India is playing its cards right with Afghanistan: Pakistan might not to be happy about it

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Afghanistan on Saturday to inaugurate the Salma Dam, in the first leg of a tour which will take him to Qatar, Switzerland, US and Mexico. The Afghan Parliament and the Salma dam are two of India’s showpiece projects in Afghanistan. The Prime Minister was present for the inauguration of the Parliament building last December and he will now also be personally present for the commissioning of the Indian built hydel power and irrigation project. At around $275 million, this is the one of India’s most expensive projects. India has extended an aid of over $2 billion to Afghanistan. The dam made by Afghan and Indian engineers and workers will irrigate nearly 44,000 hectares of land and add around 30 megawatts of power to the Herat grid. Afghan sources say that the project in Hari Rud river will benefit 50,000 families in four districts of Herat province. The dam is 20 kilometers long and three kilometres in width and has a storage capacity of 640 million cubic meters. With the commissioning of the Salma dam, now renamed the Afghanistan-India Friendship dam, Delhi will have completed its major commitment to Afghanistan. India has done well in Afghanistan, and its projects have touched the lives of ordinary people. This is why India has remained popular in Afghanistan, though its aid package is much below that what the US and other Western countries have contributed. Apart from this, India has also built the Delaram to Zarang highway, restored transmission lines from Pul-e-khumri to Kabul. [caption id=“attachment_2814860” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani. PTI[/caption] Indians were under attack while building the Delaram highway and had to have the Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force escorting the men at the work site from the camps to the construction site. However, with Saturday’s inauguration of the dam, India would have completed all the projects it undertook in Afghanistan. Should India invest more in Afghanistan right now? Many believe that with Taliban gaining ground, India must be much more careful and choose smaller projects with care. “The quantum of assistance should not go down, but projects must be selected with the ground situation in mind,” said Vivek Katju, a former ambassador to Afghanistan. “In foreign policy we cannot look for short term gains but for long term strategic interests,” said Katju. So far India has been on the right track. India’s growing friendship with Afghanistan has always been a major worry for Pakistan. The ISI and the army want to make certain that Afghanistan remains under its sphere of influence. During Hamid Karzai’s term at the helm, his closeness to India was a major irritant and Rawalpindi worried that Delhi was spreading itself out in its backyard. The fact that besides the embassy in Kabul, India had consulates in Kandhar, Herat, Jalalabad and Mazr-e-Sharif irked Pakistan. When Karzai’s successor, Ashraf Ghani took over he kept aloof from India. Reconciliation with Pakistan was on the top of Ghani¹s agenda since his inauguration in September 2014. Ghani sought to soothe Pakistani concerns about India¹s footprints in Afghanistan. He relegated India to the periphery of his foreign policy. He also began sending his army officers for training in a Pakistani academy unlike Karzai who sent his people to India. Bent on peace talks with the Taliban, he knew that Pakistan was the only country which could get the Taliban to come to the table. He visited Pakistan in November soon after he took office. He broke protocol to personally call on the army chief Raheel Sharif at his headquarters in Rawalpindi. For a while it was all hunky-dory between the two neighbours. For Ashraf Ghani, it was Islamabad, Beijing, London, Saudi Arabia and Washington. India had to wait till April 2015 before the Afghan President was ready to visit. It seemed with the new equation, India was completely out of Afghanistan. It would complete the projects it had undertaken during Hamid Karzai’s term and back out. India had no role either in the talks or in further projects in Afghanistan. But Indian officials were not unduly concerned about it. “We are not worried,” was the refrain from the Indian establishment. Indian officials were confident that Pakistan would continue using the Haqqani network to further their long term strategy of gaining strategic depth in Afghanistan. Sooner or later the equation between Afghanistan and Pakistan would sour. And finally that did happen. President Ghani is sounding more and more like his predecessor Hamid Karzai and accuses Pakistan of backing a resurgent Taliban. Peace talks between the Afghan government and Taliban, with Pakistan, US and China is going nowhere. President Barak Obama had said after a American drone killed Mullah Mansour the Taliban chief that he was opposed to talks with the Afghan government. The new Taliban leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada is an Islamic scholar and no one yet knows his views on talks.. His two deputies are Mullah Omar’s son Mullah Yaqoob, and Sirajuddin Haqqani son of Jalaluddin Haqqani. The Haqqanis are a lethal group and close to Pakistan’s ISI. The Haqqani network is suspected to be responsible for the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul where an Indian diplomat and the defence attaché was killed in 2008. Meanwhile, Taliban continues to launch deadly attacks across Afghanistan. Peace at the moment seems a distant dream.Yet India’s strategic interests dictate that it continues both aid and political ties with Afghanistan. India is playing the right cards here.