As Afghan President Hamid Karzai heads to New Delhi on a state visit — he reaches here on Sunday from Mumbai — an important item on the agenda for him and his hosts will be review and consolidation of the Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) that was signed during his trip here a little over a year ago.
Among the key areas expected to come up for discussion when the two sides meet is cooperation in the area of security. As Afghanistan prepares for the drawdown of the US-led Nato forces slated for 2014, one area of focus has been the need to have better-trained and larger Afghan security forces.
The SPA, inked in 2011, envisages an increased number of Afghan Army and police personnel being trained by India. While a sensitive Pakistan may not be pleased with the move given that it sees Afghanistan as being within its sphere of influence, the US is only too keen to see India chipping in with the training. Pegging cooperation in security as an important part of the SPA, Afghan deputy ambassador to India M. Ashraf Haidari told this newspaper on Friday, “The expansion of security cooperation as much as is possible is underway. There is training for personnel of the Afghan National Army and the police both in the short and the medium term.”
He also said that four MoUs will be signed during President Karzai’s visit, in the areas of fertilisers, mining, small development projects and youth affairs.
As regards the numbers that will require training, Mr Haidari, who has also served as his country’s deputy-assistant national security adviser, said a team of Indian officials had visited Kabul some time ago to “assess our needs”. The team had met, among others, the Afghan interior minister to gauge the country’s requirements based on the information that was provided to it, he added.
Earlier, Yash Sinha, additional secretary (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran), when asked about the training of Afghan Army personnel by India, said, “India is involved in capacity-building in various fields including the security sector... All I can say at this stage is that we are training Afghan national security forces specifically on requests received from the government of Afghanistan. I think the numbers are modest.”