Dateline Dar: Tanzania, India find 'South-South' ties in good health

Tanzania was the second stop in Manmohan Singh's first proper visit to Africa in seven years. My diary of a brief but memorable visit ...







28 May 2011
The Hindu

DAR ES SALAAM DIARY
Tanzania, India find 'South-South' ties in good health

Siddharth Varadarajan

Dar es Salaam: Indian officials have spent the past week fighting off Western suggestions that they are in a race for influence in Africa with the Chinese. On Friday, their claim that India and China complement one another was endorsed by President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, who gave a concrete and unscripted example of how the specific skill sets the two Asian powers possess has worked to the advantage of his people.

Speaking to reporters at a joint press conference with the Indian Prime Minister on Friday, Mr. Kikwete said that Tanzania lacked the capacity to provide a whole range of treatments at home, including heart surgery and care for cancer and renal diseases. A few years ago, his government sent 29 doctors and nurses to India for specialised cardiac training and now they have returned and are performing open-heart surgeries in the country for the first time. The Chinese have pitched in with an offer to help build a 200-bed hospital. “So the Indians have helped to train our people and Chinese have helped to build the hospital where they will work”, Mr. Kikwete said.

From Apollo to space

Tanzanians spend nearly $80 million every year on medical treatment abroad, including in India, so when the Apollo Hospitals group from India announced its intention of setting up a specialty hospital here, the Tanzanian government jumped at the chance. The $150 million project will be a joint venture between Apollo, the Tanzanian Health Ministry and its National Social Security Fund, with the Tanzanians providing the land and building, and the Indian side the equipment and doctors. An MOU was signed by Apollo chairman Prathap C. Reddy in the presence of Dr. Manmohan Singh and Mr. Kikwete.

Apollo’s plan is to develop their Dar es Salaam hospital as a hub-and-spoke model with smaller clinics in 14 countries across the eastern African region. Though the details of the project have yet to be worked out — including Apollo’s social obligations — President Kikwete said there would also be a training component so that Tanzania’s long-term health-care capacity gets augmented.

Speaking later at a function to inaugurate the India-Tanzania Centre of Excellence in Information and Communication Technology at the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology, Dr. Singh spoke about taking this capacity-building to the stratosphere: “I would specially like to announce our readiness to cooperate with Tanzania in the area of space technology and applications”, he said. Though he probably had satellites in mind, India should consider offering to eventually send the first African into space as part of its own manned mission project. Such an offer would fire the imagination of a continent that India regards as an emerging economic — and strategic — pole of the international system.

After Ujamaa

When Indira Gandhi came to Dar es Salaam in 1974, she gifted Mwalimu Julius Nyerere a peacock and peahen from India. There are today 14 peacock nests around the State House. The last time Dr. Singh came to Tanzania was in the late 1980s, when he was secretary-general of the South Commission, an independent body set up by the Nonaligned Movement with Nyerere as its chairman. Their exertions were, unfortunately, not as productive as that of Mrs. Gandhi’s poultry. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the advent of neoliberalism undermined this unique project of the Global South even before it got off the ground. Tanzania abandoned Ujamaa, its system of socialism, and India embraced liberalisation.

Twenty years later, however, even under the new economic paradigm the two countries have embraced, the need for South-South cooperation is being felt more than ever before. The only difference now is that the process is being driven as much by private capital as by the state, though often the two are in close partnership. Apollo officials told The Hindu that once their hospital project’s details are settled, they may consider approaching the Indian government for access to a part of the $5 billion line of credit which has been set up for Africa. Tanzania is also keen to promote investment in its agricultural sector. Millions of hectares are available for long-term lease and contracts have been signed with European and Saudi firms. But unlike in Ethiopia, these lands are not always vacant. Which is why the Indian High Commission has not encouraged Indian companies to get into farming here.

The city of peace

Wrapped around a natural harbour that is deep enough to allow massive container ships to gently sail at shouting distance from its colonial-era government quarter, Dar es Salaam is an attractive city that has all the charm of a bustling port without the menace and chaos one normally associates with cities like Mumbai and Karachi across the Indian Ocean. Traffic jams are a major problem — the bureau chief of the East African newspaper said he would rather leave for work at 6 a.m. than put up with a three hour commute. Amazingly, however, road discipline appears to be maintained at all times, even when cars are backed up for miles on undivided roads and the oncoming lanes are empty.

