or necessarily, averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan factions.
Setting the Context
India’s relations with Afghanistan since 1947 are considered friendly, ‘strong, and based on historical and cultural links’. The two countries signed the Treaty of Friendship in 1950 that marked the initiation of mutually accepted diplomatic exchange and a pledge to strengthen trade and cultural links. Bilateral relations between New Delhi and Kabul remained warm throughout king Zahir Shah’s reign in Afghanistan till 1973. Barring Afghanistan’s ‘siding’ with Pakistan on the Kashmir issue and other India-Pakistan wars, few anomalies are recorded from 1950s till the Soviet intervention in 1979. In the first serious challenge to its Afghanistan policy, India reluctantly accepted Moscow’s decision to intervene militarily in Afghanistan. Viewing an adversarial Islamabad–Beijing–Washington nexus, friendship with the Soviet Union was prioritised over undermining Afghanistan’s sovereignty. Pakistan, on the other hand, with support from Washington, supported the Mujahideen groups fighting the Soviet forces and successive communist governments in Kabul after 1979.
Support to the Mujahideen gave Pakistan considerable influence over Afghanistan’s domestic affairs after the end of the Soviet military intervention in 1989. This was clear in Islamabad’s facilitation of multiple peace accords in early 1990s, first between the government of President Mohammad Najibullah and the Mujahideen, and later, after Najibullah’s fall from power in 1991, between different Mujahideen factions. The end of the Cold War, Najibullah’s ouster, and Pakistan’s rising influence in Kabul marginalised India politically in Afghanistan. Having lost a powerful ally in the Soviet Union (and a friendly political figure in Kabul in Najibullah), policymakers in New Delhi were still adjusting to the new realities of the post-Cold War world when Afghanistan imploded. With Najibullah gone and the Mujahideen factions in control of Kabul in 1992, India faced a fait accompli that is either it engaged with the various Mujahideen factions or adopted an adversarial posture and cut links with them. This dilemma was similar to the one that India faced in September 1996 when Kabul fell, once again, to the Taliban. India’s policy debate over Afghanistan in the 1990s oscillated between containment and engagement. Some officials advocated engagement with whosoever was in power in Kabul, while others wanted to steer clear of any links with groups close to Pakistan. Officials advocating engagement with pro-Pakistan factions, and the Taliban in particular after 1996, are termed as the pro-engagement coalition (PEC) in this paper. Conversely, officials averse to pro-Pakistan factions and advocating diplomatic and military containment are termed as the anti-engagement coalition (AEC).
Note on Definitions and Theoretical Basis of Policy Coalitions
The terms ‘containment’, ‘engagement’, and ‘anti-engagement’ are used as ideas with specific political intent in this paper. The term ‘engagement’, for instance, is understood as a process whereby two political entities are involved in non-coercive diplomacy and have existing channels of interaction, either covert or overt. Engagement here does not necessarily imply diplomatic recognition to the entity being engaged with. Nor does it imply imparting legitimacy to the ideas propounded and practices undertaken by this entity. It definitely does not mean engaging in military combat with an adversary. What it implies, simply, is dealing with a political faction without necessarily aiming at containing its rise, or even if so, then not doing that militarily or by using selective (or partisan) engagement tactics. India’s debate on whether or not to engage with the Taliban, from this perspective, was that of opening a political channel without giving the group diplomatic recognition.
The idea of anti-engagement, on the other hand, implies partisan political support to one group over the other. Within the framework of such partisan support, use of coercive (military) means to communicate political intent is acceptable. The term also implies cutting diplomatic contact with the perceived adversary. However, what anti-engagement does not mean is an absence of contact with the country in question. Given the geographical proximity between Afghanistan and India, this has never been a viable strategic option for New Delhi. Even during the Taliban years, India was deeply engaged with the anti-Taliban United Front (UF) rather than steering clear of the Afghan quagmire altogether. Also, anti-engagement, as seen vis-à-vis the Taliban has not been traditional Indian foreign policy. Even in Myanmar, a country where India officially supported the National League for Democracy, the pro-Democracy political party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, New Delhi was engaging with the military junta. There are two reasons why the term anti-engagement is used in this paper instead of ‘containment’.
First, specific to this case, India did not have the means effectively to contain any political and military force in Afghanistan on its own. Such was the case in the 1990s, and remains so today. Pakistan, however, given its proximity to Afghanistan, is more in a position to do so. Even great powers like the former British Raj, the erstwhile Soviet Union, and the US-led Coalition forces today, have contained Afghan militias with mixed results at best. Secondly, the most India has done to stop any group’s rise to power in Afghanistan is to engage with its adversaries. During the 1990s civil war phase this was most visible. Identifying its interests as such, India, alongside Russia and Iran, decided to support the UF against the Taliban. Thus, the anti-engagement coalition had a strong containment axiom to its political intent, but limited capability to carry it out militarily.
The dilemma New Delhi faced in 1992 and 1996 split New Delhi’s policy circuit in two clear coalitions. Cutting across bureaucratic, institutional and political lines, these coalitions did not represent the interests or ideas of a particular political party or any ministry per se. Their differences were based on different belief systems and were mostly tactical in nature. How to deal with different factions in a civil war torn Afghanistan to secure India’s strategic interests? While some advocated broad-based engagement, others advocated partisan engagement. The idea of dividing policy advocacies along the lines of belief systems has theoretical roots in public policy theory. The terms, pro- and anti-engagement coalitions, have been drawn from the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). According to the NPF, policy narratives are constructs, strategically crafted using words, images and symbols to influence policy. The terminology offered by the NPF allows identification and articulation of the beliefs of the pro- and anti-engagement coalitions within India’s foreign policy subsystem. The NPF allows highlighting marginal policy advocacies and putting different ideas in context. However, how does the existing literature address the central question of this paper and what do answers does it offer?
Literature Review
Existing studies that examine India’s approach towards Afghanistan conclude, with credible but limited evidence, that India was necessarily averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan factions in Afghanistan—particularly the Taliban. For British historian William Dalrymple, the India–Pakistan rivalry lies at the heart of the war in Afghanistan today. According to Christine Fair, the Taliban’s links with anti-India outfits such as the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and the Pakistani intelligence services, ‘underscores the salience that Afghanistan and the Taliban have for Indian national security’. This was most visible in the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight (IC 814) by Pakistan-based militants (with help from the Pakistan’s Directorate of the Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI) and the landing of that flight in Taliban-controlled Kandahar. Fair notes that ‘India’s interests in Afghanistan are not only Pakistan-specific but also, equally, if not more important, tied to India’s desire to be, and to be seen, as an extra-regional power moving towards great power status’. Fair locates India’s strategic interests in Afghanistan on its larger security and foreign policy canvass and explains methods that India has adopted to achieve these objectives. Similarly, Harsh Pant argues that given its rising ambitions, ‘India is following a multi-pronged strategy in Afghanistan’, and the success of this proactive Afghan policy shall ascertain whether India will be able to provide security in South Asia. For Pant, Afghanistan is a ‘test case’ of India’s rising power ambitions in the twenty-first century.
