INDIA AND PAKISTAN AFTER THE RETURN OF THE TALIBAN

Sadanand Dhume is an author, commentator and columnist with The Wall Street Journal. Among his published works is the best selling My Friend the Fanatic; Travels with a Radical Islamist. With the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, Sadanand Dhume wrote in The Wall Street Journal on 16 September 2021, “The return of Taliban rule in Afghanistan is an unambiguous strategic setback for India and, at least in the near term, a triumph for the Taliban’s chief backer – Pakistan. Islamabad-aided terrorist groups will almost certainly use Afghanistan to organise attacks on Indian-controlled Kashmir and other parts of the country.” On Wednesday 6 October 2021, Sadanand Dhume spoke with members of The Sydney Institute in a Zoom meeting. The article which follows is taken from an edited transcript of that meeting.

INDIA AND PAKISTAN AFTER THE RETURN OF THE TALIBAN

SADANAND DHUME

Let’s start with India. The way the return of the Taliban is viewed by strategic thinkers in New Delhi, I would say, overwhelmingly, this is through the prism of the 1990s. That was, of course, not a very happy period in Afghanistan, but it was also not a happy period for India.

As many of you would recall, after the Mujahideen defeated the Soviet Union in 1989, a lot of the jihadist groups that had been operating or had been born in Pakistan under the aegis of the inter-services Pakistan intelligence agency, pivoted their attention toward the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which was India’s only Muslim majority province.  They were helped along by local unrest and the fact that the Indian authorities, two years earlier in 1987, had conducted an election which was widely regarded as a sham – it was rigged. So, there was an uptake of violence. When we look back on the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, it is dated to 1989, and that is no coincidence.

So, that is the prism through which Indians view it. There was the notorious hijacking of an Indian Airlines aircraft in 1999. Some of you may remember that it was hijacked to Taliban controlled Kandahar. In return for freeing the passengers, India agreed to free three people who were in its jail for terrorism incidents. One of them ended up founding the group Jaish-e-Mohammed, another one ended up being responsible for the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl. So, in many ways, this sweeping into power and the return of the Taliban, coincidentally on India’s Independence Day on 15 August, is probably the worst possible nightmare for India, in the Afghan context.

The Indians have spent 20 years trying to claw back a foothold in Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban, India had emerged as the fifth largest donor to Afghanistan. It paid for a new Afghan parliament, it sent Indian teachers, doctors and so on; it had very close ties with the Afghan government, it donated helicopters to the military, it helped train police officers.

The military footprint was extremely light, or virtually non-existent, partially because NATO and the US did not want India to get involved too deeply in that arena, keeping Pakistan sensitivities in mind. And India itself realised that was not what it would be able to do politically. But, short of a military presence, the Indian presence in Afghanistan was quite deep. India had four consulates and a large embassy in Kabul. All of that essentially evaporated overnight. India found that the Taliban – widely viewed in Delhi as a proxy of Pakistan since it not only originated in Pakistan in the early 1990s, but after 2001 found safety and sanctuaries in Pakistan – was back in charge.

So, it’s a clear strategic setback for India. It’s viewed largely through the prism of the late 1990s, which was an unhappy period. One of the major strategic questions that emerges from this is to what extent is this going to affect Indian security? And how is that going to end up affecting India’s own stance in the larger region? This goes back to a very old dilemma in Indian strategic thought or even in British Indian strategic thought to a certain extent. In an Indian context, it is the dilemma between the continental question and the maritime question. In our present-day terms, very simply put, the question really is whether India is going to focus its energies in its defence preparedness on its land borders, primarily with Pakistan but also with China, or will it be able to find the resources and reorient its own thinking and vision towards maritime questions.

This, of course, is what people in Washington would like to see. In India, that looks eastward more and is less obsessed with what is happening on its western borders, the return of the Taliban throws all of that into question, particularly if there is an uptake of violence. They’re already seeing an uptake of violence in Jammu and Kashmir. The danger is if some of that Islamist violence spills over with dramatic incidents in Jammu and Kashmir, such as the 2019 suicide bombing that led to Indian air strikes in Pakistan. Or if we see dramatic incidents in other parts of India, such as the Mumbai attacks, which were carried out by the Lashkar-e-taiba, which is a Pakistan based group. That is the big question; can India manage to contain blowback from the fall of Kabul, from the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, in terms of its own security. Moreover, what is the impact to its strategic posture. Domestically, this also plays into some pretty dangerous trends.

