A bad sign for India’s security

ast Sunday, coincidentally on India’s Independence Day, the Taliban were able to take charge in Kabul with only the minimal fighting, and it is not yet certain whether there is a resistance brewing in the country against the Taliban. Nevertheless, the mere fact of the Taliban ascendance is a bad sign for India’s security status.

The developments in Afghanistan have led to triumphalism in Pakistan. India, as a result, will be required to take measures to keep its security grid on higher alert than is the norm. This will need to be the case in all regions of the former J&K state — meaning the Jammu and the Kashmir division, as well as Ladakh, especially the region in proximity of Siachen where Pakistan and Chinese forces can conceivably converge. In addition, Punjab, Rajasthan and the coastal regions of our southern states will need to guard the internal security situation with vigour.

Pakistan-based outfits such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, that have fattened on the largesse of the State, may be expected to be emboldened by the advance made by the Taliban. These are the organisations that have been active in J&K for a long time. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant- Khorasan (ISIL-K) is, in this part of the world, rightly suspected to be another Pakistan-inspired outfit, despite its name, which can been misleading.

While chairing the UN Security Council meeting on Thursday, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar articulated India’s legitimate concerns in this regard, and drew the attention of the world body to the dangers posed by terrorism and states that sponsor them, urging that a “selective, tactical or a complacent” view of terrorism would be to the detriment of the whole world in the same manner that Covid-19 has turned out to be. Mr Jaishankar could not have been more explicit.

This is a pointer to the US stance. In UN deliberations and action-plans on terrorism, Washington refrained from categorising the Taliban as a terrorist organisation, preferring “insurgency”, which has a somewhat different meaning. This is because the US was all too clear from the beginning that the day it decided to exit Afghanistan it would be negotiating with this Pakistan-nurtured outfit. America had been “selective” and “tactical” in dealing with the Taliban.