Afghanistan
Who’s Going to Win in Afghanistan? China.
According to a recent CRS report, China’s influence in Afghanistan is steadily increasing. Whether or not that turns out to be a good thing for the United States depends on whether Washington follows through on its recently-reaffirmed commitment to maintain a strategic partnership with Afghanistan post-2011.
The extent of China’s economic engagement in Afghanistan is by now well known. Since 2002, China has pledged nearly $1 billion in aid to Afghanistan (though only a fraction of it has been disbursed, and it remains modest sum compared to the U.S., UK, Japanese, and Canadian contributions). In 2008, a state-owned Chinese firm provided the largest single foreign direct investment in Afghanistan, dropping $3.5 billion to develop the Aynak copper field in Logar province. And despite the continuing security concerns and infrastructure challenges that have hampered progress at Aynak—the ambitious proposal also called for the construction of a freight railway, a power plant, housing, a mosque, and a hospital—China remains in the running to develop the Hajigak iron ore deposit in Bamiyan province, west of Kabul.
Of late, Beijing has launched a charm offensive in Afghanistan, having no doubt sensed, as with most other states in the region, that the time to begin shaping Kabul’s post-2011 regional alignments is now. Thus, during his March trip to Beijing, Afghan president Hamid Karzai was treated to meetings with Chinese president Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao, and Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. In the course of the visit, Karzai and his Chinese hosts signed agreements on expanding economic cooperation, ensuring favorable tariffs on Afghan exports, and creating scholarships for technical training programs across a range of critical fields: commerce, communications, education, health, economics, and counternarcotics.
According to the CRS report, China may now be prepared to expand its engagement in Afghanistan into the realm of security. The report hinted that within the last six months there had been signs that the PRC could be persuaded to deploy PLA forces to Afghanistan:
“Some diplomats in Washington, DC, indicated to CRS in November 2009 that, should President Obama ask for China to contribute People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces, even in a non-combat role, to Afghanistan, China might agree to that request.”
China has already made some very limited contributions to the training of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). In the fall of 2009, the PRC launched a mine-clearing training course for officers from the ANSF and the Iraqi Security Forces at the PLA’s University of Science and Technology in Nanjing. In March, Xinhua reported that Defense Minister Liang Guanglie, following meetings with his Afghan counterpart, Adbul Rahim Wardak, pledged that the “Chinese military will continue assistance to the Afghan National Army(ANA) to improve their capacity of safeguarding national sovereignty, territorial integrity and domestic stability.” What’s more, reports have suggested that a senior PLA official may have discussed with Karzai the possibility of training and equipping the ANSF once coalition forces depart Afghanistan.
On Personnel and Policy
Peter Feaver has a thoughtful post over at Shadow Government about the Obama administration’s opportunity to “reset” its faltering Afghanistan policy on the occasion of Hamid Karzais’s visit to Washington this week. Says Feaver:
“What is needed is not a fundamental strategic review along the lines of the one that paralyzed policy last fall. Rather, the problems are in implementation and perhaps personnel, and so what is needed is the kind of team reassessment and refocus a major head of state visit can provide.”
He goes on to outline how the White House has badly mismanaged the various senior U.S. actors operating in Kabul; his observations raise a few other questions:
First, just what is Richard Holbrooke up to these days? The role of “special envoy” was unclear from the start, and it has only become more so as Holbooke appears to have taken a back seat in AfPak policymaking. As Feaver reminds us, Sen. John Kerry was forced to intervene with Karzai in the course of last fall’s Afghanistan strategy review, after Holbrooke and Amb. Karl Eikenberry had apparently fallen out with the Afghan president. And as Andrew Exum notes in his recent report on the U.S. political strategy in Afghanistan (or lack thereof), “Trying to forge a working relationship with President Karzai from Washington, as Amb. Richard Holbrooke has attempted to do, is difficult if not impossible.”
Second, and more importantly, how should we assess the White House in light of the larger strategic muddle in South Asia? “Prudence,” which Feaver notes has characterized the president’s approach to previous inflection points in the Afghan struggle, would be an improvement — and it has indeed shaped the outcome of past circumstances in which catastrophe appeared to be the likely alternative — but it’s an attitude, not a long-term solution. For better or worse, the balance of power in South Asia has begun to matter to the United States, and to the world. President Bush had, at the least, a de facto strategy for the region: build an enduring partnership with India first, achieve victory in Afghanistan second, and support Pakistan third—priorities set, it would seem , with the rationale that a lasting U.S. partnership with India and Afghanistan would encourage Pakistan to wake up and address head-on its domestic political and security challenges.
