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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
India in Afghanistan
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| Nation building or proxy war? |
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Published : 1 October 2010 |
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REZA / WEBISTAN / CORBIS |
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| Mujaheddin soldiers travelling through
the land ‘where empires go to die’ in 2002.
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| T |
THEY WERE BOTH YOUNG. One
had just the first wisps of hair
on his cheeks, like an adolescent.
The other was not much
older, his short-trimmed beard
caked with dried blood. There
were gaping exit wounds in his
shoulder, and in the pale skin of
his belly, where his undershirt
had been pulled up to reveal
the damage. The two boys were
lying dead
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amongst scattered
bricks, at the feet of a crowd of gaping onlookers and journalists, in an abandoned construction site in Kabul.
“Where do you think they’re from?” a reporter asked the
policeman who was taking a picture of the bodies with his
cell phone, his assault rifle dangling from his other hand.
The glaze of adrenaline still shone on the cop’s cheeks and
eyes. “Pakistan,” he said. “Definitely not Afghans.” They
always say that here, as if you could tell. They looked like
Pashtuns, at least.
It was just one of several attacks in Kabul this summer,
unremarkable in its execution and impact, but as a result,
a series of extraordinary events had been triggered that
would serve as a bellwether of India’s waning influence in
Afghanistan. It was 29 May, the first day of the National
Consultative Peace Jirga, and the two militants had managed
to set up in the empty site and fire rockets at the Polytechnic
University, the site of the peace jirga—a carefully
stage-managed event that had brought handpicked tribal
elders and civil society figures to endorse President Hamid
Karzai’s plan to reconcile with the Taliban.
Karzai was furious that the jirga had been disrupted, in
the middle of his inaugural speech, no less. One of the rockets
had severed the leg of one of his personal bodyguards,
and the two attackers had held out for several hours in a
gun battle with police before finally being shot to death.
The following week, Karzai called a meeting with Hanif
Atmar, the Minister of the Interior, and Amrullah Saleh,
the chief of the National Directorate of Security (NDS)—
the Afghan intelligence service—where he accused them
of deliberately failing to provide adequate security in order
to undermine the jirga. In a heated exchange, both offered
their resignations. It wasn’t the first time that either of
them had offered their resignations in response to an angry
outburst by Karzai, but this time the president accepted.
Of course, there was more to the forced resignations than
just the incident at the peace jirga. Both Atmar and Saleh
were favourites of Afghanistan’s Western donor countries,
particularly the United States. They had been responsible for Western-backed reforms in Afghanistan’s internal security
agencies. They were also officials who had been seen as
very friendly to India, in particular Saleh, who had shown
a marked and public hostility towards Pakistan, and was a
strong opponent of reconciliation with the Taliban.
“It’s clear from what’s been said around the palace that
the president had issues with Atmar and Saleh and suspicions
that they were too loyal to the foreigners,” said Kate
Clark, a political analyst in Kabul. “He’s tried to get rid of
Atmar before and the foreigners said no.”
| OMAR SOBHANI / REUTERS |
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Amarullah Saleh, former chief of Afghani intelligence, a
favourite of the Americans and Indians, resigned in June as
Karzai edged closer to Pakistan. |
The incident showed how much India’s fortunes have
been bound to the US-led nation-building project in Afghanistan,
and how much the downward spiral of that
project has diminished India’s position here. Saleh’s ouster
was particularly damaging to India, as it has hampered
co-operation between the NDS and India’s external intelligence
service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and
was seen as a significant milestone in the rehabilitation of
Karzai’s once-tense relationship with Pakistan.
“By and large, India for a long time has put all its eggs
in one basket and that is American presence,” said Harsh
Pant, a professor and expert on Indian foreign policy and
security issues at King’s College London. “America will
sort everything out and will not leave Afghanistan until
it’s achieved its objective. Suddenly, that has come crashing
down because of the West’s desire to leave.”
