Ahmed Rashid, one of the world’s foremost experts on the
Taliban, has predicted that with the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and
Pakistan there could very well be an Indian Taliban in the near future.
Rashid exhorted India and Pakistan to resurrect their dialogue
and cooperate in fighting terrorism and extremism together because if Pakistan
fails to counter the sustained onslaught of the Taliban, New Delhi could be
faced with a Taliban government as its neighbour.
"If you think infiltration into Kashmir is bad now, wait until
the Taliban become your neighbour. Then you will see real infiltration not only
into Kashmir but into India proper."
Rashid, who was speaking at the Woman’s National Democratic Club
in Washington, DC, in a discussion and book signing of his most recent book,
Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, under the aegis of the Asia Society,
said, "In 2001 we expected after the US attack [in the aftermath of 9/11] that
the Taliban, al-Qaeda, would be on the ropes, if not wiped out."
"Today we have the Taliban as a role model for an entire region.
We have not only the Afghan Taliban, today we have the Pakistani Taliban,
Central Asian and very soon you may have the Indian Taliban. You may have the
Taliban stretching into the Caucasus and even into the Middle East," he told the
gathering.
Rashid, who first wrote the seminal book on the Taliban,
reiterated that "it has become a role model for extremism, it is backed
financially by al-Qaeda and it is extremely dangerous. It is now controlling
something like a quarter of Afghanistan and large tracts of northern Pakistan
and they are now coming down into Punjab, and Pakistan is faced with a very,
very serious threat."
The Pakistani military, he added, "unfortunately, even today,
remains in a state of denial about the threat that it faces in the country. It
remains in a state of denial over the Taliban who are encroaching in Pakistan
with even more power and tactics. It remains in denial about the other extremist
groups who’ve been active in other parts of Pakistan – in the south and the
centre of the country. It also remains in denial of the desperate means that the
military needs to be realigning itself on a much more modern counter-insurgency
strategy than it has so far applied in its action with the Taliban."
Rashid said the situation in Pakistan "is very dire" and that
currently "there is a fragmentation in the leadership. There is no demonstrated
leadership, either being shown by the politicians or being shown by the army
right now."
With regard to the Obama administration’s new strategy for
Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly its regional approach, the Pakistani
author and journalist argued, "The problem is all of the six neighbours have
bilateral problems with each other and you cannot get them to agree on
stabilising Afghanistan unless you initiate a diplomatic process to get them to
talk to each other about their bilateral issues."
Rashid said it was a no-brainer that "the biggest problem here
is India and Pakistan", both of whom "are unfortunately now involved in a deep
rivalry in Afghanistan."
"I call Kabul the new Kashmir in a way," he said and noted that
"Pakistan believes that the Indian presence in Afghanistan is undermining the
western border of Pakistan and that the Afghan government is too close to India.
There is a litany of complaints here. And, this is all being effected by the
Americans, by the US military, and the Indian-Afghan alliance is part of a US
plan to help destabilise Pakistan."
Rashid said, "This is the kind of conspiracy theory which is
very prevalent in the military, the bureaucracy, in government circles, within
the elite in Pakistan."
"I certainly don’t agree with that and Afghanistan is today a
sovereign state and it has a right to have relations with every country in the
world and no other country can dictate that you can’t have relations with so and
so and so and so."
But, Rashid asserted that "at the same time, the Indians need to
be much more flexible than they have been."
He acknowledged that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh "has been
very patient so far with the kind of strings of bomb blasts that had happened in
India even before Mumbai. Mumbai was perhaps the icing on the cake and perhaps
with elections looming, the Congress government couldn’t really take it any
more."
"Anyway, the net result has been a total breakdown in relations
but I really think a start should be made in trying to get India and Pakistan to
discuss Afghanistan and to put an end to this covert war that both sides are
mounting from Afghanistan, or in Afghanistan, and the bad blood that exists
between both countries that are threatened by the Taliban."
Rashid warned that if India doesn’t let Pakistan "off the hook
here", and doesn’t help Pakistan out in this regard, India would be faced with
two threats in the near future. India would be "faced with an Indian Taliban. We
already have Indian Islamic extremist groups working in India and secondly, if
Pakistan slides even further, India will be sharing a border with the Taliban.
You will not be sharing a border with the Pakistan state. You will be sharing a
border with a Pakistan North-West Frontier Province that has fallen to the
Taliban and even parts of Punjab fallen to the Taliban and then what are you
going to do?"
"There is a real need for India to assess its national security
needs and to understand that it is threatened by this," Rashid said. "It may be,
for someone living in Kolkata or someone living in Madras, it may be an
existential threat. But it is very real and the kind of mayhem that was wreaked
in Mumbai recently is an example of what some of these groups are capable of
doing."
