Archive for the ‘LKY School’ Category

Afghanistan: The new geopolitical arena for China and India

Posted: October 11, 2022 in LKY School
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Almost entirely up to date now. A new piece exploring what competition might take place between China and India in Afghanistan. Interesting to see them both engaging with the Taliban government in different ways, and going to be interesting how this plays out going forwards. Thanks to Byron at the Center on Asia and Globalisation (CAG) at the Lee Kuan Yew school at the National University of Singapore for the kind invitation to contribute again to their fantastic China-India Brief.

Afghanistan: The new geopolitical arena for China and India

Image credit: iStock/Sohrab Omar

There have been numerous developments in Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. Amongst the most unexpected was the rapidity with which New Delhi appears to have built up its relationship with new regime. While it was never clear how antagonistic the core Taliban leadership itself was to the Indian government, the fact they hosted numerous militant groups targeting India and were close to Pakistan meant they seemed obvious adversaries. Moreover, given that New Delhi had developed a strong relationship with the Republic government in Kabul, there was an expectation that India’s relationship with Afghanistan would go into a deep freeze.

Yet, as things have played out, New Delhi has instead leaned into its relationship with the Taliban. Now going so far as to open an Embassy in Kabul and having senior officials meet with Taliban counterparts. India has sent humanitarian aid and technical support teams, and suggested it might do more. In so doing, India has seemed to emulate the approach taken by China which has been very prominent in its support for the new authorities in Kabul. But the path taken by both has been very different, and the reasons for this engagement are equally different. A question lingering over all of this has been the degree to which their engagement reflects a desire to try to curtail each other’s activity in Afghanistan with the country becoming another point of conflict between the two Asian giants.

The Taliban’s desire to court the two Asian giants is clear. From their perspective, any opportunity to try to gain greater support, potential investment and exposure as a legitimate international authority is positive. The Taliban have long made it clear they are happy to work with China on certain issues (mostly around investment)—even during the previous Republic government’s time they would speak of protecting Chinese investments. Cooperation on dealing with China’s Uyghur concerns seems more mixed, with few in the movement wanting to turn over their former battlefield allies to China.

India is a newer player in this regard, though the Taliban have been quick to grab at the opportunity. It is not clear how much India has been demanding counter-terrorism support which is being delivered, though presumably this is a part of the conversation. Doubtless there is a part of the Taliban that likes the fact that the growing proximity to New Delhi causes consternation in Islamabad, demonstrating their distance from Pakistan and giving them a sense of strategic depth and control over their destiny.

For New Delhi, it is an obvious play to try to create some options for itself and to try to find ways of insulating itself from potential terrorist problems that might emerge. Engaging the Taliban also plays into regional geopolitics, placing India in a stronger position in a battlefield where its two biggest regional adversaries (China and Pakistan) are strong players. The Indian expert community has articulated the view that a large part of New Delhi’s engagement is a product of ensuring China does not end up owning the geopolitical vacuum that might exist in Kabul.

For Beijing, the question seems more narrowly focused on engaging with the Taliban to ensure the country does not become a locus for threats against China (both at home and in the region) and creating its own backstops to Pakistani security guarantees. Where China sees great power conflict, it tends to be more towards the United States (US), with India interpreted as a player that Washington is working through.

Beijing was never quite as agitated by Indian activity in Afghanistan as was sometimes made out. These concerns were largely expressed by Pakistan and sometimes echoed by Beijing. During the tenure of the previous Republic government, the Indian and Chinese governments actually even went so far as to cooperate on diplomatic training programmes of Afghan diplomats—an outcome from the successful summits between Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping in 2018 and 2019.

But as the wider China-India relationship fell apart, in large part due to increasingly aggressive border clashes and the growing proximity between India and the US, this cooperation fell by the wayside. The Republic government in Kabul continued to try to find ways of engaging with both, but this became harder as trust levels fell. It was clear that direct cooperation between New Delhi and Beijing was going to be impossible. Beijing started to agree with Islamabad and mutter about Indian support for terrorist groups using bases in Afghanistan to strike Chinese targets in Pakistan. And in December 2020, Indian intelligence was suspected as being behind information that was given to the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in Kabul about a network of 10 Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) agents who had been operating in the country under cover.

