BACKGROUND: One of the key theaters of Indo-Pakistani rivalry has been Afghanistan. For a long time, Pakistan has sought to gain decisive influence over that state, seeing Afghanistan as a strategic hinterland in its rivalry with India and as a gateway to expanded trade, political, military, and religious ties to Central Asia. During the nineties, Pakistani intelligence agencies were also involved in recruiting Jihadis from these states as well as in forming the Taliban. India, for its part, has sought to counter this Pakistani drive, and in the new Afghanistan has been a prominent supporter of the new regime of Hamid Karzai and a long-standing ally of the Northern Alliance . It has also established flourishing trade and military ties with Afghanistan and Central Asian states as well as with Iran to threaten Pakistan’s rear, and to project influence of a military, commercial, and political nature across the region. This endeavor corresponds with directives from the highest levels of India to make India into a leading power projector throughout Asia. For these reasons any progress toward peace between India and Pakistan correspondingly reduces the opportunities and freedom of maneuver for terrorists inside Pakistan, along Kashmir’s frontier, inside Kashmir, and within India to act. Progress toward peace with India will lead to an erosion of their support since elements of the Pakistani government will no longer be able to support them. But beyond that, progress in this negotiation will also ultimately undermine the Taliban and Bin Laden’s ability to carry out terrorist attacks inside Pakistan and Afghanistan. Naturally, an upsurge of such attacks to derail the consolidation of these talks and of the new Afghanistan until conclusive success in these negotiations takes place is only to be expected. IMPLICATIONS: Beyond a short-term increase in the number of terrorist attacks that could then lead to a gradual diminution of such attacks in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, if not India as well, we can expect major strategic changes in the way both India and Pakistan relate to Central Asia as well. To the extent that these two states can arrive at a modus vivendi and a way to confront outstanding issues in their bilateral relationship, we can also expect their rivalry in Central Asia, a rivalry that contains commercial and military elements, to diminish as well. Acts of economic warfare, the closing of transportation corridors, blockades, etc. will also gradually cease, thereby opening up major opportunities for the establishment of lasting trade and transportation corridors to and from Central Asian states. These avenues for trade and for the movement of people and for goods and services can also ultimately come to encompass not just pipelines and trade routs, but also multilateral projects that include both Pakistan and India, e.g. the projected gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean which has been stalled in no small measure due to this rivalry. If these states can gradually come to eschew a debilitating and multi-dimensional rivalry in their bilateral relations and policies toward Central Asia, they will thereby foster that region’s greater openness to outside trade and transportation not just with India and Pakistan but with the outside world more broadly. This will go a long way to overcome some of the most important obstacles to economic development in Central Asia, namely the region’s isolation from the sea and from major international trade routes. Construction of a viable trade and transportation infrastructure, connecting Central Asia with South Asia and the rest of the world, can provide a mutually beneficial outcome with diverse and generally positive political consequences as well for both South Asia and Central Asia. It also will facilitate a process that counteracts the further importation of external rivalries into the already troubled and volatile Central Asian zone. That would be a win-win outcome for everyone.

CONCLUSIONS: Progress towards peace in South Asia not only helps avert the specter of an Indo-Pakistani war that could raise the threat of nuclear attacks or the collapse of the Pakistani government. It also has potentially major positive consequences for the entire Central Asian region. First of all, a genuine peace process, if not a genuine peace between those two states, entails a serious degradation in the ability of terrorist forces to hide out in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to use those territories with impunity for heir operations. In other words, both Bin Laden and the Taliban, not to mention Kashmiri organizations, will come under serious pressure from any true progress in these negotiations. Second, not only will terrorism that threatens Central Asia diminish, the importation of the Indo-Pakistani military-political rivalry into Central Asia will also be reversed and contribute to a general lowering of the regional potential for violence. Third, trade and transportation possibilities that have hitherto been blocked by this rivalry will open up. That will allow for a major expansion of both regional and global trade that will contribute substantially to overcoming some of the most intractable obstacles to regional progress in Central Asia. All these considerations make Central Asia and all those who have a substantial interest in its development more than interested bystanders in those negotiations. Few possibilities in international affairs offer as much potential for mutually positive outcomes than do these negotiations. Therefore their progress is and will continue to be of vital significance not only to South Asian governments and people, but also to the peoples and regimes of Central Asia.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Professor Stephen Blank, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA 17013. The views expressed here do not represent those of the U.S. Army. Defense Department, or the U.S. Government.