The Lowy Institute's Michael Wesley thinks they can:
But Central Asia's southern tier has benefited from no such clear thinking. Beijing's support for Pakistan has kept India strategically bottled up under the Himalayas for decades, while Indo-Pakistani hostility has led Islamabad to seek strategic depth in Afghanistan. India's response has been to try to deny that strategic depth, and China has every reason to try to block the recent countermove by New Delhi into Afghanistan. This is a complex and dangerous dynamic made chronically unstable by its cyclical structure.To avoid the worst possible outcome, all three rivals must be engaged in the process of building a stable Afghanistan â?? and collectively guaranteeing it. The most realistic route is to actively involve the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in the future of Afghanistan while broadening that organisation to include India and Pakistan. This solution ties the stability of the northern and southern tiers of Central Asia to each other, thereby broadening the stakes of those involved. The one hope and one fear that bind China and Russia together are also remarkably relevant to the SCO's proposed new members.
The attractive feature of this solution is that it puts the regional powers (i.e. the major stakeholders), and not the U.S., in the driver's seat. It's unrealistic to expect a permanent U.S. presence in Afghanistan or a permanent American subsidy for Pakistan (although Egypt has been enjoying theirs for quite a while). The notion that America doesn't have an "attention span" is an obnoxious way of saying that the treasury is not an infinite well upon which other nations have an open-ended claim.
A regional solution that ties the major powers into some kind of institutional framework for stabilizing Afghanistan seems like a good alternative, especially since none of the stakeholders save Pakistan have much interest in seeing a Taliban restoration. (Of course, whether such a gambit is workable is another matter.)
(AP Photo)
