NEW DELHI: Could India get a bigger role in the Afghanistan-Taliban reconciliation process? As the "quadrilateral coordination group" prepares to try to meet once again next week to get a dialogue process going with the Taliban, some of the participants are considering an expansion of the group to include regional powers like India, Russia and Iran.

Currently, India is kept "in the loop" by members of the Quad, particularly the US and Afghanistan. The US special representative for Af-Pak Rick Olson is in New Delhi to meet foreign secretary S Jaishankar and NSA Ajit Doval on the state of play about the talks.

Any such move however, will be strongly opposed by Pakistan. India's presence in Afghanistan is a sore point with Pakistan. With India supplying attack helicopters to Afghanistan for the first time, New Delhi has entered a security space that it hitherto stayed away from, discomfiting Pakistan even further.

The July 2015 Quad talks in Murree, Islamabad actually saw the participation of two Taliban leaders. The entire process suffered a setback, when before the second round, it was revealed that the Taliban's 'Amir-ul-Momineen' Mullah Omar had died two years ago, surprising even the Americans, not to speak of the Chinese. Since then, these 'talks about talks' are yet to take off. Next week will see another attempt at a time when the fighting season in Afghanistan is about to start.

There appears to be rethink on the part of the US regarding its Afghanistan withdrawal timetable. The US currently has 9,800 troops there, which will draw down to 5,500 by 2017, but these will stay indefinitely. Obama's decision to announce a withdrawal schedule was seen as a lifeline to Taliban who decided to wait them out. That has changed, after Afghanistan's security challenges were seen to have only increased. The US will ask its partners to commit more money and training to the Afghan army and police.

The next round of talks will once again invite the Taliban and Pakistan will be pressured to "influence" and bring them to the table. The Taliban's refusal to participate the last two times the Quad tried to meet, led to the cancellation of the meetings.

India has never really considered a place for itself in these talks. But in recent years, India has been more interested, since any eventual change in the power structure in Kabul will have consequences for India. The Chinese too were what Americans called "free riders" in Afghanistan. But their security interests were impacted as East Tuekestan Islamic Movement settled in Miranshah and built ties with Taliban. China has joined the Quad for an insider's view. The US would be happy to see India in an expanded Quad, but not Pakistan.



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