It is not clear how this growing confrontation will develop. China and India continue to seem to want to both confront and appear to engage at the same time. It is likely that we will see some steps towards rapprochement more broadly between New Delhi and Beijing, notwithstanding their deep disagreements. The leaderships are not eager for a full-on open conflict, as reflected by their willingness to both still participate in the Samarkand Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit. It is not clear this limited rapprochement will happen in Afghanistan as well.

From what is discernible in the public domain, the Indian government has for the most part been engaging with the parts of the Taliban government that are linked to the group who used to run the Doha office and those from Kandahar. Mullah Yacoub, the son of the former Taliban leader Mullah Omar and current Defence Minister, gave an interview to the Indian press in June. Prior to that much of India’s engagement seems to have been through the Ministry of External Affairs which has been engaging with its counterparts in the Taliban Ministry (mostly men who were involved in the Doha office).

Beijing on the other hand has been engaging with a far wider range of actors but does not seem to be gaining absolute trust from all of them. Where it does seem to be finding more acceptance is amongst the Haqqani faction of the Taliban government in Kabul. While it is clear other parts are eager to engage as well—in particular on economic matters— a certain level of tension lingers. This is in part a product of over-inflated expectations on the Kabul side, as well as an awareness on the Chinese side of the sheer complexity of any major endeavour in war-scarred Afghanistan.

What both China and India share, however, is a general negative image that could catch on amongst the wider community of committed extremists in Afghanistan. India’s BJP government is perceived as being Islamophobic—a topic repeatedly harped on about in extremist literature linked to organisations like al Qaeda or Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). While China’s mistreatment of Uyghurs is a topic that ISKP has particularly locked on to as a topic recognising that it is a subject of great sensitivity both amongst the Uyghur contingent in Afghanistan and their supporters, this is also an anger that resonates amongst rank and file Taliban fighters.

China and India are therefore in the awkward position of potentially garnering support from the Taliban authorities but not at a wider level. Implementing their projects on the ground could become highly complicated, and even lead to some sort of internal fractures of fissures within the Taliban movement. The wider chaos that might ensue is more likely to damage Chinese interests than Indian ones . China’s direct border and substantial investments in Afghanistan’s neighbourhood mean there is a wider range of interests that could be damaged, while India still has a certain level of insulation provided by geography.

The final aspect to this dynamic is the degree to which China and India will transfer their wider tensions to the Afghanistan, and turn the country into an arena of confrontation. There are two external elements which are likely to play into this—the US and Pakistan. Both powers are close allies of India and China respectively, and have different interests in Afghanistan. The degree to which relations between China and the US or India and Pakistan are going well or badly is likely to influence how Beijing and New Delhi lock horns in Afghanistan. Given that we seem set on a period of geopolitical confrontation, the outlook for positive resolution seems unlikely. There is, sadly, a very high chance of Afghanistan becoming once again a place for geopolitical competition, this time between China and India.

Raffaello Pantucci is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He tweets at @raffpantucci.

Washington Focuses on China While Delhi Drifts

Posted: December 29, 2020 in LKY School
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Going to quickly upload a couple of pieces now in that netherworld between Christmas and New Year, both China focused, but for very different outlets. This first one is for the China-India Brief, which is a bi-weekly newsletter published by the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Am not totally content with everything here to be honest, but China-India relations are going to stay complicated for the near future whatever happens. My understanding is both sides have now factored in a higher level of tension as the established norm between the two of them. It will just be a question of how effectively they are able to manage this.

Washington Focuses on China While Delhi Drifts

  
CIB173Image credit: Flickr/Gage Skidmore

There is a sense in Asia that the arrival of the Biden administration in Washington foreshadows a softening of the US’s stance towards China. Nowhere is the concern more acute than in Delhi, where India fears it might find itself without its preeminent ally against China at a moment when confrontation is all the vogue. But India’s concerns are misplaced. The problems Delhi may have with Washington are not likely to be the product of a shift in America’s view on China. Rather, they will emanate from a more coherent and focused American approach towards dealing with Beijing, as towards Delhi over its numerous domestic problems. 