Works by Teresita and Howard Schaffer, Sumit Ganguly and Nicholas Howenstein, as well as Sandra Destradi, focus on India’s ‘interests’ and ‘strategy’ in Afghanistan. They too assess that India was averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan factions and the Taliban in particular. Based on this assessment, the Schaffers suggest that the only strategic option in Afghanistan, to bring regional peace and security, is to go for a ‘grand bargain’, first between US and Pakistan and then between Pakistan and India. Ganguly and Howenstein argue that ‘Indian and Pakistani competition in Afghanistan long precedes the advent of the Hamid Karzai regime’. Due to the close links between the Pakistani security agencies and the Taliban, India ‘did not abandon links with the Northern Alliance’. They do not see any use in engaging with the Taliban, and argue that both the US and India should work together to contain the Taliban’s rise in Afghanistan after 2014. However, Destradi argues that India has been a reluctant partner at best for Afghanistan, and is averse to engaging with the Taliban. Based on her interviews with Indian experts, she argues that ‘India has over the past few years tried to build up linkages to all political forces and social groups in Afghanistan, including non-Taliban Pashtuns’. Though not historical in nature, these works assess that India was necessarily averse to pro-Pakistan factions in Afghanistan.
Other works by Shashank Joshi and Rudra Chaudhuri provide a holistic picture of India’s ‘Af-Pak’ strategy and ‘proxy’ calculus vis-à-vis Pakistan. Linking developments in Afghanistan with the politics of Indian-administered Kashmir, Chaudhuri argues that the starting point of a settlement between India and Pakistan is Kabul, not Kashmir. Drawing from the contested ‘Af-Pak’ strategy propounded by the Obama administration in 2009, which focused on a regional solution to Afghanistan, Chaudhuri says that greater cooperation between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan might actually help in solving long-standing issues such as Kashmir. Joshi, however, argues that ‘the risk exists that India, like other regional actors anxious over the prospect of a security vacuum in the coming years, may adopt more independent and assertive policies in Afghanistan which diverge from those of the United States’. He is convinced that India will adopt a partisan approach, like it did in the 1990s, towards Afghanistan after the withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan. Articulating India’s three main interests in Afghanistan as, ‘security, ambition, and energy’, Joshi assumes that New Delhi is necessarily averse to the Taliban.
Most Indian activities in Afghanistan, including its aid projects, are viewed from a geopolitical lens in these writings. For instance, India has prioritised Afghanistan as one of the largest recipients of formal Indian economic aid. This aid policy has expanded since 2001 during which time India provided more than US$2 billion worth of developmental aid to Afghanistan. A lot of these funds are aimed at the Pashtun-dominated Southern and Eastern provinces of Afghanistan, in the form of Small Development Projects (SDPs). Such developmental support is viewed with hostility by Pakistan. According to Islamabad, India uses these aid projects as an intelligence cover to support Baloch separatists in Pakistan from Afghan territory. Pakistan’s persistent allegations against India (though made without providing substantial evidence) often makes observers wonder as to India is exactly up to in Afghanistan. Critically, this narrative of India’s anti-Pakistan posture in Afghanistan has made Western powers put diplomatic pressure on New Delhi to limit its engagements with Afghanistan. Shanthie Mariot D’Souza details this diplomatic dynamic and argues that New Delhi needs to consolidate that gains it has made in Afghanistan during the past thirteen years. Similar to most works mentioned above, D’Souza takes India’s anti-Taliban stand for granted.
Finally, adding value to the above-mentioned works is a paper by Bhibu Prasad Routray that delineates the actors who formulate and enable India’s contemporary Afghanistan policy. Routray argues that the war in Afghanistan and the ongoing withdrawal of Western forces ‘divides the country’s [India] opinion into two clear camps: one that wants New Delhi to remain engaged in Afghanistan in spite of the threats and attacks and the other, that want it to follow the path of the international community who are on their way out of the country. Synthesising the concerns of these two contradictory, yet influential camps has not been easy.’ Routray explicates this dilemma using three case studies ranging from ‘military footprint vs. development approach,’ to the ‘reconciliation process’ and India’s possible role in the ‘transition process’. He concludes that ‘India’s approach towards the Afghan transition has remained a combination of official thinking and initiatives by the business community. As the country explores different approaches to stay engaged in Afghanistan, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has demonstrated willingness to accommodate not just the role played by the other actors, but also the views expressed by the strategic community.’ Nonetheless, Routray too assesses that India has historically remained averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan factions in Afghanistan, and particularly the Taliban in and after 1996. Though none of the literature mentioned above is a piece of historical work, why do they emphasise that India was necessarily averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan factions in general and the Taliban in particular? The next section addresses this question.
Taliban: To Engage or to Contain?
In keeping with international reaction, India’s official policy was unambiguously opposed to the Taliban’s political and social conduct in 1996. This opposition had four key aspects; firstly, New Delhi closed its embassy in Kabul and evacuated its personnel citing safety concerns. As with most other countries, India had no diplomatic presence in Kabul throughout the Taliban rule from 1996 till 2001. Officials and analysts therefore conclude that India had ‘no contacts with the Pashtuns’ during these six years. Secondly, it endorsed the United Nations (UN) Resolution 1076 which criticised the Taliban’s violation of human and women’s rights, and decided not to recognise the Taliban regime as a legitimate government. This phase of India-Afghanistan relations is treated as a diplomatic black hole. Moreover, India’s anti-Taliban stance has been assessed as strategically sound and politically correct by former Indian officials. This is because of the Taliban’s ideological make-up and perceived anti-India stance. Thirdly, India maintained diplomatic links with the internationally recognised Rabbani government and hosted Massoud Khalili, Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud and Rabbani’s political aide, as its ambassador to New Delhi. Khalili was constantly in touch with the Indian government and lobbied for the latter’s support against the Taliban. Finally, India provided covert military support to the UF in coalition with Russia, Iran, and the Central Asian Republics (CARs). This aspect of India’s Afghanistan policy is an open secret. Based on this author’s personal interviews with India’s intelligence and diplomatic officials, as well as existing media reports, it is clear that India provided financial, medical and military support to the UF. This was done considerably, if not entirely, from the Farkhor Air Base in South Tajikistan. These facts form credible bedrock for the emphasis of existing studies that India was averse to the pro-Pakistan Taliban.
