A police officer holds a machine-gun with thermal binoculars attached to it, on the rooftop of Sangu's outpost, in the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan
Credit: Reuters Photo
With New Delhi stepping up its engagement with the Taliban regime in Kabul, India on Monday condemned Pakistan’s recent airstrikes in Afghanistan and targeting of civilians on the pretext of carrying out attacks on the hideouts of terrorists.
New Delhi dismissed Islamabad’s argument that the Pakistan Air Force carried out the strikes in the Paktika province of Afghanistan acting on the specific intelligence input about the hideouts of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan across the Durand Line.
Islamabad has been alleging that the TTP has been using its bases in Afghanistan to carry out a series of terror attacks in Pakistan.
“We have noted the media reports on airstrikes on Afghan civilians, including women and children, in which several precious lives have been lost,” Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, said in New Delhi. He was replying to questions from journalists on Pakistan’s airstrikes targeting civilians in Afghanistan.
“We unequivocally condemn any attack on innocent civilians. It is an old practice of Pakistan to blame its neighbours for its own internal failures,” the MEA spokesperson said.
Islamabad welcomed the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in August 2021 as it was perceived that the Sunni Islamist militia would give Pakistan a strategic edge in Afghanistan vis-à-vis India. The relations between Pakistan and the so-called government run by the Taliban in Afghanistan worsened over the past three-and-a-half years.
Just a fortnight after the radical militant organisation’s gun-toting fighters stormed into Kabul on August 15, 2021, New Delhi’s then envoy to Doha, Deepak Mittal, had a meeting with Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, the head of the Taliban’s political office in the capital of Qatar. It was New Delhi’s second publicly acknowledged engagement with the Taliban. The first one had taken place in December 1999, when then External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh had a meeting with the Taliban government’s Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil in Kandahar and handed over to him three terrorists to secure the release of the crew and the passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC-814.
Unlike in 1996, New Delhi did not formally shut down its embassy in Kabul after the return of the Taliban to power after two decades. It evacuated its envoy and other diplomats from Afghanistan in August 2021 but sent back a “technical team” less than a year later to run its mission in Kabul and coordinate the delivery of humanitarian aid – food and medicines – from India.
New Delhi had several rounds of engagements with the leaders of the Taliban in the past two years, the latest being the meeting between a senior diplomat of India and Afghanistan’s “acting defence minister”, Mullah Muhammad Yaqoob, the son of militia’s late founder Mullah Muhammad Omar, on November 6.
India’s outreach to the Taliban is apparently aimed at stopping its strategic rivals Pakistan and China from turning the Sunni Islamist group’s return to power in Afghanistan into an advantage. The relations between Pakistan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, however, turned sour over the past two years. Islamabad blamed the Taliban regime in Kabul for the spurt in terrorist attacks in Pakistan.