The 1990 report of the South Commission noted that because "the South doesn’t know the South … we have been compelled to commit our own errors, unable neither to learn from the experience of the others in similar situations nor to benefit from other’s positive experiences". Mr. Kekwete said he looked to India for technology and investment. Manmohan Singh graciously added that as Tanzania developed, he hoped Tanzanian companies might also come and invest in India. However, one thing Tanzania could offer to teach Indians right away is traffic sense.

Dateline Addis: Manmohan invokes flour, power in pitch to Ethiopia

Clearly one up on India in terms of the facilities for simultaneous translation it provides to MPs; Ethiopia has over 80 languages. My diary from Addis Ababa ...









27 May 2011
The Hindu

ADDIS ABABA DIARY
Manmohan invokes flour and power in pitch to Ethiopia

Siddharth Varadarajan

The deadpan delivery was vintage Manmohan but the Prime Minister's speech to a joint sitting of Ethiopia's parliament on Thursday appeared to come straight from the heart. He spoke of India and the Horn of Africa once being part of the same landmass – paleogeographers call it Gondwanaland. He mentioned the Siddi community on the west coast of India who are of Ethiopian descent. And he cited “often overlooked similarities” in tradition and culture, including the use of fermented flour for making dosa in south India and injera in Ethiopia, to argue that connections between the two countries were deep despite being separated by the waters of the Indian Ocean.

The Prime Minister invoked history too, quoting Nehru's stirring call for solidarity with Abyssinia when Mussolini invaded the only African country never to be colonized. We in India can do nothing to help our brethren in distress in Ethiopia for we are also victims of imperialism, Nehru wrote in 1935, but we stand with them today in their sorrow as we hope to stand together when better days come. “I believe the better days that [he] spoke of have come,” Dr. Singh declared to applause from the assembled parliamentarians.

Ethiopia has since overcome many adversities, he said, and India too was in a position to make a difference. After reiterating India's economic commitments to the country, the Prime Minister turned to the realities of international power politics. India and Ethiopia were plural, diverse societies and both believed democracy and “respect for the free will of the people” were the only ways to solve their problems. “Similar principles should be applied in the conduct of international governance,” he added. In a veiled attack on Nato's bombing of Libya, he said the people of West Asia and North Africa have the right to determine their own destiny but that any international action “must be based on the rule of law and be strictly within the framework of United Nations resolutions.”

Though the Speaker of Ethiopia's House of Federation said Ethiopia was an emerging democracy and would like to learn from India's system, its Parliament is clearly one up on India in terms of the facilities for simultaneous translation it provides to MPs. As with all debates and meetings, Dr. Singh's speech was simultaneously translated into five languages: Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromiffa, Afar and Somalinya. Ethiopia has more than 80 languages and any MP who wants translations in her or his own language is entitled to it at Parliament's expense, a Parliamentary official told The Hindu. In contrast, the Indian Parliament has provision only for simultaneous translation between English and Hindi. MPs who wish to speak in any of the other Scheduled languages have to give advanced notice so that their speech can be translated for the other MPs.

A river runs through it

If India, which has several rivers running through it other than the Brahmaputra, is jittery about China's plans to build a dam on the Yarlung Zangbo's upper reaches, imagine the fear that Ethiopia's decision to dam the Nile must be causing in Egypt, whose entire civilisation and economy has depended on the uninterrupted flow of Africa's longest river. The Blue Nile originates in Lake Tana inside Ethiopia before entering Sudan and joining the White Nile at Khartoum for its final journey through northern Sudan and Egypt up to the Mediterranean Sea.

The Ethiopian government plans to build the Renaissance Dam some 40 km. from its border with Sudan. The project will store more than 60 billion cubic metres of water and generate 5250 MW of electricity, more than half of which Ethiopia intends to sell to Sudan and Egypt. In an effort to allay the fears of the lower riparians, the Ethiopians insist they will not use the water stored for irrigation. They also say the dam will help generate a more predictable flow in the Blue Nile, which is mainly responsible for variations in the main Nile. When the dam's plans were first announced, there were howls of protest from the erstwhile government of Hosni Mubarak. But since Tahrir Square, the new transitional dispensation in Cairo has adopted a more cooperative approach. Asked about the dam in his joint press conference with Dr. Singh, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia said his government had offered to subject the dam's design to scrutiny by Egyptian, Sudanese and international experts and that he hoped this transparency would end the controversy about the Renaissance dam once and for all.

