India is not only one of the biggest donors in Afghanistan but is also transforming lives beyond politics

Clearly, US President Donald Trump doesn’t  quite believe that rebuilding humanitarian and civil institutions does enough good in Afghanistan unless the military boots pace up and down to police order the way he wants. But his jibe about India building a library of no consequence that would be equivalent to just five hours of US operations — though India is not building a library but the Afghan Parliament — is certainly no friendly poke and points to his larger egoistic belief that though he has made India a geo-strategic ally, he feels it is not doing enough in Afghanistan in return. India is certainly not going to engage militarily just because Trump wants, our policy being to aid UN peacekeeping operations only. Besides, India has held itself in abeyance given the strategic discomfort to another of US’ long-term allies in the region, Pakistan, which was not willing to acknowledge India’s stakes in the Afghan peace process until very recently. Now that Trump has not managed to get Pakistan to deliver the goods, he is asking India and other allies to pull in their weight. He has also dangled the threat of US troop pullout though one assumes that would happen in a phased manner and not plunge the region into a chaos, triggering an unwanted exodus of refugees to neighbouring countries. And just because he has ended an annual aid of $1.3 billion to Pakistan because it provides safe havens to the Taliban, doesn’t mean India will radically alter its Afghanistan strategy and eat out of US hands. India is still steadfast about direct talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban unlike the model proposed by Russia and the US. Besides if it comes to rebuilding Afghanistan in the truest sense and not just erect compliant regimes, then India has done quite a bit in that direction, something that cannot be belittled as a token effort at restoring peace.

Since 2001, India’s bilateral assistance to Afghanistan has been $3 billion which has been used to build the Afghan Parliament, restore the Stor palace, build dams for hydropower projects, roads, power lines and upgrade existing infrastructure. Then there are smaller community development projects and training programmes to ensure economic rehabilitation of the locals. In fact, India is the biggest donor in the region for initiatives that help in rebuilding and changing lives in the war-torn country. It has never been about imposition. Till now there is no official mention of a library and though Prime Minister Modi met Trump at a trilateral meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the G20 summit recently, it is highly unlikely that the particularities of India’s engagement with Afghanistan ever came up. Trump’s latest missive against India over Afghanistan follows his earlier one in 2017, when announcing an increase in troops, he sought greater economic assistance from us on the ground that “India makes billions of dollars in trade from the United States and we want them to help us more with Afghanistan.” This means that there has actually been no change in the American perception of Indian involvement in the region as not being congruent with US design. And though we have made no libraries yet, the US must not frown upon such efforts either, considering the Islamic State (IS) militants have defaced heritage in their contempt for culture and higher education. A global campaign is already under way to rebuild the Mosul University in Iraq, which had a precious collection of manuscripts. The efforts are being coordinated by an independent historian who is seeking donation of books and archives to restore its formal glory under the slogan: “Let it be a book, rising from the ashes.”