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| Recognise Taliban threat, don’t hype it | | |
Shankar Roychowdhury
It is never a good idea to ignore or downplay threats to our national security. We have done so in the past for which the nation, particularly its soldiers (never politicians or bureaucrats), have had to pay a heavy price. But it is equally a bad idea to exaggerate any threat and hype it up out of all proportion.
We appear to be doing so with the Taliban, and the perception that it is coming close to the border with India. As far as this country is concerned, the Taliban are not all that different from other jihadi organisations like the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Hizbul Mujahideen, which the Pakistan Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) employ for proxy warfare and whom the Indian Army is already fighting in Kashmir. The jihadi outfits, the Taliban included, represent a brutish ideology combining the worst of medieval religious beliefs with savage tribal practices, which have remained unchanged since the early Middle Ages. To Western expeditionary forces, war-weary and bedevilled in strange faraway lands like Iraq and Afghanistan without any end in sight, the Taliban might appear to be some kind of demons from a distant hell, but with India it is different, because, unlike the Americans in Vietnam or the Soviets in Afghanistan, this country is protecting its own hearth and home from the barbarians at the gates.
Some tend to regard the onward march of the Taliban as a kind of symbolic rerun of Mahmud Ghaznavi or Ahmad Shah Abdali. This is of course utterly ridiculous. The Republic of India in the 21st century is not the bygone India of Somnath and Panipat. There can be no withdrawal or retreat. It is, therefore, important for the national psyche to deconstruct the semi-mythological status accorded to the Taliban by excessive media hype, and perceive them stripped down to real life in their actual dimensions.
The Indian Army has had extensive experience with their forbearers through three Indo-Pakistan wars, the Kargil war and the long-running proxy war with Pakistan. They are hard opponents, but superhuman, and are as eminently mortal as other human beings. They have been dealt with before, and can be similarly dealt with again if required.
So how dangerous really is the Talib threat to India? The Taliban are essentially the same tribal Lashkars who invaded Kashmir in 1947, updated to a contemporary context. They come across in visual media as well-trained light infantry, but their USP would be a motivation for jihad against the kafir.
Nevertheless, they cannot achieve much against India by themselves. The ISI and the Pakistan Army have incorporated the Taliban as strategic resources for proxy war in India and Afghanistan in tandem with the other jihadi groups and are actively supported by the Pakistan Army. Taliban resources do substantially enhance the existing force levels and intensify the threat for which India, and in particular its armed forces, will require to be prepared.
However, the Taliban could create an existential threat to India if they succeed in seizing power in Pakistan through a radicalised government under their control.
There are stresses within the Pakistan Army, a highly Islamicised entity ideologically radicalised by the Tablighi Jamaat, and resentful about having to fight against their ideological brethren in the Taliban in what is generally perceived to be America’s war. Jihadi influences have taken deep roots within Pakistan’s armed forces, custodians of the country’s nuclear arsenal, and collusion between Taliban surrogates and radical elements in the armed forces, some in positions of critical responsibility, can no longer be dismissed as total fantasy.
Given an environment of sufficient frenzy, the possibility of a "nuclearisation" of the jihad against India cannot be ignored and must not be discarded — Taliban suicide bomber groups with a nuclear device or materials, covertly acquired with official acquiesence and smuggled by land, air or sea to a selected "ground zero" in India, to re-create a Mumbai 26/11 combined with Chernobyl. All it requires is a throw of the cosmic dice to bring together the circumstances, intentions and personalities, as in 1999 with Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the Kargil intrusion. This is India’s doomsday scenario, and must engage serious attention within our security establishment.
Pakistan has been our traditional adversary and is likely to remain so in the foreseeable future as well. That country is in the throes of a multi-cornered civil war, caused by various internal contradictions in its state and society, between the Taliban and the civil government, the civil government and the Pakistan Army, and the Pakistan Army and the Taliban. The Sindhi and Baloch populations have little love lost for the predominantly Pashtun Taliban, while Pakistan’s civil society, their women’s organisations, the younger generation with upwardly mobile aspirations, their artistic and legal communities, plus of course their haute couture "Page Three" people, are understandably anxious about a future under the Sharia. In the past, civil society in Pakistan demonstrated its strength against President Musharraf, but similar efforts are unlikely to succeed against the bestial Taliban. For India, the situation across the border is naturally of concern and arouses much sympathy from civil activists in this country. But this must not obscure the fact that when it comes to critical issues, such as Kashmir or terrorism, all sections of Pakistani society, Talib or liberal, are united in their opposition to India. Any attempted helping hand across the border is likely to be misconstrued by many elements in that country. Pakistan’s internal contradictions are its own problem, and there is not too much that India can do except to take precautionary measures, a watching brief, and keep its guard up at all times.
Meanwhile, Indian television audiences who watched in fascinated horror as a girl in Swat was flogged by the Taliban under the Sharia law would do well to remember similar scenes in Mangalore not all that long ago, involving the Sri Ram Sene and its toothy supremo Pramod Muthalik, our very own Baitullah Mehsud. While we gear up to battle the Taliban across the border, what about tackling the Taliban-type elements already in our midst?
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