President Pratibha Patil’s visit to Tajikistan on September 2 provides a rare backdrop to pin our thoughts on India’s approach to regional security issues in South and Central Asia. The region is caught in the vortex of security challenges and threats that may appear episodic but are formative. The biggest threat to regional stability originates from Afghanistan in the activities of radical extremists and drug traffickers.
Islamic radicalism and its manifestations of separatism and extremism justifying terrorist methods of conflict add to the potential for instability in Central Asia. At the same time, a high level of strategic uncertainty has also appeared in the region, stemming, paradoxically, from big power rivalries, given the significant increase in its importance as a major source of petroleum resources and as an alternative to the volatile Middle East and Caspian regions.
Slowly but surely, the “outside” actors — principally Russia, the United States, China — are consolidating or increasing their presence in the region through complex modes of relationships that promote cooperation as well as trigger competition. A kind of polarisation of relations between Russia, on the one side, and the U.S., on the other, has been accelerating in the region. The strategic rivalry is compounded by the worsening security in Afghanistan. As militant Islamists infiltrate from across the Afghan border into Tajikistan, regional stability is coming under severe challenge. The result is a state of “strategic uncertainty” as a medium-term prospect.
Certainly, India will be averse to being the promoter or participant in a competing effort. However, it cannot but be affected by the outcome of the ongoing struggle for spheres of influence between the “pro-Russian” and “pro-American” vectors or among contending projects — Russia’s “Eurasia Space” project, America’s “Greater Middle East Initiative,” China’s “Assimilation” project, and the EU’s “Integration” project — and last but not least the potential entanglement of the region in the “World Islamic Caliphate” project. Again, regional security in Central Asia is currently multilevel and unstructured and often contradictory, which compels India to avoid military-political cooperation. Having said that, India, as an affected party, cannot remain impervious to the permanent threat of the spread of challenges from Afghanistan to neighbouring countries. The diplomatic challenge is that India is called upon to promote regional stability and bolster its anti-terrorist efforts without resorting to military-political modes of cooperation. The predicament is similar to China’s.
A redeeming feature of the Central Asian situation is that it is highly unlikely that any of the international players involved in regional projects will undermine the region’s stability, which is already quite fragile. From the Indian perspective, Washington’s continued focus on the “Greater Middle East Initiative” is of some particular interest. The U.S. thrust is on drawing the countries of the region into its sphere of influence as an “area of responsibility,” including Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan that constitute “areas of instability.” No doubt, the directions of the U.S. strategy to solve the Afghanistan-Pakistan problem directly impact on Indian interests.
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