A coffee a day

A handsome city spread out over gently rolling hills at an average elevation of 9000 feet above sea level, Addis Ababa is a bustling metropolis that has become the diplomatic capital of the continent thanks to the headquarters of the African Union being located here. The Chinese government is erecting a spectacular new building for the AU but the signs of construction visible in virtually every part of the city are testimony to the fact that Ethiopia is one of Africa's fastest growing economies. The temperature rarely rises above the mid-20s and when it does, a shower promptly cools the city. The only drawback is the pollution. Many of the cars and buses on the streets are second hand imports that are well past their prime. Though lacking the Italianate art deco architecture of Asmara, Addis Ababa has benefited from its brief encounter with European imperialism in one tangible way: a superb espresso, pulled from ageing Italian machines, can be had on virtually every street for the equivalent of about 25 US cents.

In Manmohan's visit, a new emphasis on Africa

Six-day visit to Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam sets the stage for a big diplomatic push into the continent ...

23 May 2011
The Hindu

In Manmohan's visit, a new emphasis on Africa

Siddharth Varadarajan

Addis Ababa: In the eight years he has been Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh has roamed the far corners of the globe but touched down on the soil of Africa only three times. This week, he will add two more African entry stamps to his passport — Ethiopia and Tanzania — with his six-day visit to Addis Ababa for the Second Africa-India Forum Summit and to Dar es Salaam, setting the stage for a big diplomatic push into a continent that is of growing economic and strategic interest for India and Indian companies.

In a statement released prior to his departure for Addis Ababa on Monday, Dr. Singh said Africa is “emerging as a new growth pole of the world” and that India's partnership with the continent based on the three pillars of capacity-building and skill transfer, trade and infrastructure development was a “living embodiment of South-South cooperation.”

Here in the Ethiopian capital, India is evidently the flavour of the week with a cultural festival showcasing films like 3 Idiots and Sholay drawing capacity crowds. A large Indian business delegation — including industrialists with extensive Africa operations like Adi Godrej, Sunil Mittal and Sanjay Kirloskar — has been camping here for three days. A symposium of African and Indian editors was also held on the sidelines, with both sides undertaking to build a future media partnership.

Though many countries, including China, Japan and Turkey, have held partnership summits with Africa, the Indian initiative is the first to make it to a second iteration. One reason, perhaps, is the practicality of the forum summit, with the number of African countries limited to 15 as per the ‘Banjul formula' adopted by the African Union (AU). The AU through its own process chose the participants this time: Algeria, Burundi, Chad, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Malawi, Namibia, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Swaziland.

But Indian officials say any decisions and commitments — including an enhancement of existing lines of credit already totalling more than $5 billion — will be implemented across the 53-nation continent through consultation.

After the Africa-India event, Dr. Singh will have summit meetings with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania before returning to New Delhi on May 28.

India's stake in Africa's future

More than any other region, it is Africa that has to be a strategic priority for India. What we must offer is a partnership no other power is willing or able to extend to the continent...

23 May 2011
The Hindu

India's stake in Africa's future

Siddharth Varadarajan

A spectre is haunting Europe and America, home to the colonialists and cold warriors of yesterday, the spectre of an Africa — which they ruled and exploited for a century-and-a-half — now coming under the sway of rising powers like China and India.

Read any western account of the growing Chinese and Indian presence in Africa and chances are that the charge of ‘new colonialism' will figure somewhere. And if there is ‘new colonialism,' can new colonial rivalries be far behind? In this telling, not only are China and India sucking Africa dry, but the two are also said to be locked in competition with each other for access to Africa's mineral wealth and oil.

So central is the notion of an Oriental ‘Scramble for Africa' to the western mind that it is almost impossible to speak of India's presence in Africa without dragging China in as well. Consider this typical lede from a report on the forthcoming Africa-India summit in Addis Ababa, filed by the French news agency, AFP: “India will seek to expand its economic footprint in Africa, where rival China has made major inroads, at a second summit between the South Asian powerhouse and African nations this week.”

