Taliban leaders keen to assess India’s stance towards group

NEW DELHI: As the Taliban move closer to the formation of a government in Afghanistan, senior leaders Sher Mohammed Abbas Stanekzai and Anas Haqqani have been engaged in discreet efforts to gauge the thinking in New Delhi towards the group.

Both Stanekzai, the deputy head of Taliban’s political office in Qatar, and Haqqani, a member of the group’s negotiating team, have also been part of an outreach towards India over the past week. This has resulted in them being seen as the main contact-persons for any Taliban contacts with the Indian side in the coming days.

Haqqani, the youngest son of Haqqani Network founder Jalaluddin Haqqani and brother of Taliban deputy leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, has been in contact with intermediaries in Kabul and New Delhi to assess the latest thinking on the Indian side regarding the Taliban, people familiar with the developments said on condition of anonymity.

During these contacts, Haqqani indicated a clearer picture regarding any sort of formal engagement with India would emerge only by the end of September, the people said. This was because the immediate task of the Taliban is forming a government and consolidating its position across Afghanistan.

Haqqani also indicated during these contacts that if the Indian side had conditions for any engagement with the Taliban, his group too would have certain conditions, the people said.

The overtures from Stanekzai, who trained for several years at the Indian Military Academy (IMA) in Dehradun in the early 1980s, didn’t cause as much surprise in New Delhi as the outreach from Haqqani, whose family still heads the Haqqani Network, linked to some of the most brazen attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan.

Former ambassador Amar Sinha, who served as India’s envoy in Kabul, said the Haqqani Network would have a “special problem” in living down its longstanding connections with Pakistan. “We can listen to this charm offensive but we also have to put them to the test. There has been credible evidence linking the Haqqani Network to attacks on Indian interests,” he said.

Gautam Mukhopadhaya, who served as India’s envoy to Afghanistan, Syria and Myanmar, said there is a need to ask hard questions about the outreach to India by Taliban leaders.

“While these assurances are welcome and should not be dismissed, we should ask hard questions about the motives of their outreach, which is mainly to get legitimacy from the one historically important country for Afghanistan – India, what the trade-offs would be in terms of our friends, what security guarantees are worth taking into account the Kabul airport attacks, and how they could protect anyone from the machinations of the ISI, with which they have close ties,” he said.

HAQQANI HAS BEEN IN TOUCH WITH OFFICIALS IN KABUL AND NEW DELHI TO ASSESS THE THINKING ON THE INDIAN SIDE REGARDING THE TALIBAN