Today, almost nine years after a US-led invasion deposed
the Taliban regime, large swaths of the south and southeast
have fallen under Taliban control, while Kandahar city, the
linchpin of the south, has become a battleground of targeted
killings, air strikes and improvised explosive devices.
Even once-safe areas in the north and west have become
dangerous. The rising insecurity is not simply a function of
the insurgency, but a revival of centrifugal forces that have
plagued the Afghan state for centuries, with local warlords
and criminal gangs increasingly emboldened to defy a corrupt
and ineffectual central government.
| SAYED SALAHUDDIN / REUTERS |
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Portraits of the once
influencial Ahmad Shah Massoud, who faught the Soviets
in the 1980s, was killed by the Taliban two days before 9/11.
Massoud’s deputies swept into power when the US arrived in
2001. |
The final elements of the US military surge arrived at
the end of this summer without any significant gains. The
Taliban in Baghlan Province is now threatening the main
highway north from Kabul to Mazar-e Sharif, as well as the
road south to Kandahar, and the result is an atmosphere of
pessimism and mounting panic that has reached even into
the relatively secure bubble of the capital. In September,
when the top officials of the country’s largest private bank,
Kabul Bank, were removed over revelations they had made hundreds of millions of dollars in bad loans to politically connected
businessmen, thousands of Afghans mobbed
bank branches around the country, desperately seeking to
withdraw their deposits. The incident added to the ‘end of days’ sensation in Kabul and cast a pall over Eid-ul-Fitr.
In several months of conversations over the course of
this summer—many of them off-the-record—in Kabul and
Delhi with current and former Indian bureaucrats with the
Ministry of External Affairs and with India’s intelligence
services, as well as with Afghan, Pakistani and Western officials and observers, the consensus was that India’s policy
in Afghanistan is facing the seemingly impossible task of
managing the collapse of the nation-building project in Afghanistan
and containing Pakistan’s rising influence. Despite
a massive commitment of 1.3 billion dollars in Indian
aid, the Karzai administration and Pakistan have drawn
closer, both as a result of the failure of US-led efforts to
contain the insurgency, and the rising momentum for negotiations
with the Taliban. There was confusion, however,
over India’s basic interests in Afghanistan and what sort of
plausible situations might be imagined. One thing was clear
though: the growing fragmentation of Afghanistan could
conceivably herald a return to the chaos of the civil war in
the 1990s.
| I |
F YOU VISIT THE BORDER CROSSING at Spin Boldak,
between Kandahar city and Quetta in Pakistan, you’ll
find a sort of semi-organised mayhem. Here, hundreds
of local Pashtuns pass back and forth without documentation
each day. This is, in fact, one of the best
controlled places along the Durand Line, demarcated
by the British Empire and the Emir of Afghanistan, |
Abdur Rahman Khan in 1893, which extends through the Pashtun heartland—rugged tribal country where clans overlap the border, on up through to the Khyber Pass and then into the western reaches of the Himalayas.
Like they were in the time of the British Empire, the lands
skirting the Durand Line are barely controlled or controllable,
and are rife with smuggling and militancy. They have
been a continual source of contention between Afghanistan
and Pakistan. Relations between the two countries worsened
when Daoud Khan, who in 1973 deposed his cousin
King Zahir Shah to become the first president of Afghanistan,
revived the Pashtunistan issue. Pakistan began to support
traditional Islamic rebels who were resisting Daoud’s
attempts at state modernisation, while in turn, Daoud hosted
thousands of displaced Baloch and Pashtun fighters.
The Soviet Union first supported the Afghan communist
groups that led a coup in Afghanistan in 1978, and then,
20 months later, invaded in order to prop them up. India,
though initially uneasy about the wisdom of the invasion,
gave its support. “We were taken by surprise, they hadn’t
told us they were going to invade,” said Vikram Sood, a former
head of RAW who retired in March 2003. “Both of the
superpowers have made a mess for our policies.”
| CAREN FIROUZ / REUTERS |
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Abdul Rashid Dostum, former pro-Soviet
fighter, received money and weapons from Russia and India in
the 1990s to fight the Taliban. |
Although a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement,
India had then moved into closer co-operation with
the Soviet Union, signing the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship
and Cooperation in 1971 and receiving significant Soviet
military aid. Pakistan, for its part, had fallen into the
US sphere of influence, signing a security agreement in 1959
and, in time, becoming the conduit for billions of dollars in
US aid to the mujahideen.