However, why did India decide on partisan engagement with Afghanistan after 1996? Existing studies emphasise a geostrategic and human rights rationale to this approach. The Taliban was understood, and justly so, as a movement of misogynistic Islamists with a highly questionable approach to human rights. Monotheistic practices as understood by these students of Islam, and often imposed with brute force in practice, gave India space to construe it as an entity with little understanding of matters of statecraft and international diplomacy. This was coupled with a peculiarly strong belief that the Taliban was Islamabad’s proxy force. Pakistan’s use of militant non-state actors like the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA) and the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) to foment violence in Indian Kashmir buttressed this belief. Regardless of evidence, fears that the Taliban would support separatism in Kashmir took root. Though a credible argument, these arguments do not capture the inherent contradictions in India’s policymaking processes.
First, if the anti-Pakistan ‘proxy thesis’, framed by the idea of realpolitik, were true, then engaging the Taliban would have been within reason. Having gained effective control of more than 60 per cent of Afghan territory by 1997, the Taliban emerged as a coherent military force dominated by ethnic Pashtuns. Plus, keen on international recognition, the Taliban was cautious before taking an openly anti-India stand. There was little evidence of active Taliban involvement in Kashmir barring the training camps in East Afghanistan that hosted anti-India elements such as Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA) and Hizbul Mujahideen (HM). It can be argued that these groups—HuA and HM—were pivotal in maintaining the momentum of the insurgency in Kashmir, and thus, their presence in Afghanistan linked the Taliban to Kashmir. However, the Taliban did not necessarily have effective control over all these training camps given the influence of Al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in sustaining them. Though some Afghans indeed fought in Kashmir at that time, they may not necessarily be linked to the Taliban. In fact, the Taliban had consistently denied their active presence (or any such intention) in Kashmir, even if they sympathised with the Kashmiri separatists. However, if India was necessarily averse to any group close to Pakistan, why did it recognise the Mujahideen government of Burhanuddin Rabbani in 1992 knowing well that all Mujahideen figures had links with Pakistan, and almost all were critical of Indian military operations in Kashmir?
Second, there is a perception of deep historical links between India and Afghanistan in both these countries. Social and cultural links between Pashtun communities and India are an important part of this bilateral relationship. However, if such is the case, then how was New Delhi so clear about not engaging with a Pashtun dominated force in 1996? The certainty portrayed around the ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ argument is counterintuitive given India’s historical and cultural engagement with radical Islam. Some antecedents such as the Indian National Congress’ (INC) support to the Khilafat Movement between 1919 and 1924, and New Delhi’s unhindered diplomacy with post-1979 Shiite Iran and the Wahhabi Gulf states are cases in point. Interestingly, India also accepted the presence of the radical Islamist and pro-Pakistan Hizb-e-Islami in the Afghan government in 1992. Third, given India’s active dealings with the UF after 1996, it was clear that New Delhi was not shy of engaging Afghans regardless of their ideological bent and human rights record. Neither were the warlords within the UF umbrella less Islamic nor did they have a cleaner record on human and women’s rights than the Taliban. New Delhi’s acceptance to engage with the Afghan Taliban in 2011 heightens the importance of the question as to why did India decide on partisan engagement in Afghanistan in 1996. As mentioned earlier, India’s foreign and security establishment faced a dilemma over whom to support in Afghanistan in 1992 and 1996, and how. Compounding this dilemma was the fluidity of events on the ground in Afghanistan and India’s domestic security challenges throughout the 1990s. This dilemma, this paper argues, was manifest in advocacy coalitions with diametrically opposed policy beliefs on the question of engaging the Taliban. One advocated engagement, while the other was staunchly against the idea. The next section details the beliefs, advocacies, and actors of the pro-engagement coalition.
Pro-Engagement Coalition
The pro-engagement coalition (PEC) wanted India to engage with the Taliban, at least politically if not diplomatically. Moreover, it saw reason in Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy and concurred that a non-combative stance in Afghanistan would allow constructive engagement with Pakistan. This section shows that far from being an ‘obvious’ policy decision, not engaging with the Taliban was much in defiance of India’s policy practice vis-à-vis Afghanistan before 1996. To start with, India’s decision to close its embassy in Kabul on 26 September 1996 was not the first during the civil war. Every time fighting broke out in and around Kabul, most countries including India would close their embassies and remove diplomatic representatives. In fact, this was the fourth closure of India’s mission in Kabul between 1992 and1996. Indian embassy was first targeted in June 1992 (and remained shut till September 1992) by Mujahideen elements after the Peshawar Accord was signed. At the same time, about 1,800 Hindu and Sikh Afghan nationals crossed over to India within a month ‘unable to bear the reported hostility of the new Mujahideen rulers in Afghanistan’. The second closure happened between February and September 1993, when fighting broke out between Hekmatyar and other Mujahideen factions including Mohammad Mohaqiq’s Hazara dominated Hizb-e-Wahdat, the Jamiat-e-Islami, and Abdul Rashid Dostum’s Jumbish-e-Milli. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia brokered what was called the March Accord in 1993 between the fighting factions as they agreed to cease fire till the next elections by end of 1994. The third, and penultimate time India packed up its diplomatic mission was between January 1994 and 3 May 1995, when Dostum and Hekmatyar joined hands briefly till June 1994 to oust Rabbani and Mohaqiq, and the Taliban emerged as a player. Regardless, India maintained robust links with the Rabbani government, hosted Afghan leaders and continued disbursing aid throughout this period via the United Nations (UN).
The PEC’s key tenets are best enunciated in what is known as the ‘Rao Doctrine’, termed after former Indian prime minister (PM) P. V. Narasimha Rao’s approach towards Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1992. First, India was to ‘deal with all Mujahideen groups without fear or favour and contact should be established with anyone and everyone willing to meet us despite the militancy of their Islamism’. Second, India should ‘deal with whosoever was in power in Kabul and focus would be on cultivating a friendly government that was sensitive to India’s vital interests and core concerns’. Third, India should ‘deal strictly with the government in Kabul, no matter its proximity with Pakistan or its security agencies’. Fourth, India ‘would neither arm any Afghan group nor ostracise any—not even the Wahhabi group of Ittehad headed by Rasul Sayyaf’. And finally, India will ‘focus on P-2-P relations’, build goodwill among all Afghans and ‘meaningfully contribute towards Afghanistan’s economic welfare,’ within its limited scope. In fact, on 30 August 1992, when Rabbani sought a re-fuelling stopover in India on his way to the Non-Alignment Movement Summit in Jakarta (the channel being former Indian diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar in Islamabad sending the message to the then Foreign Secretary (FS) J. N. Dixit in New Delhi), PM Rao accepted the request. In Bhadrakumar’s words, ‘we (India) warmly hosted Mr Rabbani and a planeload of Mujahideen commanders, including some frightening names vowed to eternal enmity toward India. Thus began a new chapter in the chronicle of India’s relations with Afghanistan.’ Later in mid-July 1993, the foreign ministers of India and Afghanistan—Dinesh Singh and Hedayat Amin Arsala met in New York and consolidated ties. A staunch PEC advocate, Bhadrakumar advocates the principles fleshed out by Rao even today.
