Nov 18, 2024 07:58 PM IST
India’s potential engagement with Taliban officials marks a significant policy shift amid geopolitical realities, raising concerns for national security.
The recent flurry of reports on India coming close to allowing Taliban-appointed representatives to take up key diplomatic posts in Delhi and Mumbai highlights a major policy shift, pushed through by the prevailing political realities in Kabul. Taliban officials were in New Delhi recently for a multilateral event hosted by India’s telecom regulator.
The Taliban is here to stay for now, and for the neighbourhood, ignoring them long-term is unrealistic. They have made a relatively successful push to seek out political recognition across the board. From China to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a number of States have accepted appointments by the Taliban’s interim government in a more open form. Others have baulked and allowed some access to the regime accompanied by a slew of checks and balances. Reasons vary from distance and fatigue in the West to an unfolding big-power competition. Geopolitical crevasses have offered the Taliban ample opportunities to engage globally, and they have done reasonably well.
However, engaging with the Taliban on an official pedestal is a complicated endeavour for India. To begin with, engagement is unavoidable and should be pursued. It is not merely the question of engagement itself, but what kind, and to what extent, will determine the impact on Indian national security and strategy this move could consequentially have. The fundamental shifts already represented here cannot be understated. Indian diplomats have met Sirajuddin Haqqani of the Haqqani Network, a group India has previously blamed for targeting Indian missions in Afghanistan, including the 2008 embassy bombing in Kabul that killed 58. Sirajuddin today is the acting interior minister, and operating in Kabul without his consent would be impossible.
India has also spent a long time repeatedly reminding the world that the Taliban’s creation and empowerment were nefariously designed by Pakistan. Today, Pakistan and the Taliban are at odds, with regular skirmishes across the contested Durand Line. Rawalpindi is struggling to control the likes of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). A core aim of Pakistani military and intelligence post-2021, which is keeping India out of Kabul, has failed. But this unsurprising flatlining of Pakistani strategy cannot be a theme of celebration within Indian security circles for too long, and waving jubilantly at Pakistan from Kabul is not a long-term strategy. Any meteoric rise of new extremist and terror ecosystems will impact India as well, as for many such entities, the Pakistani establishment would only be a hindrance that is to be conquered.
More broadly, engagement with the Taliban on an official footing can have repercussions for India’s own push against countering terrorism. Many at the top of the Taliban’s interim government structure continue to be on most-wanted lists and UN travel ban advisories for terrorism. Delhi has been consistently against any formulation which distinguishes between “good” and “bad” terrorism.
While pursuing pragmatic policy, narratives often have a life of their own and can become counterproductive. The Taliban itself has been seeking to place official representation in India for a while, leading to an internal tussle which, in part, led to the closing of the mission in Delhi last year. The Taliban also has its pressure points to mobilise. For long, India has maintained that people-to-people connections between the two countries are the cornerstone of the relationship. Over the past years, maintaining this stance has been difficult, in part due to India’s own errant policies on visas for Afghans, and the Taliban’s potential to weaponise access to the population by way of holding back aid or restricting movements and access to India’s “technical office”, which currently operates in place of a formal embassy.
Finally, the one positive of allowing a level of formalisation, not recognition, to the Taliban-led government is that any event where walking away from such an agreement is needed will not be a costly affair. One of the reasons why the Taliban wants to engage with India is because it knows that its survivability is impacted in case the region’s largest power sees it as a pure adversary. For India, today’s Kabul is a reality it must deal with, and with no regional appetite for further confrontation in Afghanistan, curated correspondence, as done so by others, is palatable.
The costs of such engagement are also real, and as a rapidly emerging power, these should be factored in instead of reverting to being risk averse. The presence of Taliban-appointed officials in India is, nonetheless, a tectonic moment.
Kabir Taneja is deputy director and fellow, Strategic Studies Programme, Observer Research Foundation.The views expressed are personal
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