Editorials/Opinions Analyses for UPSC – 16 June 2021

Contents

1. Preserving India’s archives
2. America’s mistakes in the Afghanistan War

Preserving India’s archives

Context:

• The National Archives is the primary repository of documents on India’s past. The last time it was in the news was in 2016 when digital copies of files relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose were made publicly accessible. The imminent demolition of its annexe by the Government of India has brought the institution to public attention once again.
• A petition by leading Indian and foreign scholars is in circulation demanding that the government show greater openness in the proposed demolition of the National Archives annexe and the safe storage of its contents since “several centuries of India’s history lie in the documents that make up the National Archives of India”.

Relevance:

GS-I: History, GS-II: Polity and Governance (Government Policies and Initiatives)

Dimensions of the Article:

1. National Archives of India (NAI)
2. Poor shape of National Archives

National Archives of India (NAI)

• The National Archives of India (NAI) is a repository of the non-current records of the Government of India and holds them in trust for the use of administrators and scholars.
• Originally established as the Imperial Record Department in 1891, in Calcutta, the capital of British India, the NAI is situated at the intersection of Janpath and Rajpath, in Delhi.
• It functions as an Attached Office of the Department of Culture under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.
• The holdings in the National Archives are in a regular series starting from the year 1748.
• The National Archives of India also holds regular exhibitions such as the display of declassified files on Subhas Chandra Bose in 2016 and the recent exhibition, “The Jammu and Kashmir Saga”, commemorating 70 years of Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India which was held from 10 January 2018 to 10 February 2018.
• The archival records include 4.5 million files, 25,000 rare manuscripts, more than 100,000 maps, treaties, 280,000 premodern documents and several thousand private papers.

Objectives of Indian National Archives

• The National Archives of India envisions to help in spreading a feeling of national pride in our documentary cultural heritage and ensuring its preservation for posterity.
• It aims to encourage the scientific management, administration and conservation of records all over the country.
• Another key objective of NAI is that it aims to foster close relations between archivists’ and archival institutions, both at the national and international levels.
• To encourage greater liberalization of access to archival holdings.
• To help in developing greater professionalism and a scientific temper among creators, custodians and users of records for proper care and use of our documentary heritage.

Poor shape of National Archives

• A series of articles published in The New York Times in 2012 talk about the parlous state of the National Archives, focusing on the letters penned by Mohandas K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Gopalkrishna Gokhale, and other eminent Indian nationalists that have suffered from exposure to humid weather, staff negligence and mishandling, and improper preservation methods.
• Another article in 2021 pointed to lack of expertise to manage acquisitions which has led to “the locking up of some of the rare documents in Persian, Urdu, Arabic, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Tamil, Malayalam, and Modi (records from Maharashtra)”.

-Source: The Hindu

America’s mistakes in the Afghanistan War

Context:

President Joe Biden has set the September 11 deadline for all American troops to leave Afghanistan, winding up 20 years of the invasion by the United States.

Relevance:

GS-II: International Relations (India’s Neighbours, Foreign Policies and Developments affecting India’s Interests)

Dimensions of the Article:

1. About the U.S. Afghanistan War
2. America’s Mistakes

About the U.S. Afghanistan War

• The United States invasion of Afghanistan occurred after the September 11 attacks in late 2001 and was supported by close US allies which had officially began the War on Terror.
• Its public aims were to dismantle al-Qaeda and deny it a safe base of operations in Afghanistan by removing the Taliban from power.
• US President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and expel al-Qaeda; bin Laden had already been wanted by the FBI since 1998.
• The US and its allies rapidly drove the Taliban from power by December 2001, and built military bases near major cities across the country. Most al-Qaeda and Taliban members were not captured, escaping to neighboring Pakistan or retreating to rural or remote mountainous regions during the Battle of Tora Bora.

Peace deal

• Donald Trump’s 2017 policy on Afghanistan, was based on breaking the military stalemate in Afghanistan by authorising an additional 5,000 soldiers, giving US forces a freer hand to go after the Taliban, putting Pakistan on notice, and strengthening Afghan capabilities.
• However, the US realised that the Taliban insurgency could not be defeated as long as it enjoyed safe havens and secure sanctuaries in Pakistan, the US changed track and sought Pakistan’s help to get the Taliban to the negotiating table.
• The negotiations began in September 2018 with the appointment of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to initiate direct talks with the Taliban. After nine rounds of US-Taliban talks in Qatar, the two sides seemed close to an agreement.

America’s Mistakes

Learning from History

• First, the U.S. went into Afghanistan without considering history sufficiently – i.e., from when Afghanistan was invaded by great powers in the 19th and 20th centuries as well.
• The British empire, which feared a Russian invasion to India via Afghanistan, sent troops to the country in 1839, ousted its ruler Dost Muhammad and established a client regime of its ally, Shah Shujah. But the British had to withdraw in the face of Afghan resistance, mostly by Pashtun warriors; while retreating in 1842, all of the British and Indian troops, except one doctor, were massacred by Afghans.
• In 1979, the Soviet Union sent troops to Afghanistan to salvage the country’s nascent communist regime, orchestrated a coup and established a friendly regime. The Soviets, faced with a bloody Mujahideen resistance (which was bankrolled and trained by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan), had to pull back in 1989 in ignominy.
• Once they invaded Afghanistan, the U.S., given the mistakes the British and the Soviets committed, could have had a strategically focused campaign, targeting its enemy, al-Qaeda, which was behind the September 11 attacks.
• The U.S. should have gone after the terrorists, destroyed their networks and then withdrawn, but it wanted to topple the Taliban and rebuild a centralised “democratic” state in Afghanistan.

Strategic failure

• After the Taliban regime was toppled and al-Qaeda driven back into the caves and mountains, the U.S. still had a chance to stabilise the country with help from its different factions and leave.
• The Taliban sought modest terms — Mullah Omar, their leader, should be allowed to return home. But the Americans rejected the offer and promised to destroy the Taliban in every corner of the country.
• The Taliban are an indigenous militancy with deep roots in Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority. Toppling them from power was easy, but defeating them in their country was not.
• The U.S. took Pakistan’s tactical support for its war on terror for granted, overlooking the fact that Pakistan had deep strategic ties with the Taliban.
• When the U.S. declared victory in Afghanistan prematurely and went on to invade Iraq in 2003, it became easier for Pakistan to assist the Taliban’s regrouping, at a time when the Afghan government was grappling with corruption and infighting on ethnic lines.

Surrender to the Taliban

• For the U.S., with the war becoming increasingly unpopular at home, President elects of the U.S. had to promise to wind it up. The U.S. has also been shifting its focus to East Asia where China is rising.
• The U.S. could have opted for a more orderly withdrawal. Instead, it surrendered to the Taliban’s terms to pull back its troops
• The Taliban have not defeated the Afghan troops yet. The Afghan government has about 200,000 battle-hardened soldiers, including the U.S.-trained elite special forces. The government still controls most of the country’s population centres. The U.S. should have used this stalemate, coupled with mounting pressure on Pakistan, to extract concessions from the Taliban.

Click Here to read about the impact of U.S. exit from Afghanistan

-Source: The Hindu