WORLD VIEW 09
Thursday, 8 May, 2014
India risks destabilising Afghanistan
BBC
I
ahMed RaShid
NDIA'S decision last week to pay for arms and equipment from Russia to boost the strength of the Afghan National Army (ANA) could be a dramatic game-changer in the region - as well as a step fraught with escalation in regional rivalries. Pakistan is almost certain to look critically at the deal and accuse India, its rival, of trying to outflank it. For the last few years India has tactfully declined to say yes to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's repeated pleas for
the Indian supply of heavy weapons for the ANA, such as long range artillery, tanks and aircraft. Spending billions of dollars in the past decade, the United States has rebuilt the ANA, but it has made sure that it remains a lightly armed force with defensive rather than offensive weapons. Both the US and India seemed to have been careful in not upsetting Pakistan, which has been critical of the size of the ANA and will most certainly react if the ANA receives offensive weapons. Until recently there have been high tensions between the Pakistan military and the ANA along their disputed, porous and unmarked border, with the Afghans repeatedly accusing Pakistan of wilfully allowing the Taliban to cross from their havens in Pakistan to fight the Americans and the ANA. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan have no control over large parts of their common border. India's refusal to accept Mr Karzai's requests has gone down well in Islamabad, and both India and Pakistan have been on their best gentlemanly behaviour when it comes to not making provocative or rash statements about their well-known mutual rivalry in Afghanistan. This relationship was tested after the Afghan Taliban's Haqqani network launched attacks several years ago on the Indian embassy and its personnel in Kabul. India and the US have repeatedly put the blame on Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which has worked closely with the Haqqani network since the 1970s. Since those attacks ceased, both
The sad state of India’s security hindu Every man his own carver, wrote Jonathan Swift. It didn’t take India’s political leaders too many hours to begin slicing what profit could be had from the train-bombing in Chennai. The BJP cast the bombing, on the basis of the flimsiest conjecture, as an attempted attack on Chief Minister Narendra Modi; Congress politicians, for their part, threw about innuendo about the perpetrators’ intentions and provenance. Questions about the extent to which the National Investigation Agency, that is controlled by the Central government, ought to be involved in the process of investigation within the State also quickly came to the fore. Lost in the noise was the issue that really matters: why citizens remain so much at danger when they travel, are at their workplaces, or when they are just walking down a crowded market street. Swathi Parachuri, the young woman whose life was extinguished by the bomb explosion, was one of the thousands of Indians who have died at the hands of terrorists. The killing continues though politicians have, for decades, been promising action. The facts are simple — and make clear the States and the Central government are equally to blame. As the United States State Department noted earlier this week, India’s internal security infrastructure is severely anaemic. In spite of the massive expansion of police manpower and large investments in technology after 26/11, training standards and personnel skills are well behind minimal acceptable standards. In areas involving specialist skills, like forensics, acute staffing deficits are evident. Last year, The Hindu revealed that the intelligence services, the cutting edge of the country’s counter-terrorism efforts, were yet to fill staffing deficits of up to 33 per cent, a full five years after the Mumbai carnage. The case of the Railway Protection Force, tasked with protecting trains and tracks along with the State governmentcontrolled Government Railway Police, is illustrative. Though the 65,000-strong force has grown steadily in numbers over the last decade, instances of serious crime occurring around the railway system — murder, rape and burglaries — are all up. Even where infrastructure exists for frisking passengers and luggage, it is utilised only cursorily. The same story unfolds in cities around the country, where illtrained personnel wave metal-detectors over cars or people carrying metal objects — and simply ignore the beeping. The situation has not changed because political leaders and bureaucrats simply don’t care enough about the issue to ensure that police forces are adequately equipped and trained to discharge their functions. The situation won’t change until citizens start holding those in office to higher standards of accountability.
countries have kept the rhetoric down, despite constant needling by Mr Karzai, Afghan army generals, Russia and Iran, which have all argued that India needs to do more to support the ANA. India has declined, saying it does not want to get involved in the civil war in Afghanistan even though it has supported the government strongly. Now that the Americans are leaving by the end of this year, India seems to have changed its tune. So far the agreement with Russia implies that India will pay for Russian arms such as light artillery and mortars to be delivered to Afghanistan. However both countries say it could involve the delivery of heavy weapons in the future. According to Reuters, India is expected to help Afghanistan restart an old armaments factory near Kabul, refit old Soviet-era weapons, and step up training of Afghan officers and special forces something it has already been doing in small numbers. Afghans have long fought with Russian or, previously, Soviet weapons and much prefer those to Western arms. Under US supervision and payment, the Russians recently supplied the tiny Afghan air force with Russianmade M-17 helicopters, which the forces of the Northern Alliance used for many years in the war against the Taliban. All this is likely to deeply annoy Pakistan, and escalate tensions with India and rivalry over their influence in Afghanistan. The Pakistan army has a low opinion of the ANA and does not trust it receiving offensive weapons which could be used on their common
border. Now - just as Pakistan is giving the Afghan Taliban and its leader Mullah Mohammed Omar sanctuary on its soil - Afghanistan is allowing the Pakistani Taliban and its leader Mullah Fazlullah to shelter in Afghanistan. Both sides have denied providing official sanctuary to the Taliban. This tit-for-tat escalation has already led to fire-fights, exchanges of artillery fire and casualties between the two armies on the border. Islamabad also has suspicions that Indian trainers or advisers on the border could theoretically now replace US and Nato trainers. Moreover, the arms deal could lead to a replay of the bloody civil war in the 1990s, when Pakistan backed the Taliban, and India, Iran, Russia and the Central Asian republics backed the then Northern Alliance. Balancing act? However, one country could play a stabilising or balancing role and that is China. President Karzai has also asked China for military help but Beijing has been extremely reluctant to get involved on the ground in Afghanistan - just as China refuses to get involved in other conflict zones such as North Korea. Pakistan could now ask its closest ally, China, to get more involved in bolstering the ANA. That could balance Indian and Russian influence. Where will money come from to pay the wages of Afghan soldiers in the future? One critical unanswered question remains: who is going to pay the $4bn a year that the ANA needs to continue
