‘ATM Modi’ squirms in Trump’s Afghan embrace
India welcomes unprecedented U.S. invitation to play a more active part in Afghanistan, but what was that about the money?
Friends don’t talk money, especially when the friendship is as special as the one India and the United States claim theirs to be. But as Narendra Modi is beginning to find out, there’s no such thing as a free hug, not in Trump World.
Unveiling his much-awaited address on the strategy to end the Afghan conflict, Donald Trump this week said all the things that would gladden the heart of the Indian leader. He blasted India’s arch-rival Pakistan for sheltering terrorists and demanded Islamabad do more to rein in terror emanating from its soil. Modi’s thoughts exactly.
Trump didn’t stop there. In an unprecedented come-hither to India, he described it as a “critical part of America’s South Asia strategy” and invited it to play a bigger role in Afghanistan. No US president has solicited India’s help in Afghanistan or highlighted India’s primacy in the region this openly.
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But then he had to spoil it all. In a snarky aside unbecoming in a policy speech, he said: “We appreciate India’s important contributions to stability in Afghanistan. But India makes billions of dollars in trade from the United States and we want them to help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development.”
The Indian government chose not to dignify the money mention with a reaction, concentrating instead on welcoming the new policy. But it rankled all the same. “Whatever Afghanistan is or should be about for India and the US, surely money is the least relevant consideration?” said Shashi Tharoor, a parliamentarian and former foreign minister who chairs India’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs.
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In the last three years, Modi has progressively tightened his embrace of the US, in a departure from the more careful approach of his predecessors balancing between the US and China. But this is not the first time Trump has brought up money. Just days before the first meeting between Modi and Trump in Washington in June, Trump singled out India for trying to extract “billions and billions and billions” of dollars in foreign aid to sign up for the Paris climate agreement, drawing an angry response from New Delhi. By the end of Modi’s trip, during which he was photographed repeatedly bear-hugging Trump, a self-declared germophobe, India had in fact signed away billions of dollars in defence contracts without much to show by way of tangible returns.
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