Foreign Policy & Security

The strength of India-Afghanistan relations was on full display at the 6th Heart of Asia Conference held in Amritsar on December 4, 2016. Criticizing Pakistan for providing a “safe haven” to “terrorists” associated with the Afghan centric Haqqani Network and the India centric Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, New Delhi and Kabul successfully used the platform to isolate and humiliate Islamabad. The two countries also discussed the possibility of an air cargo corridor bypassing Pakistan, which has consistently denied Afghanistan access to Indian markets and vice versa.

Did Pakistan facilitate the May 21, 2016 killing of Mullah Muhammad Mansour because the Taliban chief refused to join peace talks with Kabul? Mansour’s obstinacy was, after all, preventing Islamabad from delivering on its promise to the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) to bring the Taliban to the dialog table. Was the drone strike that killed Mansour a wasted effort, given that his successor, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, is equally disinclined to barter away battlefield gains in a political settlement that would leave most power with the “puppet regime” in Kabul?

Indian national security policymaking has traditionally suffered from a lack of central strategic planning: an organized process, fully integrating civilian and military defense institutions, that sets long-term defense objectives, then ensures these are met through procurement and posturing fulfilments. Instead, defense policy development largely consists of a combination of procurement wish lists submitted separately by the three military services, alongside intermittent initiatives principally formulated by the Prime Minister.

The ambush of Indian Army forces in Manipur, signing of a peace accord with the NSCN-IM in Nagaland, and Gurdaspur attacks have put internal security at the center of Narendra Modi’s agenda. India has a long history of dealing with armed groups, whether Naxalites, tribal separatists, or Kashmiri militants. Yet many of the lessons of India’s experience are consistently ignored in the popular and policy discourses on how to respond to armed groups. This history reveals important insights that have received insufficient attention.