New Delhi, July 12: Pakistan continues to have ties with the Taliban and would happily get them to negotiate with the Americans if the US could promise to get the Indians out of Afghanistan. But if the western coalition is not “convinced”, Pakistan can turn “ugly” on India again.
If anyone thought the ongoing Pakistan-Taliban conflict in its tribal areas had changed the way Pakistan army viewed their terrorists, or India, think again.
In a revealing interview, Pakistan army spokesperson General Athar Abbas said, “What we see as a concern is an over-involvement of Indians in Afghanistan… particularly if one is watching the security calculus in that… If you see an over-ingress of the Indians into these areas, like their government, their ministries, their army. The fear is, tomorrow what happens if these Americans move out and they’re replaced by Indians as military trainers? That becomes a serious concern.”
In what is little more than a veiled threat, Abbas told the US interviewer it would take unspecified “ugly” actions: if things go “beyond them, beyond the line then of course the situation would take an ugly turn…” Essentially, Pakistan continues to believe that it isn’t in its interests leveraging its ties with Taliban to get India out of Afghanistan. The argument, according to Indian officials, has not changed in Pakistan. Certainly, these candid comments by the Pakistan army continue to show that Pakistan’s nurturing of the Taliban and other terrorist groups will continue because they want to keep them as a pressure point on India.
Gen Athar Abbas makes no bones about the fact that Pakistan continues to have links with the Taliban leadership. “It was the Pakistani intelligence services that was so instrumental in assisting the American relationship in fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan… It was groups such as Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaladdin Haqqani — the Noorzai tribes of the south, the Pashtun tribes, indeed the tribe of Mullah Omar himself, these were very valuable partners…through the friendship of Pakistan. Now America finds itself fighting these exact men and these groups.”
He adds, “What the ISI (the Inter-Services Intelligence) directorate in the past had a very intense relationship because all were using them in Afghanistan.” After 9/11, things changed, but Pakistan continued its ties with these groups. “There was a U turn, and the state followed, the army followed, the ISI followed.”
However, ruling out talks with Taliban, US special envoy Richard Holbrooke responded to the interview by saying that US would negotiate with Taliban if they renounce al-Qaida publicly. “The US and (Afghan) President (Hamid) Karzai have long said Taliban reconciliation is part of our programme, people who work with Taliban, who support them, who want to lay down their arms, the door is always open,” he told CNN.
—Agencies