The day US troops left Afghanistan... and its aftermath

Sanjay Kapoor

While there is little progress on helping end the deep misery of Afghans after the US army hastily left their country on August 15, 2021, and the Ashraf Ghani government that it had propped up expectedly collapsed, the regional power like China, Russia and India are exploring whether they can use the happenings in Afghanistan to rework the new balance of power in the region.

This was visible when Indian government held its annual dialogue with the foreign ministers of 5 Central Asian countries and Islamabad chose to host a conversation with the representatives of Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) to find a solution to the problem of a bankrupt Afghanistan. Interestingly, the Central Asian countries that still follow the diktats of Russian President Vladimir Putin and are members of the OIC with three of them being Afghanistan’s neighbors chose to stay away from the Islamabad meet.

There’s gloating in the Indian security establishment after Islamabad’s OIC enterprise was spurned by these countries, that may be the case, but the painful truth is that all the moves on the geopolitical chessboard that have been made by these countries are unlikely to bring early and urgent relief to many Afghans who are going through a dark, nightmarish and hungry winter. To compound their misery, the neighboring countries have shut their door on them. Pakistan’s fencing of the Durand line is slowly getting completed. And India, which was considered a second home by many Afghans not just canceled all the visas, but also refuses to grant fresh ones to them.

When the National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, hosted a regional dialogue on Afghanistan which was boycotted by Pakistan and China, but attended by Russia, Iran and five Central Asian countries, it became apparent that the neighboring countries were not in any great hurry to provide relief to the Afghans, instead they were keen to use the departure of US troops and the coming of Taliban to achieve certain foreign policy objectives. India that hosted the regional dialogue found its views on Taliban and the threat of radicalization in the South and Central Asian region finding favor with the participants of the conference. Indian government sources claim that Russia, unlike its close ally China, is mistrustful of the Taliban. Russians that have long and granular experience of dealing with different shades of radicalization in Afghanistan seemed to be of the view that it was not possible to do business with Taliban. This represents a shift in their stand before the US left Kabul. During the run up to that epochal moment, the Russians were desperate to see the back of American troops and also wanted to collaborate with them to diminish the sway of the Islamic State Khorasan (ISK) in Afghanistan. Russians used to insist that the ISK terrorists were ferried from some ungoverned spaces of Pakistan and Central Asia to Kabul. Their purpose, Russians believed, was to spread extremist violence in Central Asia and hurt Moscow’s arc of influence in erstwhile Soviet republics.

While Russians- and as are the Chinese- happy that the US troops have left the Afghanistan, they are trying to weigh different geo-strategic options to carve a reality. China in its desperation to make its expensive $53 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) viable, does not want to antagonize the Taliban or any extremist group that is active along the route of CPEC. That’s the reason that it is not only chatting with Afghanistan’s Taliban, but also working closely with Pakistan to gain control over the group that runs the country. Chinese had made big investments in Afghanistan’s Aynak copper mines in the past, but due to violence and instability abandoned the project, but peace returning in the country, it is scouting again for minerals that include the precious and scarce lithium. A mineral hungry China does not take cognizance of sanctions on account of human rights violations or any other moral issue, au contraire it relishes it as it means less competition and also a more pliant decision makers desperate for foreign exchange.

India, which had spent $3 billion dollars in Afghanistan’s development, is not really keen to do more. A government official said that India was in no hurry to do anything more for Afghanistan as it did not serve any strategic purpose for it. India’s objectives are more to do with curbing Pakistan’s influence on its troubled neighbor and the region and also to ensure that the militancy from the restive part of the region does not spillover into Kashmir. There is a view that if Pakistan manages to fight off its financial troubles then with the support of China it could emerge as a formidable power that straddles, both, Central and South Asia. In this process it could challenge the paramountcy of India by re-igniting the Kashmir proble