Soft Power, Hard Battles

Anyone who follows office politics will be familiar with the POPO principle. POPO Pissed On and Passed Over refers to a hardworking individual whose integrity and work ethic get him nowhere, who finds himself overlooked for rewards and promotions, sidelined by craftier colleagues. Partly because he's too straight and naive and partly because he just doesn't know how to play the game, Mr POPO ends up as a spectacular underachiever.
In the past few weeks, Indian foreign policy has convinced itself it is a victim of the POPO principle. Indian diplomats have found America and its allies strangely unresponsive to their core security concerns. The Barack Obama administration seems to take this country for granted. To top it all, Pakistan is exultant, believing it has trumped India yet again.
Afghanistan has been both the trigger and the setting of this snubbing. India is being edged out of the reckoning in Kabul. Of the two recent conferences to discuss the world's most troubled region, it was not invited to the one in Istanbul. At the other conference, in London, the host government's proposal to do a deal with a section of the Taliban and exit, supported enthusiastically by Islamabad, won the day. India's protests didn't gain much traction.
India feels cheated, even a little bewildered. From building power transmission infrastructure to highways, from enhancing health and education capacities to training election officials, it has done a lot in Afghanistan. Often it has attained its social sector goals with more efficient spending than extravagant western aid agencies. Yet, this has gone under-recognised.
In a sense, India is talking the wrong currency. The harsh truth is the conflict in Afghanistan and neighbouring provinces of Pakistan has reached a stage when a stakeholder's commitment is gauged in terms of boots on the ground. When project Afghanistan started off in October 2001, it was both a nation-building and a containment (of the Taliban-al-Qaeda) enterprise. In 2010, in a very substantial measure, containment has become the priority.
As it happens, India has contributed to the nation-building aspects in Afghanistan but not quite to the containment of Islamist militia. It has no soldiers in Afghanistan and, frankly, there is no political stomach or civil society resolve to send soldiers into that country. Instead, India has put forward good works, goodwill among ordinary Afghans and cultural influences as proof of its irreversible interest in Afghanistan.
The debate on Indian troops in Afghanistan is a decidedly tricky one. After 9/11, India offered to send in soldiers with the American forces and the Northern Alliance. Washington vetoed it. Instead, it used New Delhi's offer to blackmail Islamabad's generals into joining the war. The story has moved since then, but India hasn't. Today, not only has India forgotten that post-9/11 offer as a rare moment of bravado or perhaps thoughtlessness it has practically shouted from the rooftops that it will not send its regiments into Afghanistan. Instead, ministry of external affairs (MEA) officials have indicated that if the Americans leave Kabul, so will the Indians.
Consider the message being sent. Not only will India not send troops, it will not even hold out the threat of sending troops. This is almost a form of unilateral disarmament. It allows adversaries to make advance calculations. As for friends or potential friends, it has them see India as much less of a stakeholder in Afghanistan than India sees itself. Despite the honesty of its intentions, India's strategic establishment has to be alive to this gap in perceptions.
To be fair, the issue is larger than merely Afghanistan. India has big power aspirations, at least regional power aspirations. Yet, it runs an astonishingly risk-averse foreign policy that is completely incommensurate with its ambitions. The refusal to even consider threatening to send troops to Afghanistan is a sample of this attitude.
There are other examples. The India-United States nuclear deal ran into opposition within the MEA bureaucracy, not because it was a bad deal but simply because old habits and mindsets were not comfortable with dramatic change. Going back further, it was fortunate Atal Bihari Vajpayee ordered the Pokhran tests only two months after becoming prime minister in 1998. Had he waited longer, had he considered wider consultations, the system would have dissuaded him. The timing would never have been deemed perfect: 'Sir, we can't do it this month, there is a United Nations conference on human rights. It will send a bad signal.'
A corollary to a risk-averse foreign policy is a misreading of how far soft power can get you. As is evident in Afghanistan and elsewhere, India has enormous reserves of soft power. Yet, there are severe limits to what soft power can achieve if it does not have a degree of hard power complementing it.
Essentially, India has two 'great power' templates before it: the US and the European Union. Both are multicultural and democratic, both have economic heft and cultural leverage. The US combines these attributes with military muscle. The EU's militarism is limited to conferences on climate change. Which one does India want to be?
The writer is a political commentator.