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The Strategic Disconnect between India and US Has Been Revealed by Afghanistan
There is no way the US and India can work together in the east even as the US actively props up India’s mortal and sworn enemies in the west.
September 08, 2021
In December 2017, the Trump administration announced a new national security strategy that sought to shift the focus of the US from combating terrorism to confronting the growing strategic challenge from China and Russia. In April 2021, Donald Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, declared that the US will completely withdraw from Afghanistan before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. In his speech, Biden echoed Trump’s National Security Strategy and said that “rather than return to war with the Taliban … we have to shore up American competitiveness to meet the stiff competition we’re facing from an increasingly assertive China.”
On August 31, 2021, when Biden announced the end of war in Afghanistan, he justified it by saying that “we’re engaged in a serious competition with China. We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia … we can do both: fight terrorism and take on new threats that are here now and will continue to be here in the future. And there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan.”
Clearly, like his predecessor, for Biden too, the China challenge trumps the threat from terrorism emanating from a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. That the Americans are seeking to confront and compete with China and Russia by ceding strategic space in Afghanistan to both these countries is a rather strange way to join the strategic competition. If China and Russia, together with some other countries—notably Pakistan—manage to bring stability to Afghanistan, it will mean loss of strategic space for the US and its allies from a very large geography in Asia. On the other hand, if America’s adversaries fail to pacify and normalise Afghanistan—a more likely outcome given that it is Taliban and their disreputable partners like Al Qaeda and other regional and global terror organisations who now have a state to boot—the terrorism challenge will metastasize into an uncontrollable strategic threat. Both these scenarios will seriously impact the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy.
India, which is a pivotal player in the Indo-Pacific strategy of the US, has been watching with consternation her strategic environment getting severely disturbed by the shambolic end of the US war in Afghanistan. For many years now, top US officials and policy wonks maintained that while the US and India had 95 per cent convergence east of India (read China), they had just 5 per cent convergence west of India (read Afghanistan and Pakistan). To appease the Pakistanis, the Americans were chary of letting India play a bigger role in Afghanistan. The security domain was a virtual no-go area for India. US Congressmen (including some of Indian-origin) would come to India and peddle the Pakistani line that India should keep signing the cheques in Afghanistan but desist from exercising any real influence which would rile the Pakistanis.
Successive Indian governments played along because as long as the US was present in Afghanistan, the danger of Afghanistan becoming a major source of instability and terrorism in the region remained more or less under control. That situation no longer obtains. This means that going forward, unless the Indo-US convergence to the west of India matches the convergence to the east of India, it will be difficult for India to partner the US. In other words, the two countries will now have to work in tandem on both the east and west of India.
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Gautam