India’s Strategy in Afghanistan

 

India’s Strategy in Afghanistan After U.S. Withdrawal

There are costs to every strategy of action. If India were to consider appointing a special envoy, 
speaking directly to the Taliban, and seriously consider escalating military assistance to the ANSF—
both of which this paper strongly advocates—it would no doubt invite opposition from the Ghani-
led government (which itself is struggling with the question of Taliban negotiations), Pakistan (which 
remains opposed to everything India does in Afghanistan), and other quarters. Though the situa-
tion is in flux, India will need to conduct a detailed net assessment of the political costs to its inter-
ests. The key will be to find an equilibrium between approaches to its strategy that are necessarily 
paradoxical, as such approaches often are. 
However, the potential costs should not become excuses to ignore the urgent need to politically 
reassess the current shifts underway in Afghanistan. As much as the analysis in this paper has been 
based on a close reading of these shifting realities, it has also been written keeping in mind the 
Indian state’s emphatic ability to pivot to “uncharted initiatives.” India’s recent history is full of 
examples where it took bold decisions, rather than, as a former Indian national security adviser puts 
it, “letting sleeping dogs lie.”
The Modi government has shown that it can “look beyond dogma,” whether it is through a will-
ingness to use force in Pakistan; to build stronger relations with the Middle East; to capture Trump’s 
imagination; to recognize Europe’s importance in times of changing geopolitics; to embrace the fact 
that technology is central to international relations; or to rewire India’s position within Asia. As Jaishankar states, “Evidence strongly supports the view that India has advanced its interests effective-
ly” precisely “when it made hard-headed assessments of contemporary geopolitics.” He adds, “Taking
risks is inherent to the realisation of ambition.”
It is time for such ambition to be tested in Afghanistan. It will mean taking risks, assessing costs, and
expecting failures, but it will also mean doing everything possible to address very real challenges in a
country that readily signed a Treaty of Friendship with India as far back as 1950. Facts have to be
taken for what they are. That Afghanistan is changing is a fact. That there is even the probability of
the Taliban returning to Kabul, in some form or shape, is a fact. That the United States is leaving is a
fact. It is not easy, as Kissinger argues, to change facts. What is more possible, as he has often made

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