Obama-India
By Bhabani Sen Gupta

Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special emvoy to Afghanistan and
Pakistan is believed to be assembling a team of persons who can work with him either formally or informally on his diplomatic mission. One
of these persons, probably Rubin, is likely to come to New Delhi to
listen to what the government thinks about the best ways of finding
solutions to four main issues related to his mission, namely, (1) make
Pakistan, specially the Pakistan Army focus exclusively on taming Taliban militancy in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries; (2) clearing the anarchist borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan
of different jihadist militant elements determined to obstruct U.S.-NATO
supply lines to troops in Afghanistan; (3) get together a regional framework of stabilizing peace and orderly development in Afghanistan;
and (4) get American troops out of Afghanistan before a situation of
attrition builds up there, thus sucking the Obama administration into
a quagmire.
The Indian authorities have been busy getting an adequate
understanding of the Obama administration/s overall approach to
the Afghan situation, particularly its expectations, the time-and-depth
of its commitments, and the broad frame of its operational thrusts.
It is an ongoing exercise of information and analyses. At the
present time, it seems that president Obama is determined NOT to get
into an Afghan quagmire. It does not share the Bush administration’s
political objective to build ‘democracy’ in Afghanistan. The primary
objective of Obama is to flush out, if not kill or capture, Taliban leaders
like Osama bin Laden and Mollah Omar who are believed to be living
in the tribal hideouts in the rugged borderlands, and declare that the American mission is accomplished.
It is possible, in New Delhi’s perspective, that the worsening economic situation would advise caution and circumspection on the part of the new president not to court a deeper military engagement in Afghanistan at least for three to six months. The special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan wound, in that case, spend a lot of more time
than has ever happened in American diplomacy listening to what others
have to say about Afghanistan before the action course is determined.