Like other spectres the West conjures up from time to time, the actual picture in Africa is not so frightening, least of all for the Africans themselves. “What they say doesn't make sense,” Oldemiro Baloi, Foreign Minister of Mozambique, told a group of Indian journalists in Maputo last month. “We did not fight for our independence just to shift from one colonial master to another. And India and China did not support our liberation struggle in order to enslave us.” The West doesn't like to be challenged but Africa has an interest in diversifying its partners, he added. “India is itself a poor country which has values based on solidarity and does not impose conditionalities or attach strings to its aid. Earlier, the western countries would complain implicitly about India and China but now they are more blunt. ‘Why is India doing this, why is China doing this?' And we say, because they are good, they are competitive.”

Though the tendency to see India and China as rivals in Africa is widespread, the fact is that the Chinese investment and trade presence are much larger. But there is another reason why the ‘rivals' frame may be deceptive: from the perspective of Africa, the two countries have core competences which may actually complement each other in many ways.

The Chinese excel in large infrastructure projects and have deep pockets while the Indians have an edge in ICT, capacity building and training and also emerging areas like agriculture and floriculture. The Indian ability to relate to Africans is also much greater, which is why non-Indian MNCs prefer to use Indians as managers for projects involving interaction with local officials and populations. The fact that India is a democracy, and a chaotic one at that, may mean Chinese companies steal a march over Indian ones. But India's democratic culture and consultative approach make it an attractive partner for African nations looking to enhance their own skills and capabilities. In other words, Africa is looking to do business with both China and India at the same time and there does seem to be more than enough room for both.

And yet, there's no reason for India to be complacent. As the African economy emerges, its politics stabilises and new opportunities arise, competition from around the world will be stiff. The world can look forward to greater supply of food, minerals and energy but Africa has the right to drive a tough bargain. India is well placed because of the unique set of capabilities it offers. At the same time, it must consciously avoid the path of exploitation other big powers before it have taken.

Thus far, India's engagement with Africa has operated at two levels. The first level is official, where the government has grafted on to the political goodwill built up over several decades some real financial heft. After pursuing regional and pan-African initiatives like the Team-9 framework for cooperation in West Africa and the e-network project, the first Africa-India summit in 2008 envisaged a line of credit worth $5.6 billion to be spent on development and capacity building projects. Least-developed African nations were to get preferential access to the Indian market and India also committed itself to establishing 19 centres of excellence and training institutions in different fields across Africa.

Side by side with this official thrust, the Indian private sector has also shown a willingness to invest billions of dollars in Africa. The Second Africa-India summit to be held in Ethiopia this week is likely to increase the pace of this engagement. There is talk of pushing bilateral trade with Africa to $70 billion by 2015, up from the current level of $46 billion. Cumulative Indian investments in Africa stood at $90 billion in 2010 and are likely to rise dramatically in the years ahead.

At the same time, there are several steps India needs to take to ensure the current momentum is maintained and even intensified.

First, India must ramp up its diplomatic presence in Africa. Indian companies and citizens will be more likely to work in countries where India maintains an embassy. And it would help if these embassies were robustly staffed by young diplomats anxious to make a mark rather than by those at the fag end of their career who see a tour of duty in Africa as a punishment posting and who have little or no interest in African culture and society.

Second, the government should consider establishing a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to pursue strategic investments and business opportunities in Africa, especially in sectors such as mining, infrastructure and agriculture. Such an SPV could harness the talent and resources that the Indian public and private sectors have to offer but which their managements are often unable to utilise in overseas projects in a timely manner for a variety of reasons.

Third, the SPV or some other official entity must pay attention to corporate social responsibility issues connected to all Indian FDI projects in Africa, especially since many of them might be in countries where domestic regulatory frameworks for workers' rights and environmental protection are inadequate or dysfunctional. As public pressure in India makes it less easy for Indian companies to cut corners at home, some of the motivation to invest in Africa might be linked to their belief that they can get away with dodgy business practices there. India has a strategic interest in ensuring that Indian companies operating abroad act responsibly and must come up with an appropriate monitoring mechanism.

Fourth, there must be a strict audit of all monies disbursed through the Lines of Credit for Africa. Two years ago, there were reports of questionable dealings in the subsidised export of rice to a number of sub-Saharan African countries. With Indian credit lines now running into several billion dollars — the eventual beneficiaries of which will be Indian companies and suppliers to whom recipient governments are obliged to buy from — there must be complete transparency in the process from start to finish.

