THE HIJACKING: THE TALIBAN ANGLE
Since September, 1996, Afghanistan has two capitals --Kabul, the
administrative capital, from where the Council of Ministers headed by Mullah Mohammad
Rabbani functions, and Kandahar, the spiritual capital, from where the 35-year-old Mullah
Mohammad Omer, the Amir of the Taliban and reportedly one of the three fathers-in-law of
Osama bin Laden, his 30-member shoora (a consultative council of Mullahs), the
newly-created intelligence agency and the Ministry for the Promotion of Islamic Virtue and
Prevention of Vice function.
All appointments in the Kabul-based administration and all policy
decisions are made by the Amir in consultation with the shoora. The four founding fathers
of the Taliban in 1994---Mullah Omer himself, Mullah Rabbani, Mullah Abdullah and Mullah
Biradar, who is also concurrently the Vice Chief of the Taliban Militia and the
security-in-charge of the Kandahar and other airports--constitute the shoora's hard-core.
The Amir is also concurrently the militia and intelligence chief.
The most important members of the Council of Ministers are Mullah
Rabbani himself, Mullah Mohammad Hasan Akhund, his No.2, Mullah Abdur Razzaq, Interior
Minister, Mullah Qudratullah Akhund, Minister for Information and Culture, and Mullah
Wakil Ahmad Mutawwakil, the Foreign Minister, who was before October 27,1999, the media
spokesman of the Amir.
The Amir hails from village Nodeh and grew up in village Singesar
in the Mewand District near Kandahar. Mewand is as holy and historic a place for the
Pakhtuns of Afghanistan as Kosovo is for the Serbs. According to Afghan historians, it was
at Mewand that the Pakhtuns stopped the advancing British troops and trounced them.
The fact that the one-eyed Amir (he lost the other eye while
fighting the Soviet troops) hailed from the legendary Mewand District gives him a halo in
the eyes of the simple, God-fearing and proud Pakhtuns, who follow his commands
implicitly.
The Amir is a man with practically no exposure to the world
outside Kandahar and its neighbourhood. He has never traveled in the non-Pakhtun areas of
Afghanistan, never been to Kabul since it became the administrative capital and, it is
said, hardly knows Pakistan outside Quetta and Peshawar.
The Amir and the other members of the shoora look upon themselves
as on a divine mission with the benefit of divine guidance and do not, therefore, feel the
need for human guidance and advice. The non-clerical civilian bureaucracy has consequently
been reduced to merely an instrument for carrying out the decisions of the clerics,
without any voice in policy and decision making.
There are two important Pakistani influences--that of the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the army, which is very strong on Mullah Rabbani and
his Kabul-based Council of Ministers and of Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the Amir of the
Balochistan-based Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI), which is strong on Amir Omer and his shoora.
The Maulana is, in fact, the godfather of the Taliban and the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and is greatly attached to the Bahawalpur-born Maulana Masood
Azhar, of the HUM, whose release was initially the only demand of the Indian Airlines
(IA). hijackers. The two previous attempts of the HUM to secure the release of Maulana
Azhar by kidnapping foreign tourists were both suspected to have been blessed, if not
orchestrated, by Maulana Fazlur Rahman.
In fact, when the HUM, under the name Al Faran, kidnapped five
Western tourists in Kashmir in 1995, Mrs.Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, sent him
to New Delhi as she felt he was the only man who could persuade the HUM to release the
hostages. The Govt. of India cold-shouldered him and he returned to Pakistan.
In Afghanistan, the Tadjiks had traditionally a larger presence
in the civil adminstration because of their better education than the Pakhtuns, whose
presence was more important in the military.
As a result, when the Taliban over-ran large parts of Afghanistan
and drove out the Tadjik-dominated Burhanuddin Rabbani Government with its Tadjik civil
servants, it had to depend on the large-scale deputation of Pakhtun officers from the
North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan to run the administration. Thus, there
is a substantial presence of Pakhtun civil servants of Pakistan in the various Government
departments, including the intelligence agency, airport security and the Kandahar airport
control tower.
The only Ministry to which Islamabad has refrained from deputing
its civil servants is that for the Promotion of Islamic Virtue and Prevention of Vice
because of the controversy associated with its suppression of women's rights.
From this account, it would be reasonable to draw the following
conclusions:
* Once the Govt. of India, through its perceived mishandling at
Amritsar and and Dubai, let the aircraft reach Kandahar, it had no other option but to
seek the good offices of the Taliban and its shoora for saving the hostages.
* It is very likely that the ISI and the JUI played, either
separately of each other or in tandem, an active role in influencing the events at
Kandahar and had easy access to the aircraft and the hijackers. In fact, most probably,
some of the Taliban officials--barring well-known Taliban figures like their Foreign
Minister--with whom the Indian delegation and our Foreign Minister, Mr.Jaswant singh, were
interacting must have been ISI officers and JUI members masquerading as from the Taliban.
*In view of this, it might be difficult to establish conclusively
whether the new arms and ammunition, which the hijackers reportedly received in Kandahar,
came from the Taliban, the ISI or the JUI, or from all of them acting in concert
together..
Does the benign face projected by the Taliban to India through
its Foreign Minister and his officials at Kandahar indicate a change of attitude towards
India? It is difficult to answer this question, but it needs to be recalled that since
October, 1998, the Taliban leadership has been periodically sending signals to India about
its interest in a "non-adversarial" relationship with India.
It had been claimimg that despite its support for the Kashmiris'
right of self-determination, it had not sent any Afghans to Kashmir and that the Afghans
fighting in Kashmir were from the Hizbe Islami of Gulbuddin Heckmatyar, sent by Pakistan's
Jamaat-e-Islami, who had been masquerading as from the Taliban.
In this connection, this writer had written on September 29,1999
(http://www.saag.org/papers/paper83.html):
" India should test out the sincerity of the Taliban's interest in a non-adversarial
relationship with India by maintaining a line of communication with the Taliban leadership
through their office in New York. Its professions of innocence should be tested out and
not dismissed out of hand…. We should not put all our eggs in the Burhanuddin
Rabbani-Masood basket. It would be unwise to assume that the Taliban leadership is a
Pakistani puppet and hence beyond redemption. After all, many Pakhtuns--of Pakistan as
well as Afghanistan-- had been the traditional supporters of India and one should not rule
out the possibility of there being many elements in the Taliban leadership, which feel
suffocated by the present too close an embrace with Pakistan."
Shri Jaswant Singh's visit to Kandahar, which has been criticised
by the opposition and sections of the media, would have served a useful purpose if it had
enabled him to assess the sincerity of their past claims. At the same time, it would be
unwise to nurse illusions of our being able to create a quick divide between Pakistan and
the Taliban.
The Taliban is too dependent on Pakistan for money, food and
other essential articles, arms and ammunition and manpower for running the administration
and for recovering the remaining 10 per cent of the territory from the Northern Alliance
of Rabbani--Ahmed Shah Masood for it to be able to take a markedly independent line.
Similarly, its shoora is too strongly under the ideological
influence of the anti-India and anti-US JUI for it to be able to shed its hardline
fundamentalist image of compulsive jihadists.
This should not, however, inhibit us from maintaining, through
their New York office, the line of communication with the Taliban leadership, which was
established during the Kandahar crisis. Even China has been doing so to wean the Taliban
away from the Muslim extremists of Xinjiang.
B.RAMAN
(5-1-2000)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies,
Chennai.
E-Mail:corde@vsnl.com)
