This blog provides the transcript of Candid Chat #1. Conducted on 22nd May 2022, the discussion session featured Avinash Paliwal, an expert on India’s foreign policy and the South Asian region. The conversation has been edited for the sake of brevity and clarity.
On Afghanistan and India’s engagement with the region
In the book My Enemy’s Enemy, you create a two-fold typology of the Indian strategic elite opinion on the Afghan question in the form of partisans and conciliators. However, the analysis in the book stops at 2014-15. In the context of developments involving regime change in both India and Afghanistan, which of the two factions, in your opinion, will dominate India’s policy approach towards Afghanistan?
The model, that is the categorization of the foreign policy community into two groups – the partisans and conciliators, is to make sense of the operational debates in India’s Afghanistan policy. As Afghanistan remains important for India’s strategic interests, the model allows New Delhi to make sense of the problem existing in the region that originates from Pakistan and to deal with it without compromising India’s interests. So, there exist diverse viewpoints across the political-bureaucratic spectrum regarding political engagement with groups or factions that come to power in Afghanistan despite having significant ideological and religious divergences.
From India’s viewpoint, the conciliators argue, it doesn’t matter whether the Taliban is close to the Pakistani authority or not; New Delhi believes in constant political engagement with the Taliban. Under conciliators’ influence, the Indian government decides to deal with, engage and support all those factions of government or leaders, who are independent, and whose Afghan nationalistic credentials are fairly burnished.
But then there also exists in a section an aversion to deal with groups like the Taliban or, at least, certain factions of Taliban who are militarily very strong. Per se, the whole fulcrum of the debate was that these groups are enmeshed in the security structures of Pakistan and its intelligence and closely linked with the Islamic ecosystem in the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hence, per partisans, engagement with these groups cannot be fruitful or desirable.
In the current context, the opening of the consular office in Kabul has paved the way for conciliatory logic to prevail which is much more appealing given the context on the ground. Taliban’s relations with Pakistan are strained and the pure strategic logic of keeping the channel open is tempting. This requires going beyond the Taliban’s ideological mainstay and their human rights records which necessarily show the engagement is purely geopolitically driven. But this does not mean there is acceptance of what the Taliban is doing domestically.
There is a realization that India does not have the leeway to make the Taliban change its policy. But the US may have such influence due to their aid policy, wherein money acts as a bargaining chip to get concessions on the issues. Thus, India has to build space for itself and allow it to rebuild some constituency that it has lost among the people of Afghanistan. For instance, India’s failure to provide visas to Afghan students should be seen as a serious issue.
To sum up, the conciliatory logic seems to prevail right now as they argue that India has lost much of the ground in Afghanistan. This does not mean the partisan lobby lost ground, but conciliatory ones have gained much.
Of three factors that are part of your theory, could you elaborate on how the international context has enabled the conciliators in Delhi to shape India’s approach towards the Taliban-led Afghanistan?
In terms of International context, every major player is talking to the Taliban. West has left Afghanistan, but they are still on talking terms. The international community knows no amount of resistance would be able to topple this regime in near future. So India is, thus, eventually tempted to engage. Indian policymakers have reached out to the Kandhari Shura group and Indians are comfortable enough in dealing with any group that comes to power, including the Haqqanis. Although, the debate on whether we should trust Haqanis with their promises to deliver still remains open.
How do you see the possibility of a resurfacing of the intra-Taliban rivalry? Also, your thoughts on the issue of representation and transition negotiations at the Doha peace process?
In my understanding, the Doha peace deal was the symptom of the problem, not the cause. The problem stemmed from the incompetence of the institution-building process. The successive democratic governments in Afghanistan failed to build robust institutions, in no less measure due to the lack of popular support. The money poured by the developed democracies went into PR projects and nobody was made accountable on the side of the Afghan government. India’s ICSSR fellowships, which should be decided in New Delhi, were always decided under the shadow of Pashtun politics. All of this worked like a patronage system, those who benefited from this system were close to it, it was never meant for equal distribution to ensure equitable development for the Afghans.
The Doha deal was basically the culmination of a war that was lost long back and any form of representation at the negotiation table would not have stopped the system from collapsing. An even bigger sin was the way they left, it really culminated in a traumatic ending to two decades of American engagement, and those images are stuck in people’s minds.
On the question of intra-Taliban rivalry, just because two figures- Sirajuddin Haqqani and Mullah Yaqoob- have come out in the open, it says nothing about the Taliban faction. You should ask why Sirajuddin Haqqani, the khalifa of the Haqqani network who never came out earlier is coming on CNN and giving an interview. Haqqanis have realised that they already have the guns to keep the actual physical control. Now, they are attempting to cultivate a pragmatic image, unlike the Yaqoob and the Kandhari fractions who are releasing regressive fatwas. And therein lies the fundamental contradiction between a business family which has been doing a lot of business of delivering violence and using it as a negotiation chip on the plank of political Islam and actual political Islamists who want to govern according to their version of theocratic norms.
The Haqqanis want negotiations and foreign deals. They know that the economy and the public can implode in the absence of governance and that’s why the Haqqani wants the Indians to come in. It will also serve as a signal regionally to Pakistan.
In the past, Afghanistan has flirted with communism, Islamism, and democratic nationalism which raises the issue of the possibility of the success of Afghanistan as a modern nation-state. Your thoughts?
A lot of these movements in Afghanistan in the past were influenced by modernity and were not pre-modern or medieval in that sense. Afghanistan has been in a state of internal turmoil often induced due to external factors. The challenge is not so much about the absence of raw materials for what it takes to be a nation-state. Rather, the requirement is finding a modus operandi to have a stable way of communication and settling the central debate about whether it is a republic, kingdom, or emirate. Thus, these foundational questions are very much modern, post-colonial conversations.