Fifth, a greater effort should be made to build on the domain knowledge and cultural equity that the Indian diaspora across Africa has in abundance about local business conditions and customs. It is estimated that there are as many as two million people of Indian origin living in Africa. Though the bulk of the diaspora is in countries like South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria, Indian businessmen and even teachers and professionals can be found in virtually every African country. For a variety of reasons, these communities are not so well integrated within the political and cultural milieu of their host countries. But the more economic and cultural interaction there is between India and Africa, that could well change.

Sixth, the “commerce of ideas” that Mahatma Gandhi envisaged the future relationship between India and Africa to revolve around should be made a central element of Indian policy. The 2.2 billion people of India and Africa share many problems and could learn from each other's experiences in resolving these. Promoting partnerships between the media and academic communities might be one way to do this. Innovative work in the field of handicrafts has just started and the rich field of cultural interaction has remained practically unexplored. As much if not more than business deals and lines of credit, it is this commerce of ideas which will provide true depth to the emerging partnership between Africa and India.

Osama's killing will not affect India-Pakistan talks

Despite the initial outburst of triumphalism from New Delhi over the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani cantonment town of Abbottabad, the Indian government is not going to allow the al-Qaeda leader to scuttle the dialogue process with Islamabad ...




4 May 2011
The Hindu

NEWS ANALYSIS
Osama's killing will not affect India-Pakistan talks

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The fact that Osama bin Laden found refuge in a Pakistani cantonment town may add more rhetorical punch to India’s charge that Pakistan has become a safe haven for violent extremism but the first-order effect of his killing on the bilateral relationship is likely to be negligible.

After all, India’s recent decision to rekindle the dialogue process was taken in full knowledge of the fact that Islamabad remains unwilling or unable to act decisively against the different jihadi groups that form part of the “syndicate of terror.” These include, of course, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and its leadership, who were responsible for the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.

For two years, the Manmohan Singh government kept the dialogue process suspended in the hope that this would help force Pakistan to act. The strategy worked at first but turned out to be a weak instrument the longer India persisted with it. Worse, the blanket refusal to talk meant India was unable to push for gains in other areas such as trade and commerce and confidence-building measures.

Even though the Prime Minister and some of his advisers understood that a change of tack was needed, they remained wary of how the Opposition and the wider body of public opinion would react. The contrived outcry which followed the abortive Sharm el-Sheikh initiative of July 2009 delayed the much-needed reset for another year. Ironically, when Dr. Singh’s government finally indicated — after the Thimphu meetings this February — that it was ready to move forward on the full spectrum of issues, there was hardly any political criticism. Perhaps the Opposition had better issues to target the Prime Minister on, like the 2G scam, or realised, in the wake of Governor Salman Taseer’s assassination, that the dysfunctionality of the Pakistani state was not necessarily India-specific. Either way, the dialogue is back and there is hardly any public controversy about this despite Pakistan not fulfilling all of India’s oft-repeated pre-conditions on 26/11 and terrorism.

This new strategy of engaging Pakistan has opened up the possibility of quick progress on ‘side’ issues like trade, even as progress on the core issues of terrorism and Kashmir is fated to remain slow, contingent as it is on the level of trust the two sides have in each other. Thus, at the recent meeting of Commerce Secretaries in Islamabad, for example, both sides announced their intention of taking steps that will ramp up two-way trade.

India is unlikely to make the mistake of allowing Osama bin Laden to sabotage this win-win process from his watery grave in the Indian Ocean. Apart from economic gains, greater trade will gradually enlarge the constituency of those in Pakistan who have a stake in the normalisation of relations with India. Even on the Kashmir front, the resumption of backchannel talks and the revival, obviously under a new name, of the ‘Manmohan-Musharraf’ formula, are something New Delhi can look forward to.

When the whole world, post-Abbottabad, is drawing its own unflattering conclusions about the Pakistani military establishment, there is no need for India to strike a triumphalist note about Pakistan being a sanctuary for terrorists. What the U.S. did on Monday may have been effective but it remains a second-best solution to tackling terror on Pakistani soil. The fight against the entire syndicate of terror has to be waged by the Pakistani police and security forces, acting under the complete control of the civilian government there. This is a message India needs to emphasise to the U.S. and other allies and friends of Pakistan and it will be most effective if delivered with tact and restraint.

