Biden’s Afghan mistake hurts India and helps China

President Biden has bet that exiting Afghanistan will strengthen the US in its competition with China. But they may have overlooked an important detail: This withdrawal threatens the Quad, a vital component of the US strategy in Asia.

The quad, consisting of the US, Japan, India and Australia, was revived four years ago amid growing concern about an assertive China. On 24 September, Mr Biden will host the first in-person summit of the group’s leaders. The message is clear: Together with fellow democracies, the US is gearing up to oppose Chinese belligerence. And Wednesday’s announcement of a new three-way defense agreement between the US, Britain and Australia makes the same point.

But instead of strengthening the Quad, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan would have weakened it. The return of Taliban rule in Afghanistan is a clear strategic setback for India and a victory for Pakistan, a major Taliban supporter, at least in the near future.

Terrorist groups aided from Islamabad will almost certainly use Afghanistan to organize attacks on India-controlled Kashmir and other parts of the country. The Indian goal of gaining access to Central Asia by building a port and railway line through Iran and Afghanistan remains a pipe dream. Faced with these challenges, India is likely to have less resolve and fewer resources to contribute to countering China’s threat.

Ashley J., an expert on Asian geopolitics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There is no doubt in my mind that one of the unintended consequences of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is that we have compromised India’s security,” Tellis said. Phone Interview “India wanted Afghanistan to be a graveyard of terrorism, not a graveyard of empires.”

So far, the Indian government has avoided criticizing the Biden administration’s exit from Afghanistan. In response to a question by former Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop earlier this month, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar instead praised the US for its “profound strength” and “extraordinary ability to reinvent itself”.

Indian pundits have been much less liberal. Borrowing Labor leader Clement Attlee’s famous insult to Winston Churchill, influential journalist Shekhar Gupta called Mr Biden a “sheep in sheep’s clothing” who presided over “an amorphous, unconditional surrender to an armed rabble” in Afghanistan , and turned the quad to “another”. fancy, periodic naval parade or pageant.”

Strategic affairs commentator Brahm Chelani wrote that the US exit told his allies that “they count on US support when they need it most at their own peril.” In an op-ed titled “The Unraveling of Pax Americana”, Samir Saran, president of the Indian think tank Observer Research Foundation, dismissed the idea of ​​leaving Afghanistan to focus on China as naive. “Land boundaries still matter,” he wrote, “and the US has ceded South and Southwest Asia to Beijing.”

It is clear why so many Indians are upset. To keep Pakistan in a good mood, successive US administrations limited India’s security cooperation with Afghanistan. Nonetheless, over the past 20 years, under the security umbrella provided by the US and its NATO allies, India has worked hard to increase its influence in Afghanistan. It established a large embassy in Kabul and consulates in Kandahar, Herat, Jalalabad and Mazar-i-Sharif.

New Delhi paid for the new Afghan Parliament building as part of its commitment to a democratic Afghanistan as well as a dam, a highway and energy projects. The Indian government donated helicopters to the Afghan Air Force and helped train a small number of Afghan army officers and police. Indian teachers, engineers and doctors kept coming to the country. Government of India funded scholarships for Afghan students. The nearly $3 billion in aid it provided made India the second largest non-Western donor to Afghanistan after Japan, and the fifth largest donor overall.

What will be the impact of India’s expulsion from Afghanistan at gunpoint on the Quad? Mr Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment explains that the situation “accelerates an age-old Indian dilemma between a continental commitment and a maritime commitment.” He says, “If the continental challenge is mitigated, it frees India to play in maritime space. The US in effect has inadvertently undermined India’s ability to assist us in the maritime domain. “

It remains to be seen how vulnerable India has become and whether the US can address New Delhi’s concerns about terrorism. Faced with an aggressive China on its borders, India still has reason to come close to the Quad. However, it is very clear: you cannot neatly divide the threat from China by ignoring troubled places like Afghanistan. Instead of increasing the pressure on Beijing, Mr Biden may have eased it by risking a key partner.