When events that bear a striking similarity to others unfold in India’s neighbourhood, within days of a new government taking over in Delhi, it becomes clear that not only could several 26/11-like challenges lie ahead, but attempts to derail India’s global power prospects under a can-do Prime Minister like Narendra Modi are now in full play.
First, Herat, in western Afghanistan where 72 hours before Prime Minister Modi is sworn in, four gunmen stormed the Indian mission. They were later found to be from the ISI backed Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. This was followed a little over a week later in Kabul by two failed assassination attempts on the presidential front-runner, Abdullah Abdullah, whose pro-India leanings again, are no secret.
And then Karachi, where it beggars disbelief that a Taliban force, hitherto a rag-tag band with no formal training in warfare and armed until recently with nothing more than Kalashnikovs and Islamic zeal, drawn from the misery and despair of madrassas and orphanages across the AfPak border, had overnight acquired the training and hi-tech equipment — ammunition had India markings — to execute a well-planned, brazen attack on the international airport; not once, but twice in the space of 36 hours.
Of the 28 people killed, 10 were terrorists, sporting suicide vests. Sound like the Taliban to you? A far cry from the gun-toting Talibs who fired at unarmed schoolgirls in a bus in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa — remember Malala Yousafzai — and Shia pilgrims returning from Iran last week. But here’s the thing. It’s not just the Tehreek-e-Taliban, led by the shadowy Mullah Fazlullah who hides in the badlands of Waziristan, that has claimed responsibility for the June 8 Karachi airport assault. So has the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), led by Tahir Yuldashev until he was killed in an American drone strike in August 2009.
The IMU, with strong ties to Osama bin Laden, have had their base deep inside Waziristan ever since the Taliban-Al Qaeda were run out of Kabul in 2001. The reluctance of the Pakistan Army to confront them head-on has seen one more deadly acronym added to the TTP-Al Qaeda-IMU mix — EMI, or the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, that represents the Uighurs, fighting for an independent Xinjiang, that threatens Beijing’s interests in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and the Baloch port of Gwadar which gives China access to the Gulf.
It’s the Central Asian mix to the terrorists in the Karachi attack however that is a pointer to the regrouping of disparate Sunni groups in the AfPak backyard under the Al Qaeda umbrella, where US forces are poised to leave a skeleton force of just under 10,000 troops that few believe could hold back the tide. Washington isn’t able to see that the Taliban, being given shelter and succour by Doha and Riyadh, as well as sympathetic forces within Pakistan’s Army, will yield to the superior ideological thrust of Al Qaeda, as it did once before.
The Afghan drawdown is as faulty a strategy, therefore, as that adopted by the United States in the other theatre that they exited in 2011, leaving the door open for fighters under the black flags of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to sweep into Iraq’s second biggest city, Mosul this week, brutally remaking Saddam Hussain’s formerly secular Iraq into an avowedly sectarian Sunni state.
Shia Iran, attempting a rapprochement with the US in a bid to kickstart its own economy, and up against the powerful oil-rich Sunni Gulf states of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, can see itself being rapidly undercut by the scimitar of Sunni terror, that begins on the porous Turkey-Iraq border and ends in Kashmir.
Mr Modi should take note as he heads out for a September pow-wow with a US President struggling to retain his nation’s fast eroding influence, that this grouping, inherently inimical to the rise of India, that sees little benefit in backing a civilian Pakistan government that wants to build economic ties with Delhi and Kabul.
The Indian ammo used in the Karachi attack was intended to drive home the message, however far-fetched, that the TTP — whose goal incidentally is to establish an Islamic emirate across Afghanistan-Pakistan and Kashmir, and equates Delhi with Tel Aviv and Washington — is an Indian proxy, just as the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami are the ISI’s preferred weapons of choice, whose footprints were all over the Mumbai siege.
Sources close to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif have said that a clear eyed Mr Sharif has chosen to disregard the Indian ammo as a bogus red herring, recognising the move for what it is — trying to implicate India in what could have been Pakistan’s own 26/11, and in so doing stymie any attempt at peace-making by Islamabad and Delhi in the days to come. It’s no accident that Mr Sharif’s letter to Mr Modi lays to rest all doubts that he was unhappy over his May 26-27 visit to Delhi.
The point, however, is that ever since it became obvious that power would pass from a Congress-led government to one led by Mr Modi, who would pick up where Atal Behari Vajpayee had left, and from where Manmohan Singh’s outreach to Asif Ali Zardari died in the aftermath of 26/11, India would be fair game for terrorists of any nomenclature.
Mr Sharif who, significantly, on his brief visit to Delhi, found time to visit iron-ore magnate Sajjan Jindal, wants to halt the free-fall that is Pakistan’s economy, and override former ISI chief General Shuja Pasha’s searing admission to the Abbotabad commission of inquiry that “we are a failing state, not yet a failed state”.
Mr Modi’s playbook must similarly be able to rise above the many pin-pricks that are certain to come India’s way. As he prepares to sup with US President Barack Obama in September, he must not only drive home the need for the United States administration to back the elected governments in Islamabad and Kabul, who can partner Mr Modi’s India as it carves out a thriving South Asian economic unit, he must also reinforce the risks that lie with the US arming and backing a Pakistan military, whose level of support for terrorism has not been tackled with enough weight, and who see both Mr Sharif’s-led Pakistan as much as Mr Modi’s India as ideological adversaries.
Mr Obama shouldn’t make the same mistake that George W. Bush made, and fail to tackle, as New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall writes in her book, what has always been The Wrong Enemy.
