From our partners at Newshoggers.com

By Steve Hynd

There's an op-ed by Prof. Harsh V. Pant of the prestigious Defense Studies department at King's College, London in the Japan Times today which bears reading as an accurate summation of Indian hawkish – and not so hawkish – feelings on the American misadventure in Afghanistan. Lots of Indian friends have recently been telling me much the same things.

It would be an understatement to suggest that Indian diplomacy faced a major setback at the Afghanistan Conference in London. India was humiliated and its concerns were summarily ignored. In one stroke, Pakistan rendered New Delhi irrelevant in the evolving security dynamic in Afghanistan.

…By pursuing a strategy that will give Pakistan the leading role in Afghan state structures, the West is only sowing the seeds for future regional turmoil. It would be catastrophic for Indian security if Taliban remnants came to power with the backing of the ISI and Pakistan's military. As in the 1990s, when a Pakistan-backed and regime targeted India before hitting the Western shores, a Taliban government in Afghanistan would once again train its guns on India. This time they will be triumphant if they've forced the West out of Afghanistan.

India has also learned from its past. To salvage its interests, the next few months will see India stepping up the training of Afghan forces, coordinating with states like Russia and Iran, and reaching out to all sections of Afghan society. More problematic for the West will be its efforts to add greater military muscle to development activities.

Instead of ignoring Delhi, the West would be better served if it ceases to pander to Pakistan for short-term gains. Failing to support the only secular liberal democracy in the region will embolden radical Islamists in the long run. And that's no way to enhance Western security.

The professor is right – but he's missing a goodly deal of the story.

America and its allies have belatedly realised that their best interests are best served by an Afghan exit – but domestic political considerations demand that they provide a fig-leaf of "surge success" before they do so. (Thus the stenographic happy talk channeling McChrystal's "gut feelings" we're going to be increasingly treated to over the next six months.) Their best bet of an easy exit is if Karzai and Mullah Omar come to some agreement on power-sharing, and that's essentially what was decided at the London conference, as Prof. Pant notes in his op-ed.

However, that's not necessarily in Pakistan's national interests unless it has control over the peace talk process and, apparently befuddled by General Kayani's Jedi mind tricks, American generals and officials have failed to notice this. However, recent Pakistani "game-changing" co-operation isn't all it's being cracked up to be by the tame stenographers of the U.S. press. Pakistan is holding on to it's recent Taliban captures in such a way that they can still communicate with their people while denying the U.S. access to those prisoners. And last week's attack on Kabul, which mainly targeted Indians working there, is being blamed on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group - the same one which carried out the Mumbai attacks in 2006 and 2008 and which India says it has evidence is closely supported and directed by Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency.

Pakistan's primary objective in Afghanistan is to create a regime or a set of circumstances which excludes India, giving Pakistan's military the space for a strategic retreat should there ever be a major war between the two. It's secondary objective is to aid its primary economic and military ally – China, not America – in preventing Indian influence upon and economic expansion in the region. To both those ends, it needs a Quetta Shura that will do as it is told, not go off negotiating on its own. And it needs to keep reminding Afghanistan's Karzai that the Quetta Shura isn't the only proxy weapon it has available so that he does what he's told too. Those can be seen as final positions. If China and Pakistan can get the West to bleed itself a little more on the Afghan thornbush before withdrawing, so much the better.

India, of course, has different interests again. It now stands pretty much alone in calling for the West to stay in Afghanistan for a very long time – to stymie Pakistani and Chinese plans. It's feeling ignored and unloved by the U.S. after the false spring of Bush's nuclear giveaway and the bipartisan rush to sell India lots of expensive but obsolescent weaponry. And it's trying to create a new strategy that accepts the reality of America and the West's continuing bamboozlement by Pakistan – including through outreach to nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran as well as more traditional allies like Russia and France.

But India has yet to make the intellectual leap that also eludes America: that positioning all your strategic planning around a terrorist threat that kills less than car accidents or lack of healthcare is simply a recipe for draining the nation's coffers and distracting it from a brighter future. India's main future competitor is China and vice versa, even if U.S. think tank papers on China or Afghanistan entirely miss the significance of that. China pretty much owns Pakistan and will own Afghanistan within a decade. India would be better served, in my opinion, by turning its back upon both in their entirety, rather than shackle itself to a ball and chain designed by China. Although national pride demands that something, anything, be "done now" about terrorism, the truth is that such attacks are gnats stinging an elephant, doing more damage by distraction than by the pain they inflict.

India has the potential to surpass it's rival China in a decade or two if it concentrates all its energy on maritime economic expansion and development of its infrastructure. It can only do that if it avoids the trap turning obsessively inland would create.