India mum on Taliban at UN Security Council

Though the recent killing of Ayman Al Zawahiri in Kabul exposed the continued nexus between the Al Qaeda and the Taliban, India has refrained from slamming the Sunni Islamist group currently in power in Afghanistan while speaking about the threats posed by terrorism at the United Nations Security Council.

New Delhi, however, underlined the expanding presence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (Khorasan Province) a.k.a. ISIL-K in Afghanistan.

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“The recent findings of the 1988 Sanctions Committee’s Monitoring Team’s Report points to a significant increase in the presence of ISIL-K in Afghanistan and their capacity to carry out attacks,” Ruchira Kamboj, India’s newly appointed Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said, presenting India’s statement at the Security Council following a briefing on threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.

“(The) ISIL-K, with its base reportedly in Afghanistan, continues to issue threats of terrorist attacks on other countries,” Kamboj said, adding: “The linkages between groups listed by the UNSC such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) as well as provocative statements made by other terrorist groups operating out of Afghanistan pose a direct threat to the peace and stability of the region.

The US, however, highlighted during the briefing at the Security Council that the killing of Al Qaeda chief Ayman al Zawahiri in an aerial strike in Kabul on July 31 revealed the continued nexus between the global terrorist organization and the Taliban. Jeffrey DeLaurentis, the Senior Advisor for Special Political Affairs at the US mission to the UN, said that the Taliban had clearly violated the agreement it had signed with the American Government on February 29, 2020 by hosting and sheltering the Al Qaeda chief. He accused the Taliban of failing to deliver on its “repeated assurances to the world” that it would not allow the terrorists to threaten the security of other countries from the territory of Afghanistan.

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India, however, refrained from directly criticizing the Taliban, which had returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021 through a swift military blitzkrieg across the war-torn country, taking advantage of the withdrawal of the International Security Assistance Force led by the United States. Though India, like the US and most of the other countries, has not yet recognized the government set up by the Taliban in Kabul, it has been reaching out to the Sunni Islamist militia and has of late even redeployed officials in its embassy in the capital of Afghanistan, less than a year after evacuating all of them. New Delhi’s outreach to Taliban is apparently aimed at stopping Pakistan to turn the return of the Sunni Islamist group and its affiliates to power in Afghanistan as a strategic advantage against India.

Kamboj, however, did not even refer to the Taliban’s offshoot Haqqani Network, which was known to be a closely linked to Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan and carried out several terrorist attacks on the personnel as well as the embassy and the consulates of India in Afghanistan. It was the Haqqani Network which purportedly arranged for the accommodation of the Al Qaeda chief in Kabul.