With the war in Afghanistan fuelled by the two competing
superpowers, the border also became another front in
the conflict between India and Pakistan, which after flaring
into full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971, was then being
carried out in several parts of South Asia. As RAW already
had a close relationship with the KGB, this extended to cooperation
with Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, KhAD,
the predecessor to NDS. They had a common enemy in
Pakistan.
“It was a close relationship,” said Sood of the three
intelligence services, KGB, RAW and KhAD. “It was
a closeness that flowed from the political closeness of our governments.”
The KGB and KhAD carried out assassinations and sabotage
in Pakistan, and RAW found its cooperation with them
useful; in particular for intelligence on Sikh groups training
in militant camps, according to the memoirs of Bahukutumbi
Raman, a former RAW officer.
When, after ten years of a fruitless counterinsurgency
campaign, the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan,
a brutal civil war broke out between mujahideen
factions. It was the sudden rise of the Taliban, a group of
strict Islamic fighters who brought order to the south of
Afghanistan, as the country’s pre-eminent military force
that coalesced the conflict into sharp geographic, ethnic,
and regional battle lines. The Taliban had indigenous beginnings
that stretched back through the anti-Soviet jihad,
but once they began to gather momentum, Pakistan threw
its support behind them, supplying them with weapons, logistics,
and battlefield guidance.
“There was a feeling in Delhi at the time that all was
lost,” said Sood. “We were the guys who said ‘no, it’s not
over, something can be done.’”
To counter the Taliban, Russia, Iran, and India gave
weapons, money and supplies to the United Front, commonly
known as the Northern Alliance, which included in
a loose confederation Abdul Rashid Dostum and his Uzbek
militia in the northwest, Ismail Khan in the west in
Herat, and Karim Khalili in the Hazara-dominated central
highlands, along with the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud,
whose Shura-e Nezar, or ‘Supervisory Council,’ drew on a
core of loyalists from the Panjshir Valley, a Tajik-inhabited valley north of Kabul that successfully
held out against both the Soviets and
Taliban. Massoud, a charismatic leader,
soon became the most prominent figure
in the Northern Alliance.
“He was a man who could have easily
disappeared with a lot of money but
he stayed and fought until the end,”
said Lieutenant General Ravi Sawhney,
who was the director general of Indian
military intelligence throughout the
1990s until his retirement in October
2001. He would meet Massoud in Iran
and Tajikistan, where India has a small
airbase and field hospital at Farkhor,
through which they brought in supplies.
“There was no contiguity of the
borders, we couldn’t do much besides
financial aid.”
| TOMAS MUNITA / AP PHOTO |
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Gul Agha Sherzai, Governor of
Nangarhar, a principal rival of Karzai
was in Delhi in this August to meet
with Indian officials. His visit was not
announced. |
Dostum and Ismail Khan were eventually
forced to flee Afghanistan, while
Massoud’s forces were pushed by the
Taliban into a tiny northern corner of
the country. A Taliban victory seemed
near, but the attacks of 11 September and
the US military intervention abruptly
altered the course of Afghanistan’s history. Though Massoud
had been killed by al-Qaeda in a suicide attack two
days before those at the World Trade Center (he died in
Farkhor’s field hospital), his deputies swept into power on
the back of the US-led bombing campaign that led to the
rapid collapse of the Taliban regime.
Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s military dictator, had
offered his support to the Americans, but according to recently
declassified diplomatic correspondence, he repeatedly
expressed his concerns that the Northern Alliance
would take over Kabul. His fears were realised when, despite
US pressure, forces led by the Shura-e Nazar entered
Kabul in strength and occupied the ministries.
