Editorial: India could be way out of Afghan war

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U.S. Senator Mark Kirk meets with the Sun-Times editorial board. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times

Updated: November 9, 2011 11:16AM

The United States has been in Afghanistan for too long, 10 years, lost too many lives, 1,700, and at too great a cost, nearly half a trillion dollars. Current U.S. policy of a gradual troop draw down as security responsibility is turned over to the corrupt, inefficient government of Hamid Karzai seems to us likely to leave a vacuum ripe for future terrorist trouble. Something new needs to be injected into Afghan policy.

Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), just back from a two-week trip to Afghanistan, has an idea worthy of consideration: End U.S. reliance on Pakistan and “tilt” U.S. policy in the region toward India, encouraging it to increase its financial support of Afghanistan.

Kirk’s position is based on two assumptions. First, it’s an open secret — one no one in authority previously has wanted to state publicly — that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency protects and supports our enemy, mainly through a powerful terrorist organization known as the Haqqani network. Pakistan plays a double game of letting us kill a couple of dozen top al-Qaida terrorists a year on its territory while the Haqqanis bog down 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, inflicting grievous casualties every year. All the while, Washington pours billions of dollars in aid into Pakistan. It’s a bad deal.

Second, Kirk assumes, with reason, that India has big stakes in the outcome in Afghanistan. It has grievances with both Pakistan and Islamist terror. The 1948 partition of the British colony of India produced Muslim Pakistan and India, a nation with a Hindi majority and a huge Muslim population. India and Pakistan have fought three major wars, and small-scale military clashes persist, particularly over the disputed Kashmir region.

India also has suffered deadly terrorist attacks. It had its 9/11 in the 2008 shootings and bombings in Mumbai. These attacks, which had some assistance — the only question is how much — from the Pakistani ISI, left hundreds of dead and wounded.

Given an enmity with Pakistan that won’t abate soon and the threat of terrorism, India has as big a stake — probably a bigger one — than the U.S. in preventing Afghanistan from collapsing into a terror state under the influence of Pakistan. So it’s not unreasonable to think New Delhi would be interested in building on the economic and political investment it already is making in Kabul — one reason, no doubt, for Islamabad being a bad actor in Afghanistan. India would profit, and Pakistan be discomfited, by having an anti-terror, democratic, India-friendly government in Kabul.

India, as the world’s biggest democracy en route to being an economic superpower, is both a natural ally for America and a natural leader for the region.

Kirk’s proposal to change U.S. policy has its own hazards. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) blasted it on Tuesday as having the potential for a “cataclysmic” confrontation between two nuclear-armed nations. We worry about that too, but the two nations already have known decades of hostility. Another issue is that reducing U.S. aid to Pakistan could drive it deeper into extremism. But Kirk argues that a broad-based Pushtun middle class mitigates against that.

It’s also possible that Kirk is proposing India bite off more than it’s willing to chew.

Kirk said he proposed his idea after “talking to many, many, many people in government.” Still, it’s based on a best-case scenario. That means there’s plenty of room for something to go wrong. But Afghan policy needs fresh thinking and until someone comes up with a better idea, we’d like to see Kirk’s program get serious consideration.