Great Games and Small, India and Afghanistan: The Often Neglected Player

Yesterday's major suicide bombing attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul was a reminder of a fact that is generally clear enough in the strategic vision of the regional country players but is often forgotten in Washington: India is still, as it has been for centuries, a player in Afghanistan. In our Western tendency to divide the world, while we consider Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India all part of South Asia in some sense, we tend to shrug India off as separate from the Muslim World and thus not really a player in the "Great Game" in its modern incarnation. The locals don't make that mistake. Pakistan sees India as its primary strategic enemy, and India accordingly sees a strategic value in counterbalancing Pakistan's interest by supporting, first the pro-Soviet, and now the pro-Western, regime in Afghanistan. That makes the pro-Taliban elements hostile to India, though they and al-Qa‘ida were already so over the Kashmir issue, which actually is a major one for some of their ideologues. Kashmir moves many Pakistanis deeply, but also the radicals of al-Qa‘ida.

Nothing I've said here is news to the regional specialists, but oddly it's possible to read serious pieces about the "AfPak" theater, as it's now called, that barely mention India (or China). The fact that the world's two most populous countries, both of them with fast growing economies and both of them with nuclear weapons, border Afghanistan and Pakistan is not, actually, a peripheral geopolitical consideration. Obviously, whoever bombed the Indian Embassy in Kabul was aware of that.