Should India drop the Shovel and Pick up the Gun in Afghanistan ?

[Yusuf]

As i pointed out earlier we do not need more troops on the ground to protect our people , what we need to do is rebuild old links with former commanders of the NA and build new links with Pro-Kabul pushtun leaders, this can be done in a variety of ways
1)offer scholarships to the wards to pushtun elders and build links as teachers with the leaders families
2)afghan doctors can be trained in India and then be sent to serve their communities in hospitals built by India
3)We need to expand drastically the number of afghan military officers we are training in India
4)All the above + financial largesses for Afghan leaders willing to help India

The fact remains that there are over 2 million AK's in Afghanistan as of now much of this (around 400-600,00) lies with Taliban supporter militias and the Taliban but the rest of this formidable arsenal is operated and owned by tribal militias, if we can get these tribes in our camp we might just get Afghanistan in our camp.

BR, we are already doing most of what you have said. In fact it was a good strategy on the part of India to win hearts over there rather than submission. We have our docs there. Afghans Army is being trained by us. But i think as you said, increase the numbers. I think India may well be working with the tribals. That is why we see the Pakistanis crying all the time about our consulates there. They fear the tribals shifting allegiance to India and want to make sure we move out from there.
One thing is for sure. The US cannot move out now or in the near future. All hell will break lose and 10 years of effort will go down the drain.

 

[Yusuf]

Sending a Protection Force in order to safeguard the security of embassy staff and personnel involved in development projects is not gonna be a big issues, since this is somewhat obvious and indispensable. However, the question revolved around military intervention as Nitin Pai has suggested in the aforementioned article. And I think this is a big No as suggested in this article:

Indian Intervention in Afghanistan- A Reality Check.

India is obviously not going to send a military intervention force. Why will we dirty our hands in the American war? India can do that only if we are able to extract something on the eastern front of Pakistan where the Americans force the Pakistanis to reign in the terrorists against India.

 

[COMMANDER2010]

Though a Bad Idea, and UN has not requested any peacekeeping force since NATO and its allies
are able to maintain peace in the far region. The Indian Army is already involved in several deescaltion activities within our boundaries, an extra work load will actually put extra work load into there bags and it will be bad for the morale and our economy.
We will not gain any thing from there except pride of being Indian and solving there problems, which we are already doing it by rebuilding there infrastructure.
Sending our forces out there will also invlove a logistics disaster as we will not be able to use the shortest route due to obstruction of the airspace and the country has no sea link.
Sending our best troops might result in further escalation of the situation which will result in a greater demand of manpower and logistics support and our troops will be involved in various conflicts resulting in greater human loss which we are not really ready at this point of time, HOMELAND SECURITY is the primary objective of our ARMED FORCES.