Unlike those who were averse to any pro-Pakistan faction in Afghanistan, the PEC had a fundamentally different policy outlook towards Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was despite both advocacies having the same core beliefs about India, politics and nationalism. The then FS J. N. Dixit (1991–94) confirms the dominance of the PEC in New Delhi before 1996. He mentions that PM Rao was categorical in his shift of approach from that of former PM Rajiv Gandhi i.e. in light of the Soviet withdrawal, India ‘should establish contact with leaders of all groups and remain in touch with them so that eventually India could deal with whosoever came to power’. Moreover, unlike what it did in 1996, India was to retain its diplomatic mission in Kabul as long possible despite the anarchy. Links with Russia and Iran were being given primacy to make this happen. India opened covert channels with Sigbatullah Mojadedi, Rabbani, Sayyaf, Masoud, Dostum, as well as Hekmatyar (before Rabbani’s visit). Given that overt governmental contacts with some of these figures could have posed political problems or embarrassment to both India and the Najibullah (before his fall), these links were kept secret. Most of such links were facilitated via Indian academics and journalists—a practice that India followed well into the post-2001 phase when engaging with the Afghan Taliban. Another PEC advocate, it was clear to Dixit that Islamabad was unable to secure control either over Rabbani and Massoud or over Hekmatyar.
This assessment was critical in shaping the PEC’s approach towards Afghanistan and advocating engagement. While even the PEC advocates—like Dixit and Bhadrakumar—agreed that the Taliban was being sponsored by the ISI, they did not see it from an Islamist lens. For Dixit, writing in 1996, Taliban was a student movement with primarily reflecting Pashtun interests with most of its recruits coming from the tribal areas of Pakistan. While Dixit was aware of the problems associated with opening channels with the Taliban, he stated: ‘to think that India can play a direct mediatory or intervening role in this violence-ridden situation is impracticable and unfeasible … In the coming three to five years, it would be sufficient if India managed to maintain contact with all groups in Afghanistan and joined hands with other neighbouring countries which are genuinely interested in pacifying and normalising the situation in that country’. India did not maintain contact with all Afghan factions, and instead, demonised the Taliban.
Vikram Sood, former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) from December 2000 to March 2003, India’s premier external intelligence agency, confirms the dominance of Dixit’s PEC-led ideas regarding the impracticability of Indian intervention. Apparently Sood, who in 1994 was years away from becoming India’s spymaster, had formulated a plan to develop Indian intelligence infrastructure in Afghanistan. While the then chief of R&AW supported his plan, Rao refused to give it political clearance. Not surprisingly, Sood terms Rao’s decision-making as ‘policy drift … out of indecision’. Why was Rao averse to the R&AW using coercive techniques? Fear of escalating a covert war with Pakistan and balancing domestic civil-military relations are two possible reasons. There were personal considerations as well. Rao had come to power after a Tamil suicide bomber assassinated his predecessor Rajiv Gandhi, a proponent of coercive diplomacy. On 21 May 1991, a death squad of the Sri Lankan Tamil separatist group, the Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam (LTTE) killed Gandhi in a political rally in Tamil Nadu as a revenge for his decision to deploy the Indian Peacekeeping Forces (IPKF) to quell the LTTE among other reasons. The R&AW had played a critical role in the Sri Lankan conflict, first to train and equip the LTTE against the Sinhalese dominated Colombo government, and then to fight against them. Having learnt from the after-effects of employing coercive techniques for political purposes, subsequent Indian PMs became wary of resorting to them. Moreover, having been stunned by the IPKF experience in Sri Lanka, Rao and his successors did not want to escalate conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir, or in Afghanistan, given India’s precarious economic situation in early 1990s. Often termed derogatorily as ‘lacking political will’, aversion to covert tools of military coercion is an important tenet of the PEC.
Analysis of primary sources including the Ministry of External Affair’s (MEA) Annual Reports between 1991 and 1997 not only supports the existence of the PEC, but also indicates its dominance till 1996, after which India breached almost all tenets of the Rao Doctrine. In 1991–92 the MEA, apart from detailing bilateral visits and Indian aid figures to Afghanistan under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme, stated that:
India continued to extend full support to the political settlement of the Afghan crisis based on her conviction that any such settlement should recognise the legitimate interests of all concerned and be arrived at by the Afghans themselves without any external interference.
Of importance here is India’s recognition of ‘legitimate interests of all concerned’, which included the Mujahideen. Coming within the context of a strong Najibullah government at helm and evolution of India’s own insurgency in Kashmir, the statement reflected a mood of broad-based political reconciliation. In 1992 and 1993, India’s primary position remained same on ‘all concerned entering a dialogue’, and it ‘urgently’ called for a ‘renewed international peace initiative, possibly under UN auspices’ in 1992. Throughout this period, the MEA assessed India–Pakistan relations as showing a ‘downward trend’, much like the situation on the ground in Kashmir. In 1994, while India was still coming to terms with the capabilities of the newly formed Taliban, the MEA reported that ‘India supports a peaceful political settlement which is acceptable to all sections of the people of Afghanistan.’
