The core American response to the killing of Osama bin Laden inside Pakistan is captured in a sentence of President Barack Obama, “Justice has been done”.
As for the Indian reaction to a historical turn of events, which occurred in our region, and whose implications should have a bearing on our foreign policy thinking, there is only guess-work to go by. Only unexceptionable generalities have been offered at the official level by the external affairs minister and the Union home minister.
The upshot of the essential US reading of the situation is that regional politics in the Afghan area is likely to be developed with a view to hastening the process of US withdrawal of the mass of its fighting forces from Afghanistan. President Obama’s Washington had already begun to move in that direction, some caveats notwithstanding.
Not so long ago, when former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was still around, and General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani (the current Army Chief) headed the ISI, Pakistan had offered to deliver Bin Laden to the Americans if Washington agreed to use its influence to get the Indians to erase such footprint as they may have in Kabul.
New Delhi might do well to recall this, no matter whether the US took out Bin Laden with Islamabad’s help or without it. It is the end result that matters. So, Pakistan may now be expected to press ahead with its agenda of insinuating the Taliban into the driver’s seat in Kabul. That would undo the effect of the Taliban’s defeat and ouster from power in late 2001, and once again put a Pakistan surrogate in office in Kabul. New Delhi is playing with a somewhat weak hand in dealing with such a situation. In the recent period, it has sought to befriend Pakistan but has not displayed diplomatic creativity to seek to establish a regional concert of countries that might be uncomfortable with the Taliban re-entrenched in Kabul. The policy vision has not got there.
There is another downside. India’s resource pool includes tremendous popular-level goodwill in Afghanistan on account of its far-going developmental activity in that country. And yet, it has next to no ability to assemble primary intelligence as regards the intentions of Pakistan and the Taliban. When the Indian embassy and interests in Kabul were attacked viciously more than once, we had only Afghan and US intelligence to rely on to build a credible theory of what happened and how.
President Hamid Karzai is lately seen as playing ball with Pakistan in the belief that this might offer him protection in the post-US scenario.
Nevertheless, on Monday, when the news of Bin Laden’s death became public, he informed a large, appreciative gathering of tribal elders that he had always said to the Americans that the danger lay inside Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
This is something we need to still pay attention to as we seek to develop our own regional politics and response to the post-Bin Laden situation.