functioning and paying salaries? The US and Nato have said they are willing to foot part of the bill but not for very long. There is no hint that India, Russia or China have offered money up front to support the ANA. Most experts conclude that the ANA will have to drastically reduce its size anyway by next year, because nobody will be willing to support more than 320,000 soldiers and policemen who constitute the present Afghan security forces. If outside countries pour in heavy weapons without the money to pay for sustaining the army, the danger of those weapons ending up with the Taliban becomes even greater. That is exactly what happened with the last lot of Soviet heavy weapons left behind in 1989 when Soviet forces left Afghanistan. The weapons were soon in the hands of warlords and the Taliban and the civil war started. Pakistan fears that any heavy weapons arriving in Afghanistan could end up in the hands of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. Afghanistan needs peace before it needs more weapons, and it needs bigger doses of diplomacy and political dialogue to get the Taliban to stop fighting. If that could happen, rather than flooding it with weapons once again, Afghanistan would be a happier place. Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and author based in Lahore. His latest book is Pakistan on the Brink - The Future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Why I won't be voting for Mandela's party in South Africa this time Christian sCienCe Monitor SiSonke MSiMan
On April 26, 1994 – the day of South Africa’s first post-apartheid democratic elections – I was driving from Minneapolis to Chicago in a rented mini-van tightly packed with fellow South African students from various colleges in Minnesota. We were on our way to the South African consulate in Chicago to cast our votes for the first time – mine for Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress. We may have been far away from the sunny jubilation of the first democratic elections at home, but we were determined not to miss out on history. For me, the moment has particular poignancy: I was born and lived my whole life outside South Africa. My father left South Africa when he was 19 years old. He returned in 1993 at the age of 53 after the ANC – of which he was a lifelong member – was unbanned. South Africans are going to the polls in the fifth national elections since 1994. But my vote for the ANC will not be assured, as it was in 1994. Like many South Africans I watched in horror as the South African police gunned down 34 miners two years ago. Most days I find it hard to stomach the news – there are so many corruption scandals that it is hard to keep track. Despite this, I will forever love the movement that freed us, even as I recognise that it too needs its powers checked and diluted. This election, I am voting for a rebalancing of power in the next 20 years. At the consulate in Chicago that day in 1994, we may have been dishevelled college students, but we were treated like royalty. Until that day, most of us would have had no cause to be in the building; as black South Africans, the consul would have turned us away. But that year, everything had changed. My nuclear family was now “home,” living in South Africa. My mother was busy as one of only a handful of qualified black accountants in the country. My father was heading up a transitional fund to support non-profits to thrive in a new democracy. My youngest sister was in high school in Durban. Exile is a neat word. It does nothing to convey the solitude that comes with being barred from the country of your heart. But that day 20 years ago I found it hard to be bitter. Instead, I was proud. I took my turn at the booth and marked my ballot with a vote for Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress. When I called home to Durban later that day, my youngest sister picked up. I asked excitedly, “How was it?” At fifteen she was too young to vote, but she had no trouble answering my question. “Amazing Sonk, I wish you were here.” She described everything: the exuberance of the crowds, the fear that it might all go wrong, the hi-
larity of old white women insisting on jumping the queue. Her voice had the quality of bubble gum; it carried across the static in the line like pink and blue glitter thrown into a breeze. The house was full of relatives and friends who had come to share the day with us, and somehow I managed to speak to everyone without the phone line cutting off. Finally my father got on the line. I clutched the phone as if by sheer force of will I might be transported to our living room in Durban. “So, you are in Chicago?” he asked. “Yes, Baba,” I responded, trying to pretend that I was not overwhelmed by the sound of his voice. “Well that’s good,” he said, “I am glad you made it.” We were quiet for a while, suddenly unsure what to say. Then he said what I had been waiting to hear. “Here we are my child.” He used his affectionate name for me. He laughed and then said awkwardly, almost in a whisper, as though he cannot believe it himself, “We did it. We are free.” That X crossed in a voting booth in Chicago marked my spot in history. It marked my place in a new nation at the start of a new era. Since then, much has improved. In our village, there is now running water and electricity. The road has been paved, and there are many new houses in the comm u n i t y. But my cousins have endured abysmal educations, and too many of them have been victims of rapes and sexual assaults. The ANC has become increasingly preoccupied with commandeering state resources either f o r t h e
benefit of its leaders or for the party itself. Worse, in seeking to protect President Jacob Zuma from the many scandals in which he has become embroiled, the party has used its majority in parliament to try to change our laws. In its original form, the ominous Secrecy Bill – which was bravely resisted by ordinary citizens – would have jailed journalists who published “classified’ information.” A modified version remains on the legislative agenda for this year. Despite my loss of faith in many of those who liberated us, I a m excited about our democr a c y . S o u t h Africans are realising that while elections matter, civic activism matters more. Twenty years ago when I cast my vote, I was a grateful teenager. Today when I stand in that booth I will do so as an invested citizen, as a mother, as a woman concerned with the safety of all women in my country, and as a black person committed to living alongside my white compatriots in dignity. When the tally is done, the ANC will win handily. Nonetheless, I will have voted my conscience, looking not to the past, but to the future. Sisonke Msimang is a South African writer and commentator with a background in foundation work to support non-profit organisations fighting for democratic change in Africa. She is currently an Aspen Institute New Voices Fellow and director of advocacy and accountability at Sonke Gender Justice.