If you followed, for example, the coverage of the fall of Kabul and the coverage of Afghanistan in many Indian news channels, particularly the Indian news channels that are viewed as very close to the ruling party, the BJP, to call it irresponsible would be a bit of an understatement. They generally were very quick to conflate the Taliban with all Muslims and therefore, by proxy, conflate the Taliban with Indian Muslims. So, the fact that they were tempted to use the incidents in Afghanistan as a means to demonise Indian Muslims deepens some of those fissures that we’ve already seen emerge, particularly over the last seven years, as the ruling party mobilises its base among the 80 per cent Hindu population, in large degree by mobilising them against the threat, as they see it, of the Muslim minority.

This is not to say that there is no genuine security threat that India faces from radical Islamist terrorism. There is a genuine threat. But there is also a tendency to not be very careful and not to separate the part of the threat that is genuine from the concerns and realities of India having a very large Muslim population, which is, in fact, overwhelmingly peaceful and has nothing to do with any kind of violence or radicalism. So, that’s my top line view of how things are different from if we’d had this conversation a year ago.

On the Pakistan side, we have seen how this is undoubtedly a short-term win for Pakistan. The ISI (the Pakistani army) has had a dream of strategic depth, which, in a nutshell, was the idea that because Pakistan was much smaller than India, geographically, Afghanistan would give it space where it could counter India’s geographical advantage by having this space in the rear to which it could withdraw.

Pakistan has, for four decades now, worked very hard to have an Afghan government that many Indians and Afghans would call Pakistan’s vassal state or colony in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis themselves would put it more mildly. They would say they want a friendly government in Kabul. Either way, the Pakistanis want a government in Kabul which would be very sympathetic to their concerns about India, a government that in no way could be seen as tilting towards India and against Pakistan the way the previous government, the Ghani government, was viewed in Islamabad. Undoubtedly, this is now a short-term win for Pakistan. In many ways, they have been more successful this time round than they were, even in the previous period when they swept into Kabul in 1996 and ruled for five years.

The key difference is that this time the Taliban captured some of the northern areas, places with borders with Iran, Tajikistan and the other Stans. They captured those areas first, which means that there really isn’t a base for the resistance, the way there was in the late 1990s, when Ahmad Shah Massoud held out in the Panjshir. In those days, those who resisted had land routes to Tajikistan and they could be supplied. Now, there is no resistance to speak of to the Taliban, unlike what we had seen in the 1990s. For Pakistan, I would say the long-term prognosis is very good.

The thing that I find most intriguing is not something that has been covered much; the idea of how the return of the Taliban affects a much deeper debate about the shape of Islam in South Asia. This debate goes back more than 150 years, and it’s always nice to speak with an Australian audience that is familiar with some of these issues. When I speak with American audiences, it’s a little bit more unfamiliar.

Many of you would be aware that, in 1857, there was the mutiny in British India, where the British put down, quite firmly and violently, a revolt against the East India Company. In the aftermath of that, there was a lot of soul searching among the Muslim elite of northern India because they had been thoroughly vanquished by English military power. Essentially, there was a division where – this is oversimplified but nonetheless accurate – there were basically two contending views that emerged in their purest form. They were named after two competing towns in northern India: Deoband and Aligarh. Deoband stood for the idea that the response to Western political and military superiority was to shun the West, shun Western ideas and return to scripture, return to the life of the prophets, the Koran, and the Sunna for guidance. From that comes the school of Islam called Deobandism.

