Great friends

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s visit to India came at a particularly fraught moment in his country’s quest for stability. There has been a sharp increase in the provocativeness of targets picked in Afghanistan by the Taliban — the attack on the US embassy,and the assassination of the former president and Karzai’s chief interlocutor with the Taliban,Burhanuddin Rabbani. Much of this scaling up of violence is traced back to the Pakistan-based Haqqani network,now accused by America’s top military officer of being a “veritable arm” of the ISI. As Karzai confirmed in a public lecture on Wednesday,his government’s talks with the Taliban to negotiate a peaceful settlement are off. It is amidst this edginess in the region that India and Afghanistan have iterated a framework for a strategic partnership that has so far not dared breathe its name.

Ambitious in possibility,the Indo-Afghan strategic partnership agreement puts down a formal framework for what is already being done for the training and capacity-building of Afghan security personnel. It increases the scope for deepening this cooperation,but at the moment its great import is the public nature of the agreement. That brings into clearer view the chessboard as it is being rearranged,and the challenge for India and Afghanistan is to use this clarity to engage with Pakistan in order to obtain,by 2014,greater political stability in Kabul than seems visible at the moment. For all the shared objectives that India and Afghanistan affirm,they cannot be in denial about geography and the crucial role it gives Pakistan in determining the viability of a political arrangement in Afghanistan. Karzai took great care to stress that cooperation with India cannot be configured in rivalry with Pakistan. “Pakistan is a twin brother,” he said. “India is a great friend. The agreement that we signed (on Tuesday) with our friend will not affect our brother.” India too needs to be less reticent on reassuring Pakistan. Its contribution to Afghanistan’s development works and security capacity-building causes much anxiety,howsoever misplaced,in Pakistan domestic politics and geopolitical policy-making — that anxiety serves India no good,and it gains to lead the initiative to engage with all players to transform the region.

It is in this context that there needs to be greater recognition of two other agreements signed this week to assist Afghanistan in developing hydrocarbons and mineral resources. Shared prosperity and stability are the only ways in which the region will overcome the destabilising elements that currently appear to be on the upswing.