By C Raja Mohan
April 27, 2015
The presence of Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani in New Delhi this week offers an opportunity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to recalibrate India’s Afghan policy towards greater realism and more modest goals. The need for rethinking was evident ever since US President Barack Obama announced, way back in 2009, that America would leave Afghanistan at the earliest possible opportunity.
If inertia prevented change in the Indian approach for too long, Ghani’s election as president last year and his new policies, especially the outreach to Pakistan and China, have made an Indian adjustment to the new circumstances an urgent imperative. Delhi’s fortuitous run in Afghanistan after the ouster of the Taliban at the end of 2001 tended to mask the political and geographic limits on India’s role there. India must now learn to bring its Afghan objectives back in line with the constraints.
A number of factors that facilitated an expansive Indian role in Afghanistan no longer exist. Consider, for example, the US presence in Afghanistan. Although there was a tendency in Delhi to believe that India had an independent role of its own in Afghanistan, its gains over the last decade there were deeply tied to the relative stability that emerged under the American military occupation.
No comments:
Post a Comment