E-Paper
Taliban-e-Pakistan: Inseparable Country Cousins
Wherever there is Taliban, Pakistan cannot be far behind - goes the adage that the world has ironically come to live with, ever since 1962-born Mullah Umar, a local Kandahar village priest, a product of Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary of Akkora Khattak in Pakistan?s NWFP and a veteran of the Harkat-e-Inquilab-e Islami faction of the Mujahideen, fled to neighboring Balochistan Province of Pakistan after killing the local mujahideen commander in Sang Hesar near Kandahar, from where he emerged in the fall of 1994, reportedly with a well-armed militia of 1,500 followers, sufficiently funded and stocked to provide protection to Pakistani trade convoys carrying goods overland to Turkmenistan.
Wherever there is Taliban, Pakistan cannot be far behind - goes the adage that the world has ironically come to live with, ever since 1962-born Mullah Umar, a local Kandahar village priest, a product of Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary of Akkora Khattak in Pakistan’s NWFP and a veteran of the Harkat-e-Inquilab-e Islami faction of the Mujahideen, fled to neighboring Balochistan Province of Pakistan after killing the local mujahideen commander in Sang Hesar near Kandahar, from where he emerged in the fall of 1994, reportedly with a well-armed militia of 1,500 followers, sufficiently funded and stocked to provide protection to Pakistani trade convoys carrying goods overland to Turkmenistan.
The notoriety and the Pakistani connection, thereafter is extremely well documented for anybody/ any nation to miss out, unless of course someone like the USA chooses to deliberately ignore the relationship between the two.
So it was not surprising when the news about Pakistan’s ISI involvement in Suryanarayan’s killing was momentarily broken and soon got lost in media’s bereavement over Pramod Mahajan’s death resulting out of a family dispute, which came about around the same time. Yet despite getting out of media focus and no matter how tightlipped the Indian Foreign Office may have remained over the issue, taking the official line that Karzai has already ordered a probe into the matter; the one thing that cannot be ignored by us at least, unlike the US, especially after what we witnessed in Kandahar during the IC 814 hijacking, with Urdu and Punjabi speaking ISI personnel disguised as Taliban.
The fact is that Pakistan continues to enjoy unfettered proximity with the Taliban.
Pakistan always had more reasons than one, to remain central to the geopolitics of Afghanistan. There were and still remain strong strategic and an economic dimensions to its interests in this underdeveloped, impoverished, tribal landscape. Strategic, because it wanted to offset the geographical deficiency of having a very narrow central landmass, which could split the country horizontally into two halves, through a penetrative military strike by the Indian army. Hence it needed strategic space beyond its western boundary stretching deep inside Afghanistan to preclude any such military designs by India. Despite the peace overtures and the current cricket bonhomie, Pakistan until date harbours such fears. The other strategic reason lies in maintaining a power projection through proxy presence inside the so-called ‘weak underbelly’ of Central Asia.
Pakistan’s economic compulsion to manage the hinterland of Afghanistan stems from the urge/necessity to control the trade routes emanating to and from Central Asia (former Soviet Central Asian Republics: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan), including the management of illicit narco- trade. And finally, the potentially lucrative oil and gas pipelines are too lucrative to be ignored. This is where the convenience of a Taliban connection comes in handy. During early1996, reports indicated that a partnership between the American oil major Unocal and the Saudi Delta had concluded plans for a multi-billion dollar oil and gas pipeline project traversing from Turkmenistan to Baluchistan in Pakistan via Herat and Kandahar in Afghanistan.
Originally, it is believed that these firms had concluded separate agreements with various warlords who controlled the projected pipeline route. However the swift military successes of the ISI backed Taliban forces in defeating the non-Pushtun warlords soon brought the entire oil route under Taliban control.
Yet despite this success it was apparent that billions of dollars of financing would not be available without the agreement of Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Government, who naturally was reluctant to sponsor a project that would strengthen his opponents. His government, thus, became a major strategic hurdle to Pakistan’s goal of reaching Central Asia, which gave Pakistan a politically legitimate reason to step up military and financial support to help consolidate the Taliban regime throughout Afghanistan.
Everything was hunky dory in Pakistan’s overt relationship with the Taliban until 9/11 happened, which invited a swift military reaction from the US and its allies.
Pakistan did have a lot of tight rope walking to do post 9/11, which it did with a fair degree of finesse by remaining on the American side yet clandestinely keeping its doors open to Mullah Umar and his taliban. As a result despite the replacement of the Taliban regime by Hamid Karzai, and the stifling of funds by the First World, the taliban still enjoy an undisputed hold over the Afghan soil, reportedly possessing over a $100 million war chest today, over and above maintaining surrogates in Central Asia, Chechnya and nearer home POK (LeT, Al Badr, HuM and JeM). Pakistan’s current strategic aim is to reoccupy the lost space that has gone in India’s favour; hence one should anticipate stepped up guerilla activity by the Taliban against India’s presence in the region. We therefore need to get proactive to defend our interests.
