Taliban’s return to power: RAW-NDS nexus falls apart

ISLAMABAD: The bloodless takeover of Kabul by the Taliban just a week after they launched the march of victory, facing no resistance from their rivals, gave rise to strange coincidences and consequences, one of them positive for Pakistan.

The encouraging upshot of the unique development for Islamabad is the collapse of the unholy nexus between two anti-Pakistan spy agencies -- Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) and India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) -- which are accused of being responsible for a number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan to create instability and mayhem. The latest collaborative strike of the RAW-NDS combine during its dying days was on the Chinese engineers working on the Dasu Dam project in July. Just three days before the breakdown of the bond in the wake of the fall of Kabul, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi had said categorically that these two intelligence agencies were involved in the incident in which 13 people, including nine Chinese, were killed. "Afghanistan's land was used in devising the plan and its planning and execution are clearly linked to the RAW-NDS nexus."

Through this terrorist assault, RAW and the NDS made an effort to force the Chinese working in Pakistan to leave the country and paint Pakistan as an unsafe country for foreigners.

In the run up to the collapse of the Afghan government at the hands of the Taliban, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa experienced a significant spike in terrorist hits, which were believed to be jointly sponsored by RAW and NDS. Besides these two agencies, some other foreign states have been fomenting trouble in Pakistan to keep it unstable and volatile. But the main epicenter of this conspiracy was Afghanistan. Besides, Baloch separatists, who are accused of terrorism in Balochistan, have also been getting support from Afghan territory.

There is optimism that with the demise of the NDS following the Taliban’s walkover and grip over Afghanistan, terrorist incidents in Pakistan will noticeably shrink when criminals do not get assistance from the neighbouring country. This is the most positive outcome of the Taliban’s regaining power. The “local handlers” of such elements may have got a message from the demise of the RAW-NDS cooperative relationship. It is heartening for Pakistan that the Taliban have no love lost for the NDS.

During the Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani governments, Pakistan repeatedly took up the use of the Afghan soil for terrorism against it, but they paid no heed and kept hurling allegations at Islamabad as being responsible for destabilising Afghanistan.

Buoyed by the close RAW-NDS collaboration, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech in Aug 2016, made a reference to the “Baloch freedom struggle”, saying the people in the “conflicted Pakistani state of Balochistan, as also in Gilgit and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir”, had reached out to him. “Today from the ramparts of the Red Fort, I want to greet and express my thanks to some people. In the last few days, the people of Balochistan, Gilgit, and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir have thanked me and have expressed gratitude and good wishes for me.”

The Taliban’s return to power in such a smooth manner has rendered India speechless and the silence of the graveyard prevails at the official level. The Modi government now has no choice but to stomach the bashing he is getting from a section of the Indian media. One commentator in an Indian TV channel programme sarcastically congratulated the host for simultaneously having two Independence Days, one for India and the other for Afghanistan. Billions of dollars pumped in by New Delhi in Afghanistan over the past several years, with the primary objective of encircling and punishing Pakistan, have gone down the drain. A large number of its spies and diplomats have had to escape from Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover to save their lives. Nowhere in in the history of the armed forces of any country did such ‘disciplined’ regiments melt away so quickly, shying away from firing even a single shot in the line of duty as was witnessed in Afghanistan. The Afghan forces were equipped with the most sophisticated weaponry and training imparted by the United States which spent $83 billion during two decades of its occupation. Compared to them, the Taliban had far inferior arms and ammunition and had no air power. The sudden disappearance of the Afghan forces astounded most American strategists and the intelligence community.

The US had banked on the Afghan forces in the hope that they would offer a staunch resistance to the Taliban. This proved to a fallacious assumption, which dashed all the American expectations and stunned its top leaders and policy makers. A tweet by an Indian said: “If you feel useless, just remember, USA took four Presidents, trillions of dollars, millions of lives and 20 years to replace the Taliban with Taliban”.

There is another extraordinary coincidence or meeting of minds that Pakistan, the UN Security Council and the Taliban have almost concurrently called for or vowed to have an inclusive future setup in Afghanistan, accommodating all ethnic and political groups so that it heals the wounds inflicted by the long war.

The Taliban despised by their diehard detractors are trying to demonstrate at least for now that they have considerably changed, have learnt lessons and would not repeat past mistakes and the blunders they committed during their previous rule. The initial optics suggest signs of moderation. But they now have to work hard by taking practical steps to be accepted and recognised by the global community and convince them that they are not the old Taliban that resorted to violence and repression.

Their declarations so far that they would eradicate drugs and poppy cultivation, weapons and narcotics smuggling, would not allow the use of their soil against any other country, let women work in offices as permitted in the Islamic Shariah and would not hinder the independent media to work are welcome announcements and are a clear hint that they want to have a more normal society unlike in the past.

There is a possibility that Afghanistan may finally have peace and would be relatively crime- and violence-free for the first time in many years.

Another notable feature of the Taliban’s return to the driving seat is that two superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – have had to leave Afghanistan after failing to keep the country under their domination. The Soviet Union took a decade to wrap up its invasion while the US took two decades to depart. Earlier, the Afghan Mujahideen, funded and trained by America and its allies, forced the Soviet Union to depart. This time, the Taliban, who did not have world support, compelled the US to call it a day.