Did Najibullah’s murder and the Taliban’s entry mark the death of the PEC in September 1996? Though its true that the event tipped the favour against the PEC, its fundamental beliefs remained robust. For instance, in October 1996, some Indian diplomatic officials, despite their conviction concerning Islamabad’s support to the Taliban, remained unconvinced that Pakistan could control the latter remotely. These officials assessed that Afghans have an ‘ethno-nationalist’ identity that is averse to outside domination. Disputing the consensus that the Taliban was simply an Islamist force without much regard for nationalism—much like the Al-Qaeda—this constituency within the MEA was wary of jumping to a conclusion on the former’s internal dynamics. Such ethnic understanding of the Taliban was a view that dominated American foreign bureaucracy too. The flexibility of this assessment and the PEC’s thriving existence is reflected in debates during the temporary fall of Mazar-e-Sharif on 25 May 1997. As the Taliban moved west and north from Kandahar, most factional leaders including Hekmatyar and Herat’s Ismail Khan fled Afghanistan. Mazar-e-Sharif’s fall initiated Dostum’s exile as well. The only faction actively resisting the Taliban was the Jamiat-e-Islami, marginalised to the Panjshir valley north of Kabul. India, like many other countries, momentarily faced a fait accompli i.e. either it engaged with the Taliban or remained out of Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. The situation became acute when the US received a Taliban delegation in Washington in February 1997 while Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) recognised it as Afghanistan’s legitimate government.
On 26 May 1997 the MEA came out with a cautious statement saying that the ‘new situation is entirely within the domestic sphere of Afghanistan’, and Afghans have a right to decide their future ‘free from outside influence and interference’. On 28 May, three days after Mazar’s fall, the Times of India (ToI) reported: ‘India seeks to open channel with [the] Taliban.’ According to the report a fast emerging ‘dominant’ view in the Ministry of External Affairs is that ‘we have to deal with the reality in Afghanistan for our long term national interest’. Officials had privately started admitting that India’s Afghanistan policy over the last year had ‘met with a setback’. Most interestingly, information got leaked that the Taliban—similar to Rabbani in 1992—had sent a ‘feeler’ to deal with India after its arrival in Kabul. Mullah Muttawakil sent the first feeler on 23 October 1996 in his interview to the Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, which was published by the Outlook Magazine in India. A key member of the ruling central Shura of the Taliban, Muttawakil stated:
We [Taliban] certainly can have better ties with New Delhi if India stops interfering in Afghanistan and assures us that Afghanistan’s embassy in New Delhi will not be allowed to be used against the Taliban by Rabbani’s appointees there.
Muttawakil wondered ‘what has the Taliban done to attract Indian ire?’ And added:
It seems the Indian Government has been formulating its Afghan policy without taking cognisance of the ground situation in Afghanistan. India needs to know a lot more about Afghanistan’s present realities in order to be able to formulate a more realistic Afghan policy.
Critically, when asked about Taliban’s views about Kashmir and the conditions of Muslims in India, Muttawakil stated: ‘For the moment, we won’t say anything … We want friendly ties with neighbours and have no intention of either interfering in affairs of other countries or allowing them to interfere in our affairs.’ Though wanting to engage, the Taliban’s proposal came with conditions and was far from neutral. It wanted New Delhi to cut all ties with Rabbani and throw its weight behind the Taliban.
The second signal came on 11 June 1997, before the Taliban’s retreat from Mazar-e-Sharif. This time it was Mullah Abdul Jalil, deputy foreign minister of the Taliban, who wanted India to stop treating the Taliban as an enemy. Phrases used by both Muttawakil and Jalil were similar in their criticism of India’s Afghanistan policy. Talking from a position of strength, Jalil said:
We can consider forging mutually beneficial ties with India if it brings positive changes in its Afghanistan policy … The Taliban wants friendly ties with all countries, both Islamic and non-Islamic. With our neighbours, including India, we would like to have normal relations based on the policy of non-interference. Until now, India has been interfering in Afghanistan’s affairs. We want this interference to end. In fact, we will be waiting for signs that indicate a change of heart in New Delhi.
Jalil underlined Taliban’s warmth for Pakistan in the same interview, leaving little space for an AEC dominated India to interpret the signal positively.
Former Indian FS K. Raghunath (July 1997 to November 1999), a staunch anti-Taliban figure, confirms that India did not entertain the two ‘feelers’. The question was often put that if the Taliban makes overtures, which they did, should India talk to them? ‘And the answer is no, because we don’t get anything by talking to them.’ Raghunath played a key role in undercutting the PEC’s advocacy in 1997 to influence policy change by mobilising opinion in wake of the Taliban’s ascendance and its signalling to New Delhi. Also, India had not expected the Taliban to make the gains it did by 1997. Nonetheless, according to the ToI, multiple sources within the MEA (barring Raghunath) gave two reasons why the Taliban should be engaged. First, that the Taliban wanted international recognition and was not sure for how long non-Pashtuns would accept their domination. Second that ‘an influential section within the Taliban is said to be deeply suspicious of Pakistan’. Reflecting India’s understanding of ‘political nuances’ within the Taliban early in the civil war, a strong constituency within the MEA sought political recognition for the Taliban, if not diplomatic recognition. Allegedly, this was India’s ‘uniform recognition behaviour’ towards governments of ‘disputed legitimacy’ till the 1971 India–Pakistan War or the Bangladesh Liberation War. Raghunath disagreed with the notion that in international affairs one must engage with all. However, while the merits of engagement or lack thereof can be debated, Raghunath’s claim that there was ‘no disagreement’ over the question of engagement with the Taliban does not stand up to rigorous examination of multiple sources.
An intense dialogue between the PEC and its detractors in early 1997 is reflective in I. K. Gujral’s (the then external affairs minister, EAM, of India, and soon to be PM) shifting gears on the Taliban question. Having called it ‘obscurantist’ at the Lok Sabha Debate in September 1996 in his capacity as the EAM, Gujral’s response to a journalist’s question, whether the Taliban should be resisted, on 12 March 1997 was: ‘It is not for me to say so. We are neither a party in the war in Afghanistan, nor would we like to be.’ Not only this, Gujral was actively portraying India as a non-player in Afghanistan:
Let us keep in mind that India is not involved in Afghanistan. But we are concerned about what’s happening there. Our policy is in conformity with the UN policy. We believe it’s their own problem and there should be no outside intervention. And the Taliban are an outside intervention—the support to the Taliban, I mean.
While the statement keenly reflects that India viewed the Taliban as a Pakistani creation, there is more to it. In the same interview Gujral stated that India ‘will go more than half-way to make its neighbours feel secure’, including Pakistan—without expecting quid pro quo. Dixit’s June 1997 statement that India should have a ‘flexible approach towards the Taliban’ supported this stand. However, regardless of Gujral and Dixit’s convictions, India took sides. The R&AW provided active support to Rabbani and Massoud, as alleged by Muttawakil as early as October 1996 and proven in retrospect. The fact was that India’s activities in Afghanistan—particularly military support to Rabbani’s forces—did not have political clearance. Politically, India had nothing to do with the internal situation of Afghanistan. Therefore, while the PEC advocacy dominated policy output between 1992 and 1996 and later gained some momentum in the light of the Taliban’s territorial gains in North Afghanistan in 1997, it remained unsuccessful in shaping the course of actions after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in September 1996. The next section explains why.