A fork in the road for the U.S. in South Asia

President Obama can call an end to the Fourth Afghan War and allow the Pakistani Army to fill the void, or he can shift tack and push for an end to the alliance between generals and jihadis that lies at the root of the region's terror complex.



3 May 2011
The Hindu

A fork in the road for the U.S. in South Asia

Siddharth Varadarajan

In tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad on Sunday night, America finally seems to have got something right.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the result of a catastrophic intelligence failure in which different American agencies failed to connect the dots. In response, the George W. Bush administration launched not one but two wars, first in Afghanistan and then Iraq, but did not manage to capture or kill the mastermind behind those attacks. The military sledgehammer produced collateral gains and losses for the U.S. — regime change in Kabul and Baghdad but thousands of body bags too, military bases in the cockpit of Asia but international opposition and even opprobrium as well, a bonanza for its arms and contractor industries but also a fiscal deficit which helped pave the way to a full blown financial crisis.

While counter-terrorism gains such as the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were almost all intelligence driven, the preoccupation with a military approach to the ‘AfPak' region has produced the single biggest liability for Washington: a toxic dependence on the Pakistani army. GHQ, Rawalpindi's associations and entanglements with terrorist groups ensures the “war” being fought remains unwinnable. No amount of tinkering at the margins, no Petraeus or McChrystal plan, no proposal of rehabilitation and reintegration of the Taliban, has helped the Pentagon overcome this fundamental flaw.

Patience wearing thin

Though the U.S. gave Pakistan a very long rope, signs that Washington's patience was wearing thin have been multiplying in recent months. As the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and GHQ happily played both sides of the ‘war on terror' game in pursuit of their own long-term political and strategic objectives, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was quietly distancing itself from its unreliable Pakistani counterpart. The Raymond Davies affair — in which no less a person than President Barack Obama saw fit to intervene — brought this decoupling out into the open in a particularly dramatic fashion. The Abbottabad operation is also likely a product of America going solo on Pakistani soil.

Last month, Admiral Mike Mullen openly accused the Pakistani military of collusion with the Haqqani network and other terrorists operating in Afghanistan. It is safe to assume he laid this charge in full knowledge of the fact that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, a town north of Islamabad that is a stone's throw away from the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul. The fact that the world's most wanted man could remain undetected in a small town crawling with soldiers and officers suggests either a high degree of dysfunctionality within the Pakistani system or, worse, a high degree of collusion. Plausible though the first option is, most Americans inside and outside the administration — not to speak of officials and lay persons the world over — will likely believe the second.

Mr. Obama was gracious enough to say in a general sort of way that America's “counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding” but a senior administration official who briefed reporters later on Monday was blunt about the limits of that cooperation. “We shared our intelligence on this bin Laden compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” he said.

Pakistan and Afghanistan

Where do U.S. relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan go from here? Indian officials fear there will be growing domestic political pressure on Mr. Obama to declare the ‘Fourth Afghan War' over and accelerate the drawdown of U.S. troops in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. But just because the U.S. is waging a war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is no reason for India to fear its departure. At stake is what remains to fill the void. The insurgency in Afghanistan can only be defeated by strengthening the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), on the one hand, and expanding economic opportunities for the country's peoples, on the other. Unfortunately, the former has only recently become an American priority and even then, Washington remains unwilling to allow the ANSF to develop critical assets like an air force. As for development, it is contingent on security and stability, both of which have proved elusive.

If the Pakistani military has run with the jihadi hares even as it has hunted with American hounds, it has done so in anticipation of Washington's eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the same time, this cannot be an argument for the indefinite extension of the American military presence in that country — especially when U.S. troops and aircraft have killed a large number of innocent civilians. Ten years on, it should be clear that the problems in Afghanistan do not have a military solution, at least not one the U.S. can deliver. What America can and must do, however, is to choose its friends wisely and to use its economic and political clout to ensure the Army's nexus with jihadi groups in Pakistan is weakened and destroyed. If indeed the ISI was kept in the dark about Abbottabad, this is a bad augury for the Pakistani military. But unless the U.S. is prepared to go further down that fork in the road, the terrorists who are already preparing themselves to take bin Laden's place will continue to find fertile ground inside Pakistan.