Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani — who replaced the old warhorse Hamid Karzai, a known India friend, in September last — is a smart politician and his just-concluded state visit to India exemplifies that.

Ghani has to be smart considering the fact that in the last years of his tenure Karzai had burned up his bridges with the United States, had irked Pakistan many a time and yet had not exactly been the “suitable boy” for New Delhi. He has several leading stakeholders in the regional power matrix to please.

On the one hand, Ghani has to balance his country’s relations with India and Pakistan; he also has to walk on a tight diplomatic rope with global powers like China on the one hand but the United States-led western community on the other. Simultaneously, he also has to take other major global powers like Russia and Iran on board.

Ghani’s just-concluded three-day India visit needs to be seen and analyzed in this backdrop. The main focus of Ghani’s India visit was the strategic aspect of India-Afghanistan bilateral relationship, which is nothing but a strategic challenge to Pakistan — and by extension to China as well.

Ghani played a consummate shrewd politician as he pleased India on Indian soil just as he had pleased Pakistan and China on their respective soils without displeasing other stakeholders.

His first port of call after assuming office was China, which was followed by his bilateral visits to Pakistan, the United States and Saudi Arabia. While India cannot grudge the new Afghan leader visiting the US and Saudi Arabia, the fact that he visited China and Pakistan before visiting India must have been galling for New Delhi. It was a clever bit of diplomatic symbolism by Ghani considering that Hamid Karzai had invariably placed India ahead of Pakistan and China in his travel diplomacy.

But Ghani sought to disarm India on this point even before his arrival in New Delhi when he told leading Indian TV channel CNN-IBN that it wasn’t his choice to delay his India visit as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s diary was overcrowded. “I wanted to come (to New Delhi) in the first month after becoming president but PM Modi had a very active schedule,” he told the channel’s foreign editor Anchal Vohra in an on-record interview in Kabul just before embarking on his maiden India trip.

In India, Ghani tried to drum up investment and promote commerce with India and allayed Indian concerns about his government’s approach to Pakistan and the Taleban. Ghani’s foremost diplomatic and strategic challenge has been to prepare his country for an imminent situation wherein American and NATO troops would be maintaining only a skeletal presence in Afghanistan. Such a situation would arise by the end of next year.

For this reason, Pakistan assumes a more important role than India for Afghanistan. The top most foreign policy priority for the Ghani administration is to have good relations with Pakistan with the hope that Pakistan’s rich experience in dealing with the important non-state actor like Taleban would come in handy for Kabul. India just cannot fault Ghani for his pragmatic overview of the strategic situation and resting his hopes on Pakistan for persuading the militant outfit to come to the negotiating table.

Yet, Ghani’s counterbalancing game between India and Pakistan was visible during his India trip when he did not fight shy of seeking Indian support in military hardware sales as well as imparting training to Afghan military personnel. After all, India is Afghanistan’s fourth-largest aid donor.

Ghani made it clear to his Indian interlocutors that he is not cozying up to anybody and he is governed by the sole consideration of best national interests of Afghanistan. His decision to go ahead with Indian military supplies of two Cheetal helicopters and his declared intention of continuing negotiations with India on a more proactive defense cooperation need to be seen in this backdrop.

Significantly, Ghani tried to steer clear of the notorious India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan. When it came to the issue of Afghan soldiers being trained by India as well as Pakistan, he told the Indians to breathe easy on that count pointing out that while Pakistan is training just eight Afghan soldiers, India is training 600 of them.

When he was questioned by his Indian interlocutors about Pakistan’s “undeclared hostilities” toward Afghanistan he said he hoped that Pakistan would deliver on its promises to Afghanistan.

For his part, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi set the template of Indo-Afghan ties with his following remarks to the media after his talks with Ghani on April 28: “The relationship between India and Afghanistan is not just between two countries or governments. It is a timeless link of human hearts… Your visit has added new momentum to our partnership.”

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The writer is a New Delhi-based independent journalist who tweets @Kishkindha.