It’s a cousin of Wahabism in Saudi Arabia, with which many of you are familiar. It’s essentially a back-to-basics ideology. The Taliban is the most extreme interpretation of Deobandism. It is a version of Deobandism that they practise, therefore it should come as no surprise that they are hostile to music, any kind of synchratic religious influences and the Shia. That’s one of the reasons they go after the Hazara, and that also goes back to the dynamics of late nindeteenth century India, where some Sunni clerics felt that Shia Islam had been gaining too much power. So, that’s the first response after the mutiny that was Deobandism.

The Deoband Madrasa was founded in 1867, ten years after the mutiny. Another ten years later, in 1877, marked the founding of Anglo Muhammadan College, now known as Aligarh Muslim University. This was founded by the premier reformist of the British Raj, a man named Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, and without getting too deep into the details, his argument was just the opposite of the Deobandi. Now, this was not a person who was talking about abandoning Islam or watering it down, but he believed that Muslim elites in India needed to embrace Western mores and education, including science and literature. So, in Deobandi, you had a group of people who were essentially sitting under a pomegranate tree, memorising the Quran and learning about the Hadith and traditional scholarship. In Aligarh, you had another group of Muslims who were reading Macaulay and Shakespeare, learning how to use a knife and fork and so on. That has been the tension between the Deoband approach and the Aligarh approach for 150 years. Of course, in real life, people could be a mix of both; it doesn’t have to take the pure form that I’ve described. Nonetheless, the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan is a victory of Deobandism, and I believe it’s going to strengthen Deobandi forces in Pakistan.

There are going to be people who ask the same questions that the Taliban asked; why do we need to be ruled by an elite who seem out of touch to us, who are much more Westernised than us, whose daughters go unaccompanied to parties or to foreign lands, people who sip Scotch in the evening at home, and so on. Some of that anger and resentment, and the idea that the solution lies in going back and becoming, in their view, better Muslims, has always been alive in Pakistan. And the victory of the Taliban boosts that. The other big question, going ahead, is going to be the Pashtun question. The Pashtuns are an ethnic group that straddles both Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan.

In fact, the Pakistani backing for the Taliban, and before that for the Mujahideen, originates in what they viewed as the proclivities of the Pashtuns towards independence. In the run up to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the Pashtuns had not voted for Pakistan; their leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a follower of Mahatma Ghandi. The Afghans famously did not recognise the border after independence and there was a feeling in Pakistan that the best way to counter the Pashtun question – or Pashtun nationalism – was to play up Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism. From that you get the support for groups that were fundamentalist among the Pashtuns; the Mujahideen in the 1980s and then the Taliban starting in the 1990s.

So, on the surface, you could argue that the Taliban coming to power may have settled this question in a way that the Pakistani military would like to see it settled. But I think things tend to be much more complicated. What would concern me and keep me awake, if I were in a general in the Pakistan army with some foresight and some knowledge of history, would be what if the Taliban, who are undoubtedly Islamic fundamentalist, decide that instead of being Islamic fundamentalists opposed to Pashtun nationalism, they are Islamic fundamentalists who are also Pashtun nationalists. They may not ever espouse the brand of Pashtun nationalism of the sort that we saw Abdul Ghaffar Khan, which was left leaning, influenced by socialism, influenced by Ghandianism and so on.

They could end up mobilising Pashtuns in a much more violent, religious way, for Sharia Law. In fact, you already see elements like that in groups like the TTP or the Pakistani Taliban, which has been battling the Pakistani military. The Pashtun question, in many ways, has not been closed; it remains open. I’m not making any predictions of where it goes, but it is a very big can of worms that events in Afghanistan have opened. The final point – and this is fairly obvious – is that Pakistan has its own problem with terrorism. Just as we’ve seen an uptake of violence in Indian administered Kashmir, we’re also seeing an uptake of violence in Pakistan, after the fall of Kabul. The TTP has been stepping up atacks on the Pakistan military; they feel empowered. They are ideologically, and essentially, twins of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Albeit, they are more focussed on fighting the Pakistani army, and the Afghan Taliban have been proteges of the Pakistani army. In any case, this has opened up the question of how Pakistan deals with domestic terrorism; it has put that front and centre.

Which is, of course, a subset of how India deals with deeper currents in Islam in Pakistan, and in the subcontinent.