Washington: Acknowledging that India among other countries in the region has a significant stake in Afghanistan, the Biden administration has pledged to ask regional nations to do more to support Kabul even as Washington packs up from the strife-torn country by September 11 after a failed 20-year effort to defeat the Taliban.
US secretary of state Anthony Blinken, on his way to Kabul following the announcement of the US pullout, said during a stopover at the Nato headquarters in Brussels that despite some differences there are some shared interests across a number of countries, whether it is Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and others, in not seeing Afghanistan descend back into civil war.
“The risks that could pose to them, including potentially extremism and terrorism directed against them, refugee flows heading in their direction, drugs as well, all of those argue that countries will have an interest and also some influence with the parties in Afghanistan to try to keep things moving in a positive direction (sic),” he noted, without mentioning the Pakistan military’s widely known and well-chronicled role in subverting Afghanistan through its Taliban proxies for its strategic goals. “I think countries will now have to look hard at the interests that they have, look hard at the influence they have, and decide whether to use that in ways that ensure that Afghanistan is not a source of instability and a source of terrorism and extremism,” he added.
Blinken was following up on similarly vague remarks by President Biden in a national address in which he said Washington “will ask other countries in the region to do more to support Afghanistan, especially Pakistan, as well as Russia, China, India, and Turkey” since they all have a significant stake in the stable future of Afghanistan. Biden did not mention Iran, which has a long and unstable border with Afghanistan. The basket of countries also have different interests and stakes in Afghanistan, with India alone devoting huge resources in an effort to put the country on track to be a modern and plural democracy to account for its diversity.
The upcoming US pullout without specific plans to shore up a weak government in Kabul has caused concern in New Delhi, where there is apprehension that a vacuum, in the words of India’s chief of defence staff General Bipin Rawat, could create “space for other disruptors”. Afghanistan is a nation which is rich in resources, and there are nations “that tend to exploit resources for their own benefit without the benefit going to the community of that nation,” Rawat noted at the Raisina Dialogue 2021 without mentioning either Pakistan or China, calling on international community to ensure “Afghanistan is for the Afghans”.