Anti-Engagement Coalition
Running parallel to the PECs dominant policy advocacy were proponents of containment of the Taliban. Termed as the anti-engagement coalition (AEC), these officials advocated containment of the Taliban by bolstering anti-Taliban elements in Afghanistan. To be clear, the PEC and the AEC were much in agreement over facts such as Pakistan’s support to the Taliban. With the same resource and information available to advocates of both coalitions, the difference lay in approach. There were three key aspects to the AEC’s belief system. First, that the Taliban was a ‘Pakistan-raised, Pakistan-trained and equipped, new Islamist fundamentalist force’ in Afghanistan. Second, that the Taliban would advance Pakistan’s strategic interests instead of uniting Afghanistan under one banner. And, third, not only should the Taliban not be recognised but also active counter-measures should be taken to stop its ascent. There was consensus in India’s strategic circles that the Taliban was a ‘creation’ of the ISI. K. Subrahmanyam, a top Indian strategist, reported the Taliban’s links with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in December 1994, and noted the West’s (primarily the US) ‘tacit’ support to the student movement. Views of the Indian media, often reflective of official Indian thinking on foreign policy matters, were best seen in the ToI editorials, often harsher in tone than Subrahmanyam, at regular junctures between 1994 and 1999. On 21 October 1994, the ToI sought a ‘reassessment’ of India’s ‘hands-off approach’ and advocated an active policy of India providing a ‘neutral’ platform to the warring factions. The ToI editorials throughout 1995 gave a blanket assessment of ISI-Taliban nexus and claimed that ‘working under the guise of bringing peace to a war ravaged countryside through the strict implementation of the Shariat, the ISI has sought to further its own agenda’. They also called the Hizb-e-Islami chief and Pashtun Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ created and nourished by Pakistan and overlooked by the US. Bashing the US as a destabilising actor in Afghanistan, the Indian media remained critical of the US for supporting Pakistan. In contrast, it portrayed Iran’s former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as a ‘harbinger of hope’ and Russia a close friend.
The ToI’s narratives shifted as the Taliban entered Kabul on 25 September 1996. On 28 September it suggested:
Neither a Balkanised nor a pro-Pakistani Afghanistan is in India’s interest and yet the North Block has remained curiously unmoved. Today, rather than rushing in to back one or the other side, India should strive to play a key role in regional diplomatic efforts aimed at bringing peace to that unfortunate country.
Marking an end to India’s hands-off policy immediately after Taliban’s entry into Kabul, New Delhi decided to side with Iran and Russia. Much in contrast to its September editorial, the ToI now articulated India’s place in the regional equations as such on 14 October 1996:
If this ethnic polarisation continues, the danger of all Afghanistan’s neighbours being drawn in to protect their ‘own’ will increase. As will the possibility of wider regional conflict …. Washington is opposed to the fundamentalism of Iran but at least the regime there is based on a certain constitutionalism which acts as a brake on the kind of excesses the Taliban are committing. The Iranians can be talked to and negotiated with but not an unpredictable force like the Taliban. This is the moment for Washington to work closely with Moscow, New Delhi and Tehran.
The AEC’s advocacy was the winner’s tale in India in 1996–97. In a plot dominated by oil pipeline politics, strategic depth, ethnic tensions, and territorial disputes (Durand Line and Kashmir), the Taliban, Pakistan and the US were the ‘villains’, and the Afghan government factions and other anti-Pakistani elements coupled with Iran and Russia were the ‘heroes’.
Statements by officials actively engaged in policymaking at that time, the MEA’s annual reports, and debates in the Lok Sabha reflect the same. According to K. Raghunath, ‘there was nobody who was doubting this policy (of not engaging the Taliban). Nothing was to be gained, in fact, everything was to be lost by showing the slightest signs of wanting to engage (with the Taliban)’. A strong anti-engagement advocate, Raghunath conveyed a similar message to Lakhdar Brahimi, the then Special Envoy to the UN Secretary General on Afghan Affairs, during the latter’s visit to India on 12 September 1997. Raghunath was categorical that ‘all bastions of freedom in Afghanistan were demolished and the Taliban was running riot, and they ran a kind of regime of atrocity’. He argues that the Taliban would have treated recognition from India as a certificate to their ‘Jihad ideology’, which was much in contrast with secular Indian sensibilities. Salman Haidar, Raghunath’s predecessor as the FS (March 1995 to June 1997) provides a similar assessment of the situation. ‘Our relationship with Afghanistan, as I understand, has a lot to do with Indo-Pak relations …. The Afghan civil war was a time when this was very visible. Pakistan was backing the Taliban, we hated the Taliban, and the Taliban was seen as a group damaging Indian interests.’ Key reason given for this emotion of ‘hate’ was the ‘unstable situation in Kashmir’ where ‘there was plenty of tinder’. When asked why India did not engage the Taliban knowing well that this could raise the Taliban’s stake of supporting the insurgency in Kashmir, Haidar stated:
The logic of what you [author] are saying is absolutely correct, but the time was not right … I don’t think the situation had developed to the point where some exploration of differentiating between different types of Taliban and different types of groups within Afghanistan was possible … Terror meant Taliban.
According to Shyam Saran, India’s FS from August 2004 to September 2006 (but who played an important role even in the 1990s) and till recently the chief of National Security Advisory Board (NSAB), the Taliban was ‘seen as trying to exclude India from Afghanistan and prove to be very hostile to India. That is one of the reasons why India withdrew its diplomatic representation from Afghanistan. And during that period also saw its interests in supporting the Northern Alliance (UF).’ Haidar, Raghunath and Saran, all concur that not only did India view the Taliban as a hostile entity but also wanted to work towards containing its rise. Lalit Mansingh, FS between December 1999 and March 2001, adds that India ‘lost all contact with Afghanistan during those six years’. This was despite Saran’s assertion that India’s outlook towards Pashtuns communities was not altered by the rise of the Taliban, and that ‘not all Pashtuns are Taliban or not all Pashtuns are fundamentalists’.