On doing IR theory and researching India’s foreign policy
What’s your take on the disconnect between the mainstream IR theory and the actual policy conduct of states? I happen to believe that theory and praxis should go together and must not hold each other at the cross.
The main job of a theory is not to guide policy, but to explain. It is more of a lens and less of a driver. If India behaves in a manner to guard its national interest, it can be seen as being socialized in a way to do that. We need not assume it to be driven by realist expectations of a state’s behavior in international politics. In other words, the state’s behavior is not guided by a theoretical lens, but by how they view the world.
In your quest for diversifying the IR discipline dominated by western narrative and ideas, has your empirical research on Myanmar and Afghanistan provided you with the possibility of inductively theorising India’s engagement with the neighbors? Do you see scope in such an approach for doing non-Western IR theory?
International relations as a discipline evolved to make sense of western experiences and most of the empirical data that informed debates in this discipline is based on western historical experiences in inter-state relations. Such an approach has led to a neglect of the experiences of non-Western, decolonised states in theorizing about IR.
At the same time, the distinctiveness of the western and non-western theory is false as it creates traps, wherein some processes or some actors will always be excluded from the consideration of major theoretical canons. The ladder of abstraction that caters to the generalized understanding of major processes serves theoretical needs. Still, the focus on lower levels will evince crucial micro-processes that also shape foreign policy and the behavior of the states.
My work aimed to capture the diversity of opinion like how actors dealt with challenges and how that shaped foreign policy-making. If these processes are accounted for, then the utility for major canons to explain niche micro processes evaporates. Such categories hinder valuable addition to knowledge and do not acknowledge the role middle-range theories play in shaping and influencing policy making. The idea of partisan and conciliators developed in the book is not to challenge the broad canons but to show that what is offered by these broad theoretical tools is simply inadequate to account for the decision-making processes that go into the making of India’s Afghanistan policy.
What’s the importance of field visits and archives for scholars of international relations and diplomacy?
There was a military coup in Myanmar in Feb 2021 and the Indian response to the takeover was continued engagement with the military junta. India’s normative approach precludes support for or diplomatic dealing with the rebels or the secessionist. Still, India is dealing with the junta. On the other side of the border, in Myanmar, the Chin National Army rebels are conducting the most horrific attacks against the junta. Still, there has not been a single attack on Camp Victoria which is just one stone’s throw away from the Manipur border.
It is by looking at India’s national intelligence archive and by going to Mizoram and asking the locals, one can understand the complex layers of engagement with Myanmar and what is happening at the Chin National Front.
Related to the earlier question, would it be more fruitful to explain India’s engagement with the sub-continent by taking an inductive approach where the researcher uses empirical experiences to formulate the theory?
I am not against the idea of taking a deductive approach where the researcher starts with a theoretical proposition in mind and then goes to archive or look at sources to check the validity of the research assumptions. The American academic system privileges this idea and I have used this method in one of my writings on migration with Paul Staniland. But I am a historian by heart and I have a certain bias in favour of inductive empirics. I would rather have a good political history than two-by-two equations. This dilemma of inductive-deductive is a persistent one and for a researcher, it is necessary to learn to navigate that terrain. Further, on the issue of this inductive-deductive divide, a researcher cannot come out of archives with a good historical argument without having some degree of conceptual understanding of the area under study. Any argument has to be rooted in some theoretical understanding.
I prefer the inductive approach because I see a gap in the narration that cannot be incorporated into a theoretical proposition. For example, look at India’s role after the assassination of Sheik Mujubur Rahman in 1975. There has not been a single study on this topic. We know that India’s relationship with Bangladesh went sour after the Bangladesh national party (BNP) came to power with the simultaneous increase in the insurgency in India’s northeast. But what happened in those two months after the coup against Sheikh Mujibur Rahman? What was the Indian Government doing when the Indian High Commissioner was attacked in Dacca? Why is it that India had such a visceral distrust of general Ziaur Rahman who tried to play safe?
The questions are numerous. Only by going into the empirics of the event through archives do these questions start making sense. The existing IR theories fall short to provide an answer to these questions. From a realist point of view, India needed some degree of presence to establish itself as a regional hegemon. And India was there but also supporting the Chakma insurgency and using all sorts of covert operations in the late 1970s and early 80s to dislocate Ziaur Rahman. So that’s why inductive detail becomes important when theory does not provide a direct answer.
On the gender gap in IR
Why do our conversations on strategy and national security are completely devoid of gender? In the debate on the post-US withdrawal future of Afghanistan, have the aspirations of the Afghan women leaders and activists been taken into consideration?
I am not an expert on gender and IR and that’s my shortcoming. But that does not mean that I am not sensitive to it. Peace is easier when women are not at the table. Is it? Afghanistan might be in a different position if women were on the table, so that is a lacuna that has to be fought for. Patriarchy is globally deep-rooted, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s wrong but yet this is what we are dealing with, there are no two ways about it.
My concern has always been that tokenism of women, making women a reductive category, is a bigger concern and worth engaging with. For instance, women negotiators in the Doha peace process carry multiple identities. They’re fighting for women’s rights but they are also politically aligned with different factions. There also have been women drug runners. How do you tell the Taliban that their mandates are wrong when they are the ones giving these women their cut for poppy in their area?
This is something that has to be put into the research agenda out there. We are talking about inductive empirics and then we will look at some of the ways it will have to be done. And in terms of representation, the Taliban has been getting a big share of criticism because of their treatment of women. At one level, it’s the paradox of Afghanistan that they have felt the pinch of it while most other countries don’t care about it.