Will Mullah Omar’s death give life to terror?

Arun Joshi

The reported death of Mullah Omar,  better known as the reclusive leader of the Taliban, should not be  dismissed in India  as something distant and inconsequential. His death after a prolonged illness is bound to lead to a war of succession and throw the ultra-fundamentalist group in different directions The way his death has been announced by the Afghan government at the time when the peace talks between Taliban and the Afghan government, anchored by Pakistan, were in progress, cannot be a mere coincidence. Mullah Omar in a written statement had backed these talks  with the objective of restoring peace in strife-torn Afghanistan. If he had died more than two years ago, who was withholding this critical piece of information and with what purpose?  This question has remained unanswered and India, with its stake in  peace in Afghanistan because of the historical relations with the country,  cannot overlook that.

 We need to ponder over the strategic necessity. Multiple threats, both internal and external, stare at India. One of  the disturbing factors in these threats has been  the Talban  and  its partnership with the ISI of Pakistan.  The duo had put the nation's pride on the mat.  It was ISI-sponsored and Taliban-executed plots of attacks on the Indian embassy in  Kabul, Afghanistan and the hotel Indians used to frequent. These assaults had sent out a clear signal that both the Taliban and the ISI wanted India to be out of Afghanistan. The latest development of talks between the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani and Taliban under the supervision and the  participation of the ISI  has isolated  India in South Asia. This is a diplomatic failure for India  in  Afghanistan where India has invested billions of dollars in building of infrastructure and education. It has been  Pakistan's endeavour from the very beginning to keep its eastern neighbour out of the western one.

We cannot afford to forget how the Taliban led by Mullah  Omar  had humiliated India in the December of 1999, before and after the  release of the passengers of  the hijacked  IC 814  that was parked at the Kandahar airport. There were other episodes of equal concern for India. When the US had fired missiles to target the  hideouts  of  the Al-Qaida  chief Osama bin Laden, in 1998 in retaliation to attacks  on its embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in August that  year, among the dead were the militants of  Kashmiri groups like Hizb-ul-Mujahideen  and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. Their cadres were undergoing training there. Kashmir also saw a number of Afghans  fighters engage the Indian army in  the Valley. 

Now, with Mullah Omar dead and his long-time deputy Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour selected as his successor with the support of the Jalal-ud-Din Haqanni faction, the power struggle has begun. Both the brother of Mullah Omar,   Mullah Abdul Manan and  son  Mullah Yaqoob have challenged this, claiming that only a small section had chosen Mansour and the majority had not supported  this choice. Whatever be the case, the stark fact is that  all the factions of Taliban are hostile to India. 

 How can  Mullah  Omar's  death  be of any consequence  to India? Mullah  Omar  was more than a leader of a political-terror organisation that ruled Afghanistan  for many years. He was also a symbol of  inspiration for  jihad for the Islamist militants. Pakistan’s ISI had created Taliban in the 1990s during Prime Minister  Benazir Bhutto's term and then nurtured it before it marched into Afghanistan and started ruling the place, except in the areas under the control of the Northern Alliance. They mauled the system. The Taliban became a byword for strict Islamic ways in the rest of the world, where women were rendered without any rights. Mullah Omar's relations with Osama bin Laden and  the unique tie-up between the Taliban and the Al-Qaida  defined a movement that had Kashmir on its radar. Bin Laden had mentioned Kashmir in several of his video appearances. 

Former CIA   official and counter-terrorism expert  Bruce Riedel had said  that Al-Qaida and its offshoot Lashkar-e-Toiba  were involved in the hijacking of the Indian airliner. This was before the Taliban and the Al-Qaida invited the beginning of their end after the horrendous  attack on the American soil on 9/11. Americans responded with an air campaign  in the first week of October  2001. Thereafter, the Taliban and the Al-Qaida scattered.  That's history. With Osama dead in May 2011 in a stealth attack by the SEAL, Mullah Omar's death has  created a piquant situation.

The Taliban had given the Afghan territory to be used as haven by the Al-Qaida and its fighters. In geo-strategic terms, it  is called state patronage to non-state actors. Mullah Omar was the host and Al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden] were the guests. This  is  what it looks like but in the pre-20001 and  post   that, the crucial fact is that  both the host and the guest were guided by Pakistan. It was only after the threat relayed by the then American Deputy Secretary of State,  Richard Armitage that  the US might bombard Pakistan if it did not plug out its support to Taliban and Al-Qaida that the then Pakistani President  Pervez Musharraf had  declared his unequivocal support to  the Americans in their “war on terror.”

India could not capitalise  on that situation. It kept on watching, just as it is watching  now while  Pakistan is anchoring the peace talks. There are contradictory situations — the symbol of inspiration for the terrorists has died. India can ignore at its own peril the possibility that the Taliban would be gobbled up by the Islamic state. Already there have been considerable defections from Taliban to the Abu-bakr Al Baghdadi-led ISIS that has already announced the Islamic state. A majority of Muslims across the world, from Saudi Arabia to Iran to Jordan, detest  the Baghdadi version of Islam — beheadings,  massacres, ghastly  burning alive of the hostage Jordanian pilot Mu'ath al-Kaseasbeh. But this majority is silent and it often falls  in line with the brutal ways. That is precisely what had happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule. The gobbling up of Taliban by the ISIS poses serious dangers to India. With ISIS already having  lured its young men from India and many others propagating its ideology of hatred and killings on the social media, the vulnerabilities multiply. The supporters of Mullah Omar in the absence of their “leader being alive”  would seek their protection  in the ISIS. It is how the  terror groups  emerge, merge and  then share a common cause. It is also a  question of their survival, but their survival in this manner, with Pakistan's tools having been consumed by the global terror network, India cannot  breathe easily. It would have to shake up itself, shed its lethargy and know the enemy within and in the neighbhourhood.

[email protected]