Saran’s statement reflects Indian official’s historical memory with Pashtun ‘elites’ as well as people-to-people relations at a cultural level. Most interviewees within and outside India’s state establishment corroborate this point. However, Pashtun leaders that officials recall as being close to India were from the so-called ‘Settled Areas’ of the erstwhile North-West Frontier Provinces (NWFP) of Pakistan. These include Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his brother Khan Sahib, from the Pashtun dominated Awami National Party (ANP). In Afghanistan, apart from former King Zahir Shah, Indian officials idealise the period of former Presidents Najibullah and Daoud Khan, and often make this a historical reference point to advocate strong ties with Afghanistan. The ideological thread connecting all these leaders is their tough stand against the Durand Line border issue with Pakistan. Questioning the territorial sovereignty of Pakistan, political advocacies of all these Afghan leaders reflected a deep aversion towards the Pakistani establishment, leading Pakistani policymakers in turn to support the Afghan Islamists. Socially, it was representative of traditional Pashtun-Punjabi tensions rife in the region. India, thus, primarily engaged or associated most with elements that had outright anti-Pakistan predilections. This aspect played an important role in India’s decision to not engage with the Taliban. Though Pakistani sources were aware of the Taliban’s aversion to the idea of the Durand Line as the recognised border with Pakistan throughout its reign, New Delhi could never accurately assess whether the Taliban would actually be interested in contesting the Durand Line and attempting to attract the Pashtun population of Pakistan in a greater Pashtunistan. In addition to this lack of understanding of Taliban–Pakistan relations and the Taliban’s sovereign agency as an actor, the brutal killing of Najibullah and his brother on 27 September 1996 strengthened the AEC. This is reflected in India’s ‘strong condemnation’ of the act, and hosting of Najibullah’s wife and daughter in India ever since.
An important primary source indicating this anti-engagement tenet of India’s Afghanistan policy is the debate in the Lok Sabha regarding the situation in Afghanistan on 27 November 1996. The then EAM Gujral, despite being a proponent of good neighbourly relations in what was called the ‘Gujral Doctrine’, bluntly criticised the Taliban and Pakistan:
The pursuit of obscurantist doctrine by the Taliban leadership and the consequent denial of human rights, especially the rights of women, have been extensively condemned. The implications of these events have been assessed, especially the risk of an adverse impact on India’s security.
On the security aspect, Gujral highlighted India’s worst fears over a Taliban-led Afghanistan.
We have recently seen credible reports in the international media on the Taliban handing over terrorist training facilities to the Harkat-ul-Ansar. It is reported that at these training camps Pakistani and other youth are being trained for terrorist activities in Kashmir.
As shown in the previous section, Gujral shifted gears in 1997, and attempted to portray India as a non-player in Afghanistan. These narratives emerging from the MEA and the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) reflect the AEC’s dominance in 1996-1997.
What were members of the military and intelligence agencies of India thinking? Consideration of this community’s advocacy is important given Pakistan’s claims that India covertly supports anti-Pakistan Baloch separatists from Afghan soil. In fact, it is argued that the Pakistani military establishment’s rationale for involvement in Afghanistan is rooted in its strategic outlook vis-à-vis India. According to a top military intelligence officer closely following Afghanistan after 2001: ‘Indians had nothing to do with the Taliban … and Pakistan made sure that we have no connections with the Pashtuns.’ This was, at a minimum, one reason why India could not properly assess the possibility of collaborating, if need be, with the Taliban on the Durand Line issue. The official adds somewhat caustically:
We’re fascinated by the Pashtuns but they have done nothing for us. When they have a choice to make between Pakistan and India then they may not side with us. Any intelligence agency (read R&AW) that says that they have contacts and leeway among Pashtuns—they are cheating themselves.
Reconfirming India’s links solely with Afghan elites, the official categorically stated that the only reason Pashtuns would choose India over Pakistan is because they want their ‘elite status’ back in Afghanistan. Pakistan has made them Jihadis. Confirming that R&AW maintains links with the Taliban, the official also claimed that covert contacts do not last long. Finding the Taliban’s philosophy ‘repugnant’, the official said that engaging the Taliban openly ‘was a very difficult choice’ in 1996. According to Vikram Sood, former spymaster, India did not really have a ‘game-plan’ on Afghanistan pre-2001. ‘We didn’t make any concerted attempt, it was sporadic effort. If Rabbani said something then we would sit together and chat about it’, and see what could be done. Not expecting the Taliban to reach Kabul, Sood considers its rise coming to R&AW as ‘a shock … we were left numb for a while’. On the question of engaging with the Pashtuns, Sood hinted that though the R&AW tried to build networks, the killing of Najibullah was a massive blow:
[The] rest of the Pashtuns were not willing to talk, they were too scared. And we didn’t want to upset them because at that time we were also not very sure how it was going to play-out. And remember, the Taliban was Pakistan-based so the proper assessment whether all Taliban were Pashtun or Pashtuns are Taliban was not made fully.
For the same reason, Indian intelligence had refused to engage with Hekmatyar who had sent signals to India in October 1994 when he lost support from Pakistan in wake of the Taliban’s rise. Sood confirms that India’s non-engagement with the Taliban or Hekmatyar—who they accepted as part of the Rabbani government till the time it lasted in 1992—was not as much about ideology as it is often portrayed. It was primarily because of a weak capability to understand the situation in depth on the ground. Haidar reiterates this point:
There are two elements. One, lack of capacity, and two, more important, lack of desire … India has always been the last of the people around to accept that there can be different types of Taliban.
Thus, it was not just the Pakistan factor or the insurgency in Kashmir that helped the AEC remain dominant domestically. A serious gap in knowledge and capacity compounded by India’s economic and political resource crunch during the 1990s added weight. The arrival of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janaya Party (BJP) government in 1998 and its increasingly aggressive stance on Kashmir further strengthened the AEC. Critically, though for different reasons, Moscow, Tehran and the Central Asian Republics’s staunch anti-Taliban stand, coupled with the UN’s condemnation of the Taliban strengthened the AEC tremendously. Constituting a negative social construct of the Taliban (and in some cases even the Pashtuns), and a sense of realpolitik to engage with anti-Pakistan elements on the Afghan landscape, the AEC’s advocacy was able to influence policy in its favour.
Conclusion
Most contemporary studies foresee an imminent proxy war between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan after 2014. The primary basis of their argument is India’s aversion to engage with pro-Pakistan factions in Afghanistan, and particularly the Taliban, during the 1990s. Considered a zero-sum game of influence with Pakistan, New Delhi”s aversion to the pro-Pakistan Taliban regime is considered a marker of this rivalry. This paper revisited India’s approach towards Afghanistan and examined if New Delhi was necessarily averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan political factions during the 1990s. Based on fresh primary interviews with former Indian policymakers, media archives, and official reports, the paper showed that India engaged with and accommodated pro-Pakistan factions after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 until 1996. The Taliban’s rise to power in Kabul in September 1996 challenged India’s engagement-with-all approach. Nonetheless, the decision to sever ties with the Taliban and to bolster anti-Taliban factions was highly debated in New Delhi. Many in India saw the Taliban as a militant Islamist force sponsored by Pakistan. For others, however, it was an ethno-nationalist movement representing Pashtun interests, and not necessarily under Islamabad’s control.
