Moscow-held Afghan talks: Glimmer of hope for peace or re-imagining geopolitics?
In a major diplomatic breakthrough, India sent two former diplomats to the much-awaited Moscow talks on Afghanistan reconciliation held on November 9. The two-member ‘unofficial’ delegation comprised of Amar Sinha, a former Indian envoy to Kabul, and the former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, TCA Raghavan, who currently heads India’s leading foreign policy think tank, Indian Council of World Affairs.
While India categorically denied holding direct talks with the Taliban, the presence of Indian representatives at the talks — known as the Moscow format — is noteworthy as it is an unprecedented development that may shape future engagement in Afghanistan.
Seen as a “diplomatic victory” for Russia — to be able to gather representatives from 12 different and ideologically diverse countries on a common platform — the Moscow meeting has serious political implications.
It is no exaggeration to say that the meeting has to do with larger geopolitics of the region with mounting fears about the return of the cold war days, when Washington aggressively pursued the containment of Soviet expansion and laid the basic foundation of her foreign policy. In pursuit of this foreign policy and the heights of the cold war, the United States never considered India to be of any major political significance in Asia.
However, the relations between Washington and New Delhi evolved — from missed opportunities to constructive transactional engagement — often replete with contradictions. New Delhi’s complicated bilateral ties with US are a result of two main factors — firstly, a consequence of the US-Soviet competition for influence in the region. Secondly, an outcome of the Indo-Pakistan rivalry. This gave credence to Dullesian argument that helping India even moderately with defence supplies would upset Pakistan — Washington’s “loyal ally”.
The failure of US to provide India with defence supplies in the 1960s opened New Delhi’s route to Russia’s predecessor state, the Soviet Union, which emerged as a primary military supplier to the Indian forces at that time. This trusted friendship between India and Russia set in anxiety and insecurity in Washington.
Since then, an almost similar pattern — of missed opportunities and alternative negotiating channels — has emerged on the global scene. This includes the ongoing peace process in Afghanistan.
In its perennial quest for hegemony in the region and as a continuation of Dullesian argument, the US has, for decades, deliberately feigned ignorance to India’s significance in the reconciliation process. India’s absence from the Afghan peace process in these years is a combination of Washington’s short-sightedness in terms of geopolitical dynamics and New Delhi’s blindfolded Afghan policy that underrated the overwhelming presence and role of the Taliban in the country.
While on surface Moscow meeting is clearly about peace in Afghanistan, it also revives the debate on the new Cold War — with competing visions of US and Russia — and shatters India’s old beliefs, forcing her to re-examine the existing assumptions that the Taliban is a social and political reality in Afghanistan. This shift in India’s policy repositions New Delhi as a legitimate stakeholder in the Afghan peace process.
It is hard to escape the impression that India has gradually and comfortably rationalised and recognised Taliban as a reality in the country and as an important player in talking peace to the Afghan government.
In fact, unlike other important players like Washington that has often bypassed the Afghan government in making peace overtures to the Taliban, the Indian leadership has remained committed to its policy of Afghan-led, Afghan-owned and Afghan-controlled peace and reconciliation process.
While the essence of India’s Afghan policy remains intact, New Delhi has reviewed its approach aligning its interests with the realities on the ground. It must be noted that there is a shift in approach and not an abrupt reversal in India’s policy towards the peace process.
The assumption that military solution alone can make Afghanistan a stable and viable nation is not only false but completely flawed with weaknesses engrained in the strategy. The two — peace and war — are inherently contradictory.
Significantly, a study by Brown University, titled Costs of War, released on November 8, 2018, stated that the number of fatalities in Afghanistan since the launch of war on terror in 2001 has caused 147,000 deaths until October 2018. This includes the civilians, the Afghan security forces, non-state actors as well as US-led coalition forces.
Moreover, the conflict-induced displacement that endangers the basic livelihood of the displaced persons in the country stands at 2.61 million.
These brutal facts of the current reality in Afghanistan cannot afford to have an abrasively selective attitude of external powers towards establishing peace in the country. Furthermore, during the November 9 Moscow talks, the head of the five-member Taliban delegation Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai asserted and reiterated his stand on the withdrawal of US forces from the country as a pre-requisite to peace.
Another Taliban representative, Mohammad Sohail Shahin, expressed the need to talk to the Americans for pulling out forces Afghanistan. Shahin stated that the Taliban is ready to address Washington’s security concerns arising out of Afghanistan.
Treading on the thin margins of practical possibilities, this dramatic diplomatic move by Moscow can be seen as a good opportunity for India contextualised in the larger bargaining process in the Afghan civil war resolution.
Moscow’s multilateral initiative and New Delhi’s renewed position in the ongoing peace process in Afghanistan must be seen as an essential component of the multi-layered interdependent stages of past negotiations and within the new reimagined geopolitical framework — with India consolidating its position as a key stakeholder in the country.
While there is constant churning in world politics, what remains to be seen is — if the Moscow-hosted talks will move towards ending the war in Afghanistan or is it merely a resurfacing of geopolitical ambitions?