So far there is no hint of an Obama strategy, but the data we have suggests almost an inversion of the Bush approach. (If you want a second-order indication of this, read PACOM commander Admiral Robert F. Willard’s testimony – lament — to Congress and contrast it with what General Petraeus’s approach to the region; Willard has an India-first view, Petraeus a Pakistan-first view). Perhaps we’ll get a better sense this week, in between Supreme Court reportage.
(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Afghanistan’s Regional Context
In an interview on Monday with the Wall Street Journal, General Stanley McChrystal provided some commentary on the regional dynamics which stand to affect U.S. efforts in Afghanistan:
“We get overly fixated sometimes on al Qaeda, but the reality is there are regional issues here that are potentially more important than that and so that needs to be put as one of the key points.”
This was encouraging observation on the part of the ISAF commander, given that the competition among regional players to exert influence in Afghanistan will only become more intense as the United States’ 2011 drawdown date approaches. McChrystal went on:
“Everything in the region affects everybody else. You know it’s like in the solar system: Each planet actually does gravitational pull on all the others. Pakistan is clearly affected by a number of actors, India being large. And Afghanistan is affected by a huge number of actors.
I think the better we can make India and Pakistan relations, the better it is for everyone, particularly a relatively weak nation right now like Afghanistan because as those two significant nations have friction sometimes, it can affect Afghanistan in ways that are just huge. So I think it’s really important that the transparency and the trust with India be part of that calculation. And clearly the Pakistanis are worried about Indian activities inside Afghanistan and sometimes there’s a lot of misperception associated with those, so I think clarity there is essential.”
Reducing India-Pakistan tensions in the near-term may indeed allow the Pakistani military to feel more comfortable in shifting forces from its eastern flank to combat insurgents just inside its border with Afghanistan. We have seen this phenomenon in action, with the redeployment of more than 100,000 forces from Pakistan’s Indian to Afghan border (as reported in the Pentagon’s biannual report to Congress on progress toward security and stability in Afghanistan), and the Pakistani army’s continuing operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
But in truth, there is little India — or the United States, for that matter — can do to dissuade Pakistan’s national security establishment that Afghanistan remains a critical source of “strategic depth,” or that India’s engagement in the country — which has taken the form of a broad but low-profile “soft power” campaign — is anything other than an effort to encircle Pakistan. At the same time, India — whose objectives in Afghanistan have been clear and, as Dan Twining noted recently, coincide closely with those of the U.S. — should not be expected to reduce its presence in Afghanistan simply to mollify its rival.
India’s Afghan Endgame — and What it Means for the U.S.
Not long ago the Washington Post featured a story about a newly constructed park and community center for women in Kabul. Apart from the author’s moving account of the Afghan women’s appreciation for their newfound freedom and opportunities — the center offers a range of vocational classes — one detail stood out: the facility is funded by the Indian government and run by the Ahmedabad-based Self-Employed Women’s Association.
The park is one of many development projects the Indian government has sponsored throughout Afghanistan, having committed $1.3 billion in total to the country’s reconstruction. Major contributions have included power plants, medical facilities, schools, and, most notably, a highway across Nimruz province which links the Afghan ring road to the Iranian border and beyond to Chabahar, an Indian-built port on Iran’s Makran Coast. Delhi’s diplomatic presence in Afghanistan has also swelled since 2002, with the opening of consulates in Herat, Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Mazar-e-Sharif; India maintains a modestly sized — though according to most assessments, influential — embassy in Kabul, as well.
Delhi is pursuing what amounts to a “soft power” campaign in Afghanistan — one which, according to Ahmed Rashid’s Descent Into Chaos, is “designed to win over every sector of Afghan society, give India a high profile with the Afghans, gain the maximum political advantage, and of course undercut Pakistani influence.” And although India’s efforts have without a doubt unnerved the Pakistanis, Delhi has managed avoid the perception among the other states engaged in Afghanistan that it is actively seeking to antagonize Islamabad — perhaps because of the extent of the services it has provided to the Afghan population. Assuming Rashid is right about India’s desire to cultivate influence among the Afghan citizens, its strategy has been success: an ABC News/BBC poll released in early 2009 indicated that 71% of Afghans viewed India favorably. Only 8% said the same of Pakistan.
But in adopting a “hearts and minds” approach, strategically conceived though it may be, the Indians have naturally foreclosed on other modes of influence. As former Indian diplomat Rajiv Sikri noted in his recent book, “Although India’s security remains deeply affected by what happens in Afghanistan, India’s disadvantage is that it is not involved in Afghanistan’s security in any meaningful way.” Among commentators and analysts in India, Sikri isn’t alone in suggesting that Delhi’s efforts to shape events in Afghanistan — while savvy and subtle — remain disproportionate to its strategic interests in the country.
In recent months, however, there have been signs that could quickly change.