Three key themes emerge from this article. First, theoretical constructs such as the NPF can help conceptualise policy advocacies and unpack under-appreciated policy currents of India effectively. India’s Afghanistan policy in 1990s was more than a negative-correlate of Pakistani actions. This was despite Pakistan’s use of asymmetric warfare in Kashmir. The strategic importance of friendly relations with Afghanistan and its impact on Pakistan was not overlooked, but India’s final policy approach had at least two angles to it. Existence of the anti-engagement and the pro-engagement coalitions vis-à-vis the Taliban proves this point. Both the coalitions saw the centre of gravity for most Afghan and Indian security problems in Pakistan. As Ogden argues, ‘Pakistan’s support of various insurgencies and terrorism against India has … entrenched the contemporary Pakistan-terrorism nexus within India’s (foreign and domestic) security perspectives’. However, different coalitions advocated different approaches to the problem. The PEC advocated engagement with the Taliban and all those warring factions deemed unfriendly to India and close to Pakistan. The AEC advocated partisan engagement with only those factions that had a positive predilection towards India.
Marginalisation of the PEC by 1996 was apparent in India’s decision not to recognise or even unofficially engage with the Taliban. The AEC dominated the policy scene throughout late 1990s and for most of the US-led NATO war in Afghanistan after 2001. Even at the 2001 Bonn Conference, regardless of being a marginal player, India was actively supporting the non-Pashtuns dominated United Front. Though the temporary fall of Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997 put pressure on the AEC to engage with the Taliban and view the Afghan landscape realistically, this did not happen. However, the key policy coup led by the AEC advocates in mid-1990s was India’s alignment with Russia, Iran, and the Central Asian Republics to support the UF morally, financially and militarily. This was a radical departure from the 1992 Rao Doctrine and squarely aimed its actions against the ‘Pakistan-supported Taliban’. Interestingly, this phase of AEC domination in Indian foreign policy experience paved way for the narrative that the Afghanistan conflict was a byproduct of the India-Pakistan rivalry. Though partially true, the shortcoming of this argument is that it mixes political interpretation and beliefs with policy outputs. It misses the historical existence of the PEC, and is based on a stringent assumption that India–Pakistan rivalry is cast in stone. Even if it is true that most Indian officials view Afghanistan from a security-dominated Pakistani lens, and most Pakistani officials view it from a security-dominated Indian lens, the policy outputs over time indicate political sophistication and nuance. Therefore, the argument that India and Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy is a subset of India–Pakistan relations with little independent merit to bilateral ties, does not hold true at all times.
Second, the empirical findings of this article have important implications for the current policy debates in India over Afghanistan. As per the Afghanistan-US Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) 2014, NATO forces will not be involved in combat against the Taliban from December 2014. There will be 9,800 troops stationed in Afghanistan under Mission Resolute Support, but they will not be engaged in combat against the Taliban. Moreover, the new Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani, has made overtures to all sections of the Taliban to reconcile differences with Kabul and sought Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China’s support for the same. Even Hamid Karzai’s government had been attempting to engage with all Taliban factions independently. While welcoming Kabul’s initiative to reconcile differences with the Taliban, New Delhi remains wary of the Haqqani Network. The question then is, are Indian policymakers willing to wage a covert war against Pakistan in Afghanistan after 2014? Though concerns over the outbreak of such a proxy war remain legitimate given the recent deterioration in the India–Pakistan bilateral relations, examination of India’s approach towards Afghanistan in the early 1990s, and even today, demonstrates a very different picture.
For one, India was reluctant to deliver heavy lethal weaponry to Afghanistan despite Kabul’s repeated requests since 2013. This, according to successive Indian governments, will only add fuel to fire by increasing Pakistani anxieties about Indian influence in Afghanistan. Moreover, given the ambiguity over the capabilities of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), there is a real concern that Indian arms may fall into the hands of the Taliban. Second, India has been offering Foreign Secretary level talks on Afghanistan with Pakistan since 2006. Pakistan has rebuffed these proposals consistently. According to Shyam Saran and the recently retired NSA Shivshankar Menon, Pakistan refuses to discuss this issue with India for fear of recognising India’s growing influence in Afghanistan. Islamabad, on the contrary, claims that India is using Afghan soil to support anti-Pakistan militants in the politically fragile provinces of Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA). Islamabad’s concerns vis-à-vis Indian involvement in abetting separatism within Pakistan are not entirely baseless. The R&AW indeed had supported such elements within Pakistan in 1980s. It had set-up two desks—Counter-Intelligence Team-X and Counter-Intelligence Team-J—to undertake covert offensive action within Pakistan, when the Punjab insurgency was at its zenith. In 2009, former Indian PM Manmohan Singh signed a declaration with his Pakistani counterpart in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, in which he agreed to ‘discuss’ Balochistan. The declaration indicated India’s links with the Baloch separatists in Pakistan and led to severe criticism of Singh on his return to Delhi. Such deliberations between India and Pakistan firmly indicate that both the countries face a genuine security dilemma over Afghanistan. However, it is also clear that India’s Afghanistan policy is not simply aimed at waging a proxy war against Pakistan.
Finally, are contemporary Indian policymakers necessarily against the idea of engaging with the Taliban? Though a subject of separate study, results on the ground are contrary to public perceptions. Covertly, but surely, India started engaging with certain Taliban and other pro-Pakistan factions—including Hekmatyar, the Quetta Shura, and the Peshawar Shura—from 2005–06 itself. Even though averse to the idea of reconciliation at the 2010 London Conference, New Delhi accepted talks with the Taliban with high degree of political nuance when it signed the India-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement in 2011. Unlike 1996, India today has both the desire and the capacity to understand and engage with the Taliban. If it was unaware of the tensions between the Taliban leadership and Pakistan in the 1990s, it is very aware of the surge in anti-Pakistan sentiment across Afghanistan over the past 13 years. With its post-2002 approach clearly being in favour of engaging with the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, New Delhi maintains an open approach towards many Taliban factions barring the Haqqani Network. With the PEC dominating India’s contemporary Afghanistan policy—again, a subject that needs detailed academic inquiry—New Delhi maintains a cautious stance in Afghanistan. Therefore, as this article explains, India’s Afghanistan policy is not a subset of its tensions with Pakistan, and New Delhi, contrary to popular perception, is not entirely and consistently anti-Taliban in its outlook.