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That India is playing a ‘destructive’ game in Afghanistan is undeniable. India’s recently ramped up engagement is designed to do one thing – rile Pakistan into maintaining its support of the Taliban.  While the cold-blooded realpolitik element of this is evident there are also many reasons that the ‘problem’ is also the solution. This may not be the ‘perfect’ solution but then perfect solutions only lay in the minds of beauty pageant contestants.

India’s development aid to Afghanistan has always been situation-specific and development projects there are targeted to spread work, funds, and benefits evenly across communities. Unlike the West which has now started favouring dominant tribes to ensure stability, India has always accepted Afghanistan as a loose confederacy of warring tribes where the imposition of external definitions of statehood and stability do not work. The net result is that when the Western withdrawal is complete, ‘collaboration’ is identified with one tribe that then gets decimated, while economic favouritism makes enemies of all the disenfranchised. Contrast this with the Indian approach which ensures an even wellspring of favourable opinion that can be activated at a later date. Similarly, unlike the West, which has contributed to the brain drain out of Afghanistan as those who study in the West usually end up immigrating there – most Afghans who come to India go back to rebuild their country. India therefore has concentrated not just on current development but also future development.

India’s strategic training pact with Afghanistan again is far more situation-specific. The US-imposed training regime lasted a bare three weeks per intake while the German training went on for an unrealistic three years. In India, officers are trained for a period of six-eight months enabling a reasonable quality-quantity matrix. This may be a case of too little too late but given that almost everyone agrees that Afghanistan is lost, India stepping in with renewed vigour provides a significant boost to Afghan morale. Small, futile gestures like India’s massive increase in aid can bring a semblance of calm before things invariably spiral out of control post 2014.

India, by exacerbating Pakistan’s self-destructive streak, has simply brought home to the latter the reality of its failed policies. That Pakistan still refuses to introspect is a different matter – but the bankruptcy of the Pakistani national myth, its failed policy and institutions, its excessive and too smart by half militarism, and of Islamism run amok, are very evident to any thinking person in the tragic country. In many ways the situation in Pakistan is not dissimilar to the dangerous last phases of the Weimar Republic with people wondering ‘what if’. And yet a foreign and Afghan policy collapse may have the same effect as the Soviet banner of victory hoisted atop the Reichstag.

Baiting Pakistan into increasing its duplicity in its dealings with NATO, India has effectively provided the West with a convenient scapegoat. Come 2014 the historical narrative will more likely focus on betrayal rather than the reality that was the West’s bad homework and flawed assumptions. This may not be the truth but then when has history ever been about the truth? The inevitable isolation of Pakistan post 2014 will in all probability be absolute. Whatever plausible deniability that Pakistan concocts post 2014 in the Afghan power vacuum, will simply not be bought. In short Pakistan will have no more excuses left. An isolated Pakistan also forces the military’s hand in ways that have thus far been impossible. Most top military brass with families, and holdings either in London or Dubai have thus far been beyond reach. Should the Pakistan army be singled out for isolation – then for the first time and within the rule of law, can the assets of these grandees be targeted.

Moreover the West has been caught in a deep military pincer. On one hand, as China modernizes and becomes an ever bigger threat, the West has to contend with a demographically and ultimately financially superior power capable of wielding significant high-intensity warfare resources. On the other hand, consistent Western engagements in deeply wasteful low-intensity conflicts in rogue states (many of them beneficiaries of Chinese diplomatic protection) have drained the West of will and focus. Gallingly, Pakistan which has proven to be the single most valuable source of Western military technology for China, for a while at least, succeeded in getting more hi-tech. All this will stop post 2014. The withdrawal from Afghanistan will simply refocus the West’s attention on real issues of grand strategy instead of tying their world view to intangibles like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’.

Are we losing Afghanistan? Yes, and in the process India gains a victory of the magnitude our army has always failed to achieve. We should all be praying for a crushing defeat – the worse the defeat in battle the bigger the victory in the war. Defeat is not the unavoidable consequence, but rather the desired end goal. The West’s problem is India’s solution – it is just that the West does not know it yet.