Afghan President Hamid Karzai and India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed the accord on Tuesday in New Delhi, a day after Karzai accused Pakistan in a televised speech of foiling his attempts to make peace with Taliban insurgents by secretly backing their war effort. The agreement is not directed at Pakistan, Karzai said yesterday, without giving details on the type or scale of training being discussed.
After years in which Karzai kept India at arm's length on security issues, his willingness to seek military training "is a joint message he and the Americans are sending to Pakistan that, if you don't come on board and stop supporting these guerrillas, we have an option to strengthen ties with India", Amin Saikal, an Afghan political scientist at Australian National University, said on Tuesday.
Saikal and other analysts say the growing strains are part of an "end-game" in which Pakistan is seeking to keep or increase its influence in Afghanistan as the US tries to reduce its commitment to the decade-long war, the longest-ever conflict for the US military. While India has drawn closer to Afghanistan with promises of new aid and an offer to invest billions of dollars in mining a large iron deposit, Pakistani leaders have traded top-level visits with China's leaders, seeking closer ties.
As President Barack Obama tries to withdraw the bulk of America's 98,000 troops in Afghanistan within three years, the US and Karzai have publicly increased pressure on Pakistan to end what they and independent analysts say is its policy of quietly backing the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.
Denial
Pakistan's army for years has denied reports by scholars — and last month by the top US military commander — that it supports guerrillas as proxy forces for attacks on Afghanistan and India. Pakistan has fought three wars with India and its officials say the army would regard any Indian security presence in Afghanistan as a threat to Pakistan.
While "Pakistan won't object to any Indian role in helping the development" of Afghanistan, "any military or intelligence role for India will not be tolerable for Pakistan", Pakistani foreign policy analyst and former ambassador Maleeha Lodi said in an interview in July. Pakistan's security policies are set by its politically powerful army, which Lodi said retains "its desire to prevent any kind of strategic encirclement" through an Indian-Afghan security relationship.
The new Indian-Afghan agreement largely enshrines joint projects already under way, Karzai said yesterday in a speech sponsored by a New Delhi think tank, the Observer Research Foundation. It envisions Indian help "to train our police for us, to train our army for us, to train thousands of Afghan youth who are right now studying in India", he said.
While US-led forces currently train Afghan troops, their main combat force is scheduled to withdraw by 2014.
Strains between Pakistan and both Karzai's government and the US have increased following guerrilla attacks in the Afghan capital last month that officials in Kabul and Washington say were sponsored by Pakistan. On September 13, Taliban fighters fired rocket-propelled grenades into the US Embassy compound, and a week later a suicide bomber killed Karzai's chief envoy for talks with the Taliban, Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said before retiring at the end of September that Pakistan's main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, for years has supported "proxy terrorist organisations", including the Haqqani gu
errillas and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
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