Through the lens darkly
ZED Tarar, deputy director of the London International Media Hub and the US State Department’s Hindi and Urdu spokesman (is it colonial hangover that prompts a country to have its Hindi/Urdu spokesperson posted in London instead of New Delhi or Islamabad?) has made an apparently routine statement: “The US does not look at the impact of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan through the India lens.” Of course, no country should look at developments in another through a third party’s lens. For instance, Indian officials should look at Russia and Iran through their own lens — if they still have one — rather than the American monocles that they have been wearing since the Narasimha Rao era.
The best bet for the West is to have a UN Peacekeeping Force with Indian boots firmly on the ground in Afghanistan.
The worrisome part of the spokesperson’s comment was the qualitative differentiation he made between the US partnership with India and Pakistan. While the US is partnering with India on vaccination and climate change, it is collaborating with Pakistan on Afghanistan and counter-terrorism. Such clarity of vision and articulation points towards a Pak-first policy for the US towards Afghanistan — that is, if it is not looking at the troubled country exclusively through the Pak lens. For, the nature of this partnership was underscored after Pak spy agency chief Faiz Hameed flew down to install ISI’s puppet regime in Kabul, with global terrorist Sirajuddin Haqqani as its pivotal interior minister. And this goes well with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s insistence that Pakistan has a vital role to play in dealing with the Taliban, as he told an Indian newspaper in end-July, much before Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul in mid-August.
The sequence of events leading to the Taliban takeover (or US handover), the ISI chief brokering a deal to install a government in Kabul and the US reiteration of a Pak-centric policy towards Afghanistan — when read along with Thursday’s Taliban accusation that the US has violated the Doha agreement on keeping Haqqani out of the terror list — would seem like a script getting enacted, one in which India doesn’t have many lines. India still can go on doing vaccine maitri at the cost of its own citizens and cut down its carbon emissions at the cost of its meagre industry, but the US is offering Pakistan a seat at the high table where global terrorism is being discussed. So, only the perpetrators get to discuss the impact of their actions and not the victims. The irony in this is not lost on anyone.
The transformation of Afghanistan into an emirate and a rabid Islamist society for the second time in the last thirty years can also be viewed as a continuation of the colonial policy of identity politics, which created Pakistan in the first place. The British attempt to turn the oil-rich Muslim world into its playground and a piggy bank after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and later the successful US policies to keep the former Soviet Union out of the Persian Gulf seem to have influenced the creation and re-creation of Islamist identity projects all along West and Central Asia, with their reverberations felt in the entire continent. The closest allies of the US in West Asia have been among the biggest exporters and funders of a pan-Islamist ideology.
Now, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan will not just have an impact in Jammu and Kashmir in terms of heightened militant activities or a psychological push for Islamist secessionism, it would even have a pan-Indian influence over those already radicalised by Maududism. For instance, a newspaper in Kerala run by Jamaat-e-Islami headlined the fall of Kabul as “Occupation over: free Afghanistan”. So, there are Indian newspapers and organisations outside J&K that have celebrated the victory of the Taliban and look forward to a Sharia society.
Interestingly, even in a Marxist-dominated state, it is not ideologically fashionable or politically attractive to attack the regressive Islamists, as it is to take on Hindutva forces. While the ruling dispensation there had invited purdah-clad women to protest against Sabarimala’s regressive rituals, there are no similar attempts yet to condemn the negation of women’s rights in Islamist societies — and in families closer home — that a Taliban era would herald. Instead the two prominent minorities — Muslims and Christians — are clashing over the fertility rate of Muslims and the conversion of non-Muslims through marriage. The impact of the Taliban takeover could be gauged from the anti-Muslim sentiments it has triggered among Christians in Kerala. A bishop of the Catholic Church has unleashed an extremely hate-filled tirade of “narcotics jihad” against Muslim youngsters — with no reference to the Afghan situation, though — consciously or unconsciously timed after the formation of the new Taliban regime. The domestic climate of Hindutva aggression and the Muslim hurt over the fear of loss of citizenship is fertile for radicalisation.
In this context, for peace in the region and to ensure that radical Islam does not get exported to Xinjiang, Russian enclaves with Muslim populations, the Central Asian Republics, J&K or Kerala, the United Nations should have a peacekeeping force in Kabul. The Haqqanis had earlier been accused of the 2008 attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul that killed 58 people, including senior Indian officials. Such an attack can happen any time against any embassy. The latest Kabul attack left 13 US troops and over 150 Afghans dead just outside the airport. And there is no guarantee that any country’s mission or interest will not get targeted in Afghanistan. Hence it is important for the world community to insist on a UN Peacekeeping Force to be stationed in the country if the Taliban want their leaders to be struck off the UN list of wanted criminals.
Afghanistan will not look rosy through the Pak lens or the colonial prism of identity politics any longer, however much the US officials try — for the Russians and the Chinese have firmly entrenched themselves there, with the latter announcing a $31 million aid package to the Taliban. The best bet for the West is to have a UN Peacekeeping Force with Indian boots firmly on the ground in Afghanistan.
