India's Changing Afghanistan Policy: Regional and Global Implications
Abstract : Since 2001, Afghanistan has allowed New Delhi an opportunity to underscore its role as a regional power. India has growing stakes in peace and stability in Afghanistan, and the 2011 India-Afghan strategic partnership agreement underlines India's commitment to ensure that a positive momentum in Delhi-Kabul ties is maintained. This monograph examines the changing trajectory of Indian policy toward Afghanistan since 2001 and argues that New Delhi has been responding to a strategic environment shaped by other actors in the region. As the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces prepare to leave Afghanistan in 2014, India stands at a crossroads as it remains keen to preserve its interests in Afghanistan. This monograph underlines the ever-evolving Indian policy in Afghanistan by examining it in three phases, before drawing out the implications of this change for the region and the United States. There has been a broader maturing of U.S.-India defense ties, and Afghanistan is likely to be a beneficiary of this trend. Managing Pakistan and unravelling Islamabad's encirclement complex should be the biggest priority for both Washington and New Delhi in the coming years if there is to be any hope of keeping Afghanistan a stable entity post-2014.
Domestic Support for Mrs. Gandhi's Afghan Policy: The Soviet Factor in Indian Politics
IN ONE of those strange tricks that history springs on an unsuspecting world, the USSR massively intervened in Afghanistan in December 1979. Occurring at a time when the Janata government in India, which had emphasized "genuine nonalignment" in foreign policy, had spent itself, and elections were imminent, the untimely intervention laid the new Indian government's foreign policy squarely on the line. It is to the credit of Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the architect of India's foreign policy for more than a decade, that she proved equal to the challenge after nearly three years out of office. The new government in India, in its apparent pro-Sovietism on the issue-and notwithstanding its professions of nonalignment-has stood apart from a great many nonaligned nations and a large part of the third world. Our concern here is to assess to what extent the world view of Indians and their support of Mrs. Gandhi enabled her to take this stand after her return to office in 1980. Even before she was formally reinstated as Prime Minister on January 20, 1980, after her landslide victory, Mrs. Gandhi had taken charge of India's strategy on the Afghan issue. On January 12, she instructed Brajesh Mishra, the Indian envoy at the United Nations, to make the following points in a statement on India's stand: (1) the Soviet Union sent troops to Afghanistan on December 26, 1979, at the request of the Afghan government; (2) while India was against the presence of foreign troops and bases in any country, it had no reason to disbelieve a friendly country like the Soviet Union when it said that it would withdraw troops from Afghanistan when asked to do so by the government in Kabul; (3) India hoped that the Soviet Union would not violate the independence of
Contemporary debates in Indian foreign and security policy
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