The northerners consolidated their strong position on the
ground at the 2001 Bonn Conference, which charted a roadmap
for Afghanistan’s political future. The most important
ministerial positions in the interim government were entirely
occupied by Shura-e Nazar figures, who simply took
on the roles they had had under Massoud’s administration:
Marshal Fahim as Defence Minister, Yunus Qanuni as Interior
Minister, Abdullah Abdullah as Foreign Minister,
and as head of the newly-formed NDS, Muhammed Arif
Sarwari, who had been the CIA’s primary liaison under
Massoud. With the exception of Qanuni, who became the
Minister of Education and the Special Advisor on Security to Karzai, all of these figures kept their positions through
the Transitional Authority that oversaw the Constitutional
Loya Jirga in 2003, up to the first presidential elections in
2004.
For the first time in Afghanistan’s history, you had an interior
minister, defence minister, a foreign minister, and a
chief of intelligence who were all from the Panjshir Valley.
These were men who had been, a month before, fighting
desperately against a Pakistani-supported Taliban while
taking military and financial aid from India. Now they were
the masters of Kabul, far more powerful than Karzai, who
had just arrived from exile in Pakistan and had no military
base of his own.
These were good times for Indo-Afghan relations, and
India reciprocated with substantial support, committing
1.3 billion dollars in development projects such as roads,
dams, the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital, a power line
between Kabul and Uzbekistan and sponsoring hundreds
of scholarships for Afghan students to India, making it the
largest bilateral donor in the region and the fifth largest
overall, after the US, Britain, Japan and Germany.
Even the new parliament building on Darulaman Road is
being built by India for 83 million dollars, though Afghans
are beginning to wonder when it will ever be finished (the
government says 2011). The Manmohan Singh administration has also embraced co-operation in security matters
with Afghanistan, seeing it as a crucial battleground in
fighting terrorism in the region. Though India, primarily
due to US objections stemming from Pakistan’s concerns,
has not sent its military to take part in the NATO-led International
Security Assistance Force, it has helped build
the capacity of the Afghan security forces, providing pilot
and counterinsurgency training and even mentoring the
Afghan Army’s marching band.
The NDS figured prominently in this scheme. The CIA,
which directly controlled the NDS’s budget until 2008, has
worked to grow what is widely regarded as one of the most
effective and cohesive institutions in Afghanistan, outperforming
the Afghan Army and the dismal Afghan National
Police. “It’s been a tremendously powerful institution in
Afghanistan, certainly since the 1978 revolution,” said analyst
Kate Clark.
The basic material for the organisation came from two
sources: Shura-e Nazar’s pre-existing intelligence men,
and former members of KhAD. They had previously been
merged during the short-lived Rabbani government in 1992,
when Fahim was put in charge of the intelligence service.
After the Northern Alliance took Kabul in 2001, that setup
was reconstituted. It was not unusual for communist-era
figures with experience in security or bureaucracy—particularly
those associated with Najibullah’s rule—to participate
in the post-2001 regime, as they represented some of
Afghanistan’s most well-trained talent.
| EMILY WAX / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES |
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An Indian engineer at the construction site of the new
Afghan parliament, funded by the Indian government. |
Both the Panjshiris and the former KhAD members had
experience working with Indian intelligence against Pakistan
and its proxies in Afghanistan. RAW picked up these
pre-existing relationships after 2001. “We knew a lot of
these guys from their KhAD days,” said a former Indian
intelligence official who recently retired. According to current
and former intelligence officials within RAW and the
NDS, the relationship between the two agencies had been
co-operative, though less close than in the KhAD days, with
NDS officials visiting India for training and RAW maintaining
information gathering operations in Afghanistan.
