Pakistan’s ISI Continues To Destabilise The Situation And Create An Undifferentiated Fear In Afghanistan
By Jyoti Malhotra
20 January,
2021
Republic TV
editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami’s chats about the Pulwama attack in 2019 aren’t
the only thing Pakistan’s Imran Khan is complaining about this week. Foreign
minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s admission that Pakistan has complained to Kabul
— “with evidence” — about India interfering in the Afghan peace process is as
interesting a development.
File
photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani in
New Delhi | Shahbaz Khan | PTI
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Perhaps
Qureshi was referring to the visit of National Security Adviser Ajit Doval to
Kabul recently, where he held talks with his counterpart Hamdullah Mohib and
other Afghan leaders to “synchronise efforts to combat terrorism” and expand
cooperation.
In the wake
of the meeting, the irrepressible first vice-president of Afghanistan, Amrullah
Saleh, tweeted:
“Had a
pleasant meeting with NSA Ajit Doval of India. We discussed the enemy. It was
an in-depth discussion.”
No prizes
for guessing who Saleh was referring to. Since he was a 25-year-old aide to the
former Afghan leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who fought the Taliban until he was
assassinated two days before the 9/11 attacks in the US, Saleh has openly
called out the ‘Pakistan hand’ in destabilising Afghanistan. With a new US
administration taking over this week and US troops drawing down as per schedule,
the Afghans are keen that India fill the vacuum or at least play a bigger role
in staving off the Taliban terror attacks masterminded by Pakistan next door.
Doval knows
Afghanistan well. A former chief of the Intelligence Bureau, he was on the tarmac
in Kandahar in December 1999, when the hijacked IC-814 plane was surrounded by
ISI-backed gunmen to prevent an Indian commando rescue operation.
Certainly,
India is concerned about the senseless violence in Afghanistan. Two female
judges were shot dead on Sunday morning. A magnetic bomb hit an official the
same day, but he was lucky. In Baghlan, eight security men were not.
Several
articles in the Afghan and international media have described how Afghans are
being reduced to shivering shadows of their former selves, aware that they may
not return home when they set out in the morning.
Enemy’s Enemy
Back in
Pakistan Monday, one of the country’s best-known journalists, Hamid Mir, had a
column on the Afghan-Pakistan situation in the Urdu newspaper Jang – I read the
translated version. Mir talks about how PM Narendra Modi has taken “my enemy’s
enemy is my friend” metaphor to heart and is joining hands with Afghan
President Ashraf Ghani (Pakistan’s enemy, according to Mir) to undermine
India’s enemy (Pakistan). Mir links the killings of the Hazaras in Mach in
Balochistan with the rising instability in Afghanistan.
Mir says
that the Islamic State (IS) has taken responsibility for the Mach killings, as
it did for the massacre in Kabul’s Sikh Gurudwara last year, in which Muhammed
Anis, an “Indian national”, also known as Abu Khalid al-Hindi, participated. He
admits that the names of the Mach IS attackers are not public yet. He is, of
course, implying there is a connection.
Mir is
right, but only partially. Indeed, a Muslim man from Kerala, who took the nom
de guerre Abu Khalid al-Hindi and joined the Islamic State Khorasan Province
(ISKP), was one of the perpetrators of the Kabul Gurudwara attack. Terrorist
franchisees, like al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) have about 150-200
members across Pakistan-India-Bangladesh-Myanmar – most Indian members are
active in south India.
Global
scholars admit, however, that India remains a puzzle for “global jihadists when
it comes to recruitment” – there are hardly any. Why, needs debating in another
column.
When
Islamic State was at its peak in 2014, trying to create a state in West Asia
and had raised 30,000 insurgents from across the world, fighters from India –
mostly from Kerala, some from coastal Maharashtra – barely touched a 100.
In
contrast, even Mir will admit, disenfranchised, disgruntled – and even hapless
— Pakistanis are willing to join the jihad worldwide, not least because the
defence of “Islam in danger” is drilled into them. The 2008 Mumbai attacks, of
course, are a classic case in point.
A Lot Depends On Biden
Westward
into Afghanistan, a brother Muslim nation, Pakistan’s ISI continues to do what
it has done for decades. Destabilise the situation and create an
undifferentiated fear by targeting innocent people so that the rule of law
breaks down. It wants to send a message to the Afghans and its leadership that
just like the 1990s, groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani Network — which it
controls parts of — will be in charge. That the Americans have had their turn
for 20 years, and despite a new administration taking charge, are now leaving.
That’s why
the Doha negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government are going
terribly slow. All sides are waiting to see what the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration’s
foreign policy priorities will be — one Biden adviser admitted, it would be
“China. China. China. Russia.”
That,
certainly, would be a mistake. Ignoring the Af-Pak region will mean giving
Pakistan a long rope. But if the Biden lot are willing to reach out to
neighbours like Iran and India and put their concerns around Russia on the back
burner, the fightback against the Taliban would not just mean giving peace a
chance in Afghanistan.
It would
mean cutting down the ISI and encouraging a political dispensation to take real
control in Pakistan. It would mean asking the Chinese, their rivals anywhere
else in the world, to tell their client state, Pakistan, to fall in line. It
would mean reshaping the geopolitics of South Asia.
Does the
Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration have the resources — or the energy and
the mind space and the interest — to do it? Certainly, the next few days and
weeks will be crucial.
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Views are personal.
Original Headline: If Biden ignores Afghanistan-Pakistan,
ISI will get a long rope. India must play bigger role
Source: The Print
URL: https://newageislam.com/the-war-within-islam/pakistan’s-isi-continues-destabilise-situation/d/124111