There will be a change in Washington’s approach towards China, but it is more likely to be a tactical shift than an adjustment in perspective. Beijing has been formally classified in American strategic thinking as the principal adversary in a global confrontation (Moscow scores as a problem just behind it). President Trump’s attempt to cast his political adversary as ‘Beijing Biden’ never resonated. Comment pages and think tank output over the past few years have gone to great lengths to emphasize that the aggressive posture towards China emanating from Washington was in fact a bipartisan push. Few on either side of the aisle has dared to articulate a narrative of cooperation or engagement, with a hawkish perspective that portrayed China as a new Soviet-style adversary on the world stage being the dominant view. 
 
But while this firm shift against China took place in Washington in the shade of an erratic Trump administration, Delhi found itself getting into an ever-tighter fix with Beijing. Constant border irritations escalated to the point that in the summer of 2020 Indian and Chinese soldiers fought a medieval-style battle in contested territory leading to unknown numbers of dead. Fury boiled over as hawks screamed for vengeance and confrontation.  
 
Yet the result has been as inconsistent as could have been expected. On the one hand, there has been a sharpening. The security establishment in Delhi is now minded towards confrontation with greater alacrity. Visions of cooperation with China in Afghanistan are gone, the long-dormant Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) Economic Corridor is stalled (if not defunct), and Delhi is seeking to slowly push China out of its domestic cyber infrastructure in every possible way. India’s military establishment is using this moment to burnish its budget and buy as many new tools as it can. 
 
On the other side of the coin, however, India has continued to engage with China. Most specifically through various multilateral formats that the two share. At the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS Summits, India has appeared at the appropriate level and sought to avoid bringing its bilateral clash with China to the table. This reflects a broader reality that Delhi continues to acknowledge, namely, that no matter what happens, it will still find itself bordering China, a country on its way to being the world’s second (or possibly) largest economy.  
 
India has always been amongst the most hesitant partners of the Australia-India-Japan-US Quad. Its defence arrangements with the US have improved considerably over the past few years with a series of major agreements, but remain quietly complicated by India’s close relationship with Moscow. Delhi has always sought (understandably) to have its cake and eat it: it engaged with Russia and the US at the same time. It benefitted from stratospheric Chinese growth while also hinting at joining anti-Chinese alliances. And since Beijing saw its future as one intimately bound to Delhi in some way and did not see India as much of a threat, China was willing to let this prevarication go, until the recent confrontation which seems to have tipped the scales in both Delhi and Beijing towards the hawks. 
 
But Delhi’s hedging is going to become more complicated under a Biden administration, though not necessarily for reasons of Biden softening on China. Far from Washington changing on China, we are likely to see a continuation of an aggressive policy towards Beijing under President Biden. The difference will be that it is likely to be delivered with greater coherence and consistency than under President Trump. In fact, we are likely to see a more hardnosed and transactional relationship between the US and China – one  that no longer looks with optimistic lenses towards a world they would like to build together or fantastical bargains that cannot be maintained, but rather a relationship built on realpolitik focused on national interests. Biden will be more able to work with China on certain issues, but these will be framed through a context of importance to Beijing rather than being about American nationalism or global goods. Trade relations will be dealt with in a way that genuinely prioritizes American industries and holds China to account for promises that it has failed to fulfil. The US will continue to push on human rights and will not offer any break on these in exchange for other issues. This will all be delivered alongside Western allies who have been desperately waiting for American leadership. And crucially, the President will not personally hint in meetings at offering a break in his policies to China and will stand behind what his staff have negotiated. 
 
Beyond the difficulties India will have hedging with China is that the Biden hardliners will also come down on Delhi. While India has largely gotten a pass on domestic problems which have been bubbling up under Prime Minister Modi during the Trump administration, under President Biden human rights questions in Kashmir as well as problems in domestic political discourse will be raised. And it is unlikely that Washington will be willing to bargain these away in exchange for a deeper partnership against China. In addition, Washington might actually ask for a harder line towards Russia, something President Trump refused to broach, while fissures between Washington and Delhi on issues like technology openness and access might become bigger. Delhi will find itself under greater pressure from Washington and be unable to exploit space between China and the US.  

Delhi may look at a new Biden administration as a spanner in the works of its relationship with China, casting blame on soft Democrats unwilling to confront Beijing. But this will miss the real problem, which is that the US’s perspective on India has shifted while clarifying on China. Delhi will find itself still hedging with China while Washington has marshalled a new clarity and direction in its policy towards Beijing and the world.

Raffaello Pantucci is a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI and a Senior Fellow at RSIS.