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The Rediff Special/ Sreedhar

Time to hijack Taleban from Pakistan?

For understandable reasons, Indian public opinion about the Taleban is less than sympathetic as far as its role in the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Flight 814 from Kathmandu on December 24, 1999 is concerned.

Yet, one cannot ignore some basic facts about the way the drama began and ended in Kandahar. After their departure from Dubai, the hijackers had planned to land in Kabul, but the Taleban authorities refused permission. The hijackers were then asked to proceed to Kandahar, the headquarters of the Taleban's spiritual leader, Mullah Muhammad Umar, by their Pakistani bosses. It is reasonable to assume that by the time the hijacked aircraft landed in Kandahar, Mullah Umar was contacted and necessary permission was obtained by the hijackers's Pakistani bosses.

The Taleban's initial response was confusing, indicating thereby that they were not clear how to respond to the crisis. Their actions on the first two days were limited to providing humanitarian assistance to the hostages. By day three, they seemed to had sorted out their priorities. In fact after the Shura meeting, they publicly announced that safety and security of the hostages would be their priority number one. If any harm was caused to the hostages, they threatened to storm the plane.

According to one version of the events as they unfolded, a report on a television news channel from India that the Vajpayee government was planning to free some terrorists in Indian prisons to secure the release of hostages on board the hijacked plane confused everyone.

Pakistan Television repeated this news through the day four and five. This appears to have led the Taleban to conclude that the Government of India had not ruled out this option.

Their next logical step, in their perception, was to be honest brokers, and finish the hijack drama as soon as possible. The hijackers's demand of $ 200 million and return of the coffin of Sajjad Afghani, one of their comrades buried in India, seems to have convinced the Taleban about the unreasonableness of the hijackers. It appears that at the Taleban's intervention alone, the hijackers were made to drop these two demands and accept only swapping of hostages for Maulana Masood Azhar and two others.

Once the Taleban succeeded in narrowing down the hijackers's demands, they began exerting pressure on India to finish the entire business within a definite time frame. The Taleban threatened they would force the aircraft to leave their territory. It worked. The Government of India caved in by agreeing to complete the deal by December 31, 1999. The Taleban foreign minister invited his Indian counterpart to come down personally and supervise the exchange.

A day after the hostages were released, the Taleban authorities announced that they left the hijackers and the three terrorists released from Indian prisons on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border near Quetta.

From the above sequence of events it appears the Taleban tried to remain as neutral as possible in the whole hijacking incident. Any other course of action would have had a backlash on them.

By officially declaring they had released the hijackers on the Pak-Afghan border, the Taleban made it known to the rest of the world that they endorsed the Indian assessment of Pakistan's role in the hijacking. They apparently wanted to clear themselves of any type of involvement in this "un-Islamic" action in the holy month of Ramadan. It also shows that the Taleban in their own unorthodox fashion conveyed to their creators and benefactors, