Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
I was in Karachi the day the former Pakistani military ruler, Gen. Zia-ul -Haq’s aircraft packed with some of his confidants, a couple of diplomats including the American Ambassador of the day, all of whom died in an air-crash near Bahawalpur, a mystery crash that has continued to remain unsolved over all these years. A well-connected Pakistani journalist had told me then it was not as simple as it was made out to be, one of those rare air accidents that keep occurring off and on; there was something else to it. What it was neither I nor my friend have been able to fathom over the years.
A conspiracy theory was naturally set afloat with accusing fingers pointing in several directions. The truth though is that the cause of the mystery explosion has remained unknown. Against this backdrop, I am almost certain the recent helicopter crash in Baltistan, in the northern region of Pakistan, originally part of the princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, which, among others, killed two foreign diplomats, accredited to Islamabad, will end up as another unexplained accident.
For the record, the official word is that the helicopter had crashed due to technical failure. The claim made by the Tahreek-e -Taliban Pakistan, that they brought down the chopper with a shoulder-fired missile, was pooh-poohed by both civil and military authorities in Islamabad. The diplomats were travelling by separate choppers on a tourism related Pak initiative and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was to have played the host on arrival, was traveling by a separate aircraft, dropped the mission halfway, choosing instead to return to his Islamabad base to assess the losses.
I have no reason not to disbelieve the official Pakistani version of the chopper crash but there is something to be said in favour of the Taliban claim. Shoulder-fired missiles are nothing new in that region. The deadly weapon was extensively used by the Mujahideen in the long drawn out battle between them and the Russian invaders of Afghanistan. In the post-Soviet years such weapons could easily be picked up from the proliferating gun shops along the Pak-Afghan border or Landikotal, the smuggling paradise near Torkhum on Pak-Afghanistan border.
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, before the American-led coalition restored Kabul’s authority over the land, such weaponry was easily accessible. The American during their long engagement in the region also lost many choppers to such Taliban shoulder-fired missiles. The Pakistani Taliban, hard to tell from their Afghan cousins, have in the past expressed in the battlefield their ability to use these missiles and even more complicated weaponry. After all they have shared arsenals and sanctuaries alike in the past. In fact I recently read somewhere an elaborate tally of the losses the Taliban, the Afghans as much as the Pakistanis had inflicted on regular forces and tragically on civilian targets, including schools and mosques.
The appearance of the ISIS on the scene in Afghanistan and occasionally among or alongside Pak-Taliban, threatens to add a new dimension to the problem as was witnessed on a Karachi street during midweek when militants affiliated to the Islamic State (ISIS) ordered the mass killing of 43 Shias travelling by a bus. The ISIS appearance on the scene doesn’t augur well for the future in a country already riven by sectarian divisions.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may have done well by keeping his country away from the Saudi-sponsored strife in Yemen region – without any apparent damage to the close bonds existing between Riyadh and Islamabad – but the ISIS involvement in the week’s incident in Karachi indeed portends further trouble for Pakistan.
It is probably the fear of an enlarged role of ISIS in the country that prompted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to pay a hurried visit to Kabul, his Army Chief and the ISI Chief in tow, to work out a solution to the problems posed by their respective Taliban outfits in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The ISIS has already announced its intention to enhance its engagement in the impending conflict in President Ghani’s Afghanistan.
Having succeeded in putting his country’s rocky relationship with Pakistan on a firmer foundation the pragmatic new Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani did well to invite Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Army Chief General Raheel Sharif and the Inter-Services Intelligence Chief General Rizwan Akhtar for substantive talks on the issue of supporting and harbouring terror groups.
At their meeting in Kabul the other day both acknowledged the need to pool their efforts to combat militant groups trying to destabilize Afghanstan, using Pakistani bases. “We must fight together to build up our security and stability and to bring about economic security which our people deserve and seek,” Ghani said at their meeting. Nawaz Sharif pledged that any militant group seeking to destabilize Afghanistan from Pakistani soil “will be hunted down”. They agreed to conduct coordinated operations on mutually agreed basis to target militant hideouts along the border. Special attention was paid to the problems arising from the recent Taliban attacks on Afghanistan’s Kunduz Province.
Ghani’s summing up of the talks ended thus : the enemy of Afghanistan is an enemy of Pakistan and vice versa.”
The exchanges between the two sides in Kabul do indeed augur well for peace and stability in the region. By taking the Army and the ISI Chiefs along Nawaz Sharif obviously wanted to dispel doubts that it was the Pakistan Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence which together provide the inputs for the Afghan Taliban to remain afloat- and as credible force at that.
Much as one would have liked to applaud the significance of the latest Kabul dialogue one can never be sure of how the words exchanged in the Afghan Capital will translate on the ground. The Pakistani Taliban have been under severe military pressure ever since the outrage they committed with that attack on a school in Peshawar killing scores of innocent children.
Yet, they have not shown any signs of falling apart. They have continued to be active on either side of the Pak-Afghan border. If you ask me, I know it is very hard to wipe them out, given the advantage of terrain and tribal loyalties. And yet it is not as if they can’t be tamed into submission. That will require an all-out effort on the part of the Pakistan army, not to speak of an endorsement of such an action by tribal community leaders on either side of the border. The Pakistanis will also have to remember that the so-called Afghan Taliban are products of its Islamic seminaries. How can one forget that the one-eyed Mullah Umar, the Afghan Taliban chief, is a product of one such famed Karachi seminary and that Quetta has been his base for as long as one can remember.
Of interest to us is that no sooner than the Ghani Sharif accord was announced another high profile Taliban attack on a Kabul guest house where our Ambassador was to be the Chief Guest at a musical soiree, resulting in the death of four Indians among others. Terrorists struck the building, moving about freely, picking up targets individually. Fortunately, the Ambassador had not reached the place or else we might have had a first class diplomatic row on our hands. Not that the other deaths, including those of the four Indian killed, were less heinous. I don’t wish to read more sinister motives in the incident apart from hoping that the attack is not a precursor of more such anti-Indian incidents
Or, is it an extension of the reservations the new Afghan dispensation may have developed in the context of the wait- and watch policy adopted by New Delhi in reassessing its future cooperation in rebuilding of that war ravaged country. I don’t blame President Ghani for this state of our bilateral relations but it would be of a piece with the policy the Modi government seems to have adopted towards our tiny neighbour off the Kerala coast, Maldives. Modi is believed to have taken time off to mention Maldives on the first day of his talks with President Xi of China. Afghanistan too figured in the talks but I am not sure stuck to his wait and watch position or offered to step in with the warm sense of friendship which had been the hallmark Indo-Afghan relations over the past centuries. Meanwhile China has already made its presence felt both in Afghanistan and Maldives.
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