NEW DELHI : The Taliban’s swift takeover has brought to power an Afghan government more closely aligned with Pakistan, stirring security concerns in neighboring India and potentially raising tensions between the two nuclear-armed rivals.
Officials in India, who supported the US-backed government in Kabul, have warned in recent days that the Taliban’s return could again make the country a haven for terrorists. The Taliban have said they would no longer allow Afghanistan to be used against other countries, but Indian officials are skeptical.
“It’s the same Taliban that was there 20 years ago," India’s Chief of Defense Staff Bipin Rawat said last week at a meeting on U.S.-India partnership.
Indian authorities are particularly concerned about security in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir, where a heavily militarized line of control has separated India and Pakistan since partition in 1947. India doesn’t share a border with Afghanistan, but Islamist militant groups have long targeted India over its control of a portion of Muslim-majority Kashmir.
“Taliban’s victory will give a fillip to radical ideology and groups with similar orientation in the region and around the globe. It will also embolden Pakistan to continue using terror as part of its state policy," said Amar Sinha, a former Indian diplomat who served as an ambassador to Afghanistan between 2013 and 2016.
India and the U.S. have accused Pakistan of supporting the Taliban and providing them with sanctuaries on its side of the border, which Islamabad denies.
Pakistan says it favors including the Taliban in the political process as the only way to bring peace. Recently Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan went further, saying Afghans had “thrown off the shackles of slavery" with the Taliban takeover.
India and Pakistan have long accused each other of supporting terror groups. India has pointed to groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba that it blames for attacks on Kashmir, while Pakistan has alleged that India supports Baloch separatists and violent jihadists.
“Pakistan has repeatedly presented irrefutable evidence of India’s active planning, promoting, aiding, abetting, financing and execution of terrorist activities in Pakistan," Islamabad’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in August.
Pakistan has alleged that India had a hand in recent attacks against Chinese interests in Pakistan, including a bombing that killed nine Chinese nationals in July. New Delhi denies the charges.
In the 1990s, India and Pakistan fought a proxy war in Afghanistan. India and allies such as Russia backed what was known as the Northern Alliance of warlords from ethnic minorities. Pakistan supported jihadist groups from the country’s biggest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, who also live on the Pakistani side of the border, settling finally on the Taliban.
Once the Taliban conquered most of Afghanistan in 1996, many Pakistani jihadist groups that target India ran training camps there—until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 toppled the Taliban. With the U.S. gone, India fears Afghanistan will again become a haven for groups that target it.
The biggest concern for India would be the spread of extremism triggered by the euphoria among the various terrorist groups in Afghanistan at having forced the U.S. withdrawal, said Deependra Singh Hooda, a former lieutenant general in the Indian military.
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“This could embolden groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba, who would use this narrative to recruit more youth into their ranks," he said.
India blames the two groups, which are largely based in Pakistan, for carrying out a number of attacks on its soil. Lashkar-e-Taiba is believed to be behind the 2008 Mumbai attack that killed more than 160 people, including six Americans. The group denies carrying out the attack. Some of its operatives are on trial in Pakistan for their alleged involvement.
Jaish-e-Mohammed, which is designated a terror organization by the U.S. and the United Nations, was founded by Masood Azhar, a Pakistan-based Muslim cleric. Azhar was set free in 1999 in exchange for passengers on an Indian Airlines plane that was hijacked and flown to Afghanistan during the Taliban’s rule. The group’s primary aim is to merge with Pakistan the portion of Kashmir controlled by India.
Pakistan says the turmoil on the Indian side of Kashmir is an indigenous uprising mainly against human-rights abuses carried out by Indian troops there. In 2019, New Delhi took away the region’s political autonomy and detained many local politicians. Human-rights groups have criticized India for suppressing political freedoms in Kashmir.
The Indian government says that the aim of removing Kashmir’s autonomous status was to integrate it with the rest of the country and encourage economic development there, and that the criticism over the suppression of political freedoms ignores the security threats.
The two countries have held a clandestine peace dialogue over the past couple of years, according to officials on both sides, but relations remain tense.
Violence in the Kashmir region has the potential to escalate into a broader conflict. In 2019, India sent warplanes into Pakistan for the first time since the rivals were at war in 1971 after a Kashmiri militant killed 40 Indian paramilitary police officers. The attacker claimed in a video released after the attack to be a member of Jaish-e-Mohammed, and the Indian air force carried out strikes on what Indian officials said was a training camp of the group.
On Tuesday, New Delhi said the Indian ambassador to Qatar met the head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai. The discussions focused on safety, security and the return of Indian nationals stranded in Afghanistan, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said. India also raised concerns about Afghan soil being used for terrorist activities, and the Taliban representative assured the ambassador that it wouldn’t be.
“If India has to keep its neighborhood peaceful, it will have to find ways and means to work with all stakeholders, including the Taliban," said Arvind Kumar, professor at New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of International Studies.
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