CHECKMATING INDIA IN AFGHANISTAN IS THE PLAN

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Saturday, 05 March 2016 | Hiranmay Karlekar | 

India must make Pakistan pay an increasingly steep price for its mischief, happening not just in this country but also elsewhere like Afghanistan, until Islamabad realises the folly of the course it has been pursuing

The attack on the Indian consulate in Jalalabad on March 2, in which nine persons were killed and 19 wounded and the chancery was damaged, deserves more than passing attention. No less a person than Mr Hamid Karzai, a former President of Afghanistan and a staunch friend of India, has said in a recent interview to Ms Suhasini Haider of The Hindu that it was a part of a trend of such attacks launched from Pakistan. He has added, “They are simply attacking India’s presence in Afghanistan, whenever they get the opportunity. The whole spectrum of the India-Afghan relations, the relationship itself, is the target of the attacks.” Elaborating, he had further stated, “Each of those attacks has originated from across the border, from neighbouring Pakistan. That’s where the origin of this trouble is: The Lashkar-e-Tayyeba is from there, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e- Mohammad, all these outfits are from Pakistan. So, the sanctuaries, the training grounds, the financial factors and the motivating factors are all inside Pakistan, and come from across the border.”

Some may argue that Pakistan is unlikely to have triggered the attack because the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack and the organisation is locked in a violent conflict with the Taliban for the control of large tracts of Afghanistan, and the Taliban are the creatures of Pakistan. Such an argument will ignore the fact that Afghanistan’s intelligence agencies suspect Islamabad's hand behind the attack which, it says, bears the stamp of methods associated with Pakistan. Besides, Ms Carlotta Gall wrote in her dispatch published in The New York Times of February 6 under the heading, ‘Pakistan’s Hand in the Rise of International Jihad’, “Ahead of Pakistan’s 2014 operation in North Waziristan, scores, even hundreds, of foreign fighters left the tribal areas to fight against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Tribesmen and Taliban members from the area say fighters travelled to Quetta, and then flew to Qatar. There they received new passports and passage to Turkey, from where they could cross into Syria. Others travelled overland along well-worn smuggling routes from Pakistan through Iran and Iraq.”

Adding that the fighters “arrived just in time to boost the sweeping offensive by ISIS into Iraq and the creation of the Islamic State in the summer of 2014”, she further asserted, “If these accounts are correct, Pakistan was cooperating with Qatar, and perhaps others, to move international Sunni jihadists (including 300 Pakistanis) from Pakistan’s tribal areas, where they were no longer needed, to new battlefields in Syria.” Ms Gall writes in her dispatch that these accounts provided, as one Pakistani politician put it, “just another reminder of Pakistan’s central involvement in creating and managing violent jihadist groups.”

Given Pakistan’s ‘central role’, it would not be surprising if it has close links with the Islamic State in addition to those with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate has a long history of deftly managing different Islamist terrorist groups, some of them at war with one another, to serve its own dubious ends. Its central goal in Afghanistan being the installation of a subservient Government and the total exclusion of any meaningful Indian presence in the country, there is no reason why it should not sup with the Islamic State if the latter can achieve this target, and try to have a rapprochement between it and the Taliban. It can always dump the Taliban, which would perhaps be too weakened by the losses suffered in the conflict to create trouble for it.

Those who might consider such a development too cynical to be credible, would do well to recall Pakistan’s duplicity and treachery in its interface with the United States which Mr Husain Haqqani describes in Pakistan between Mosque and Military as, “Pakistan’s great power patron of choice, crucial as a source of weapons and economic aid. Alliance with the United States became as important a part of the plans for consolidating Pakistani Nation and State as Islam and opposition toHindu India”. It used the weapons it received from the US from the mid-1950s to fight global communism, particularly the Soviet Union, in the 1965 war against India.

Its deceit and double-dealing were glaringly in evidence during the mujaheedin’s jihad against the Soviet Union from 1980 to 1989, which it ‘coordinated’ with support from the US. To ensure a subservient Government in Kabul at the end of the war, it began strengthening fanatical and bitterly anti-American Islamist groups patronised by the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan. Yossef Bodansky writes in Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America: “Islamabad’s critical need to conceal the US-financed training infrastructure from the American Government resulted from far more than the disagreement between the ISI and Washington over the fact that the prime recipients of the military assistance were Islamist groups. The ISI adamantly opposed supporting Afghan resistance organisations associated with the predominantly tribal-traditional Pashtun population, who were essentially pro-Western. Instead, the ISI insisted on diverting some 70 per cent of the foreign aid to the Islamist parties-particularly the Hizb-i-Islami, who were inherently and virulently anti-American. From Washington’s perspective, the support for the Afghan jihad was so important as to warrant ‘ignoring’ the ISI’s use, or abuse, of the US-funded training infrastructure for other ‘causes’ from Arab Islamists to regional group supporting Pakistan's own interests.”

Pakistan continues its double-dealing with the US, fighting and/or not fighting the Taliban and the Haqqani network while lapping up the massive economic and military aid that continues to pour in. If that is so, there is no reason why it cannot do so with the Taliban and the Islamic State, supporting both with neither knowing about it, and ready to defenestrate one of them in favour of the other, should it feel necessary.

The lesson all this has for India is one that has been harped upon innumerable times: Pakistan is no to be trusted. New Delhi must honour its long and deep friendship with Afghanistan, by maintaining a strong presence on its soil. It must enable the Government in Kabul to hold its own and render it all possible aid-including military-to this end. Pakistan will hit back with terrorist strikes in India and Indian interests and establishments in Afghanistan. In addition to further strengthen its infrastructure for coping with such attacks, it must make Pakistan pay an increasingly steep price for its mischief, until Islamabad realises the folly of the course it has been pursuing.