Saleh, who took over as NDS chief in 2004 and had been
groomed for the position by the Americans, is also from the
Panjshir Valley, though at 38 he had been a relatively minor
figure in Massoud’s administration. As a director in the
Northern Alliance’s office in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, he had
been a liaison with foreign intelligence services. “One of
the most brilliant people I’ve met,” said Sawhney. “Slightly
short-tempered, but if there’s anyone who knows the Taliban
and Pakistan’s hand in the game, it’s him.”
During his tenure as NDS chief, Saleh would publicly accuse
the Pakistani government of waging an active campaign
of support for militant groups in Afghanistan. “The tribal agencies of Pakistan, like Bajaur and North and South
Waziristan, are kept by the government as a strategic pool
of fighters. From there, fundamentalist warriors are sent to
fight in Afghanistan or elsewhere,” Saleh told Der Spiegel, a
prominent German magazine, in 2009.
“Amrullah Saleh was very hostile,” said a senior Pakistani
official. “He gathered Panjshiris and Karmalists [former
communists] around him who were ideologically opposed
to Pakistan.”
The extent of the NDS’s operations in Pakistan is a matter
of dispute. As a function of its counterintelligence and
counterterrorism roles, the NDS has been working actively
to penetrate the Taliban and other insurgent groups, both
within Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan’s
tribal areas, where the CIA has active intelligence gathering
operations as well. (A key figure in this had been Dr
Abdullah Laghmani, the Pashtun deputy head of the NDS
who was killed in a suicide attack in Mehtar Lam in 2009.)
However, Pakistani officials claim that NDS under Saleh
has gone further than that, taking the fight to Pakistan by
cultivating links with militant groups on Pakistani soil.
One Pakistani official in Kabul accused the NDS of actively
supporting elements of the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan
that had turned against the Pakistani military, namely
groups in Orakzai, the Swat Valley and South Waziristan—
all locations of Pakistan’s selective military campaign in the
tribal regions. “They were working very closely in Orakzai
with NDS,” he said. “NDS had contacts with Maulana Fazlullah
and with Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan.”
Afghan officials denied providing any support to militant
groups.
The NDS has also been accused by Pakistan of harbouring
militant Baloch separatists, including Brahamdagh
Bugti, leader of the Baloch Republican Party. In November
2007, Balach Marri, a key militant separatist leader, was
killed in Afghanistan, according to some news reports at
the time, due to a NATO air strike that mistook him and his
men for Taliban. The Pakistani source claimed that Marri
had in fact been killed in a suicide attack in Uruzgan. “They
brought his dead body here to the military hospital in Kabul.
The family got in touch with us and they wanted the body.”
Initially, the Afghan government was too embarrassed to
give up Marri’s remains, but, the source said, “eventually
they gave us the body.” Marri was later buried by his family
in Balochistan.
Pakistan’s further suggestion is that RAW has been working
with the NDS inside Pakistan. “India was essentially
using Saleh’s networks,” said the Pakistani official. In the minds of many in Pakistan’s military and intelligence community,
today is a replay of the jihad period, when KhAD
and the KGB launched assassination and sabotage campaigns
in Pakistan, and RAW played an active, if minor role,
in the covert war against Pakistan. Yet the NDS today is not
what KhAD was at its full strength. For one, it has a far less
effective penetration of the current Taliban than KhAD
did of mujahideen groups, due to its relative weakness as
an institution and its lack of the same deep links among Pashtuns.
For another, the NDS’ close co-operation with the
CIA would likely place limits on actions that might be seen
to jeopardise American co-operation with Pakistan.
Indian intelligence officials denied any active involvement
in Pakistan, a contention that has been supported in
public by the US. Regardless of their truth, however, allegations
that India has been meddling in Balochistan have
been effectively used by Pakistan to pressure India over Afghanistan
and Kashmir.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Rahul
26 October 2010
02:47 AM
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Excellent piece. Loved it. I hope there are more serious journos like this person.
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Ashutosh
9 October 2010
01:50 PM
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[my comment did not appear. i'm doing this second time.]
This is the definitive piece on what India is up to in Afghanistan. I hope from PM downwards, everyone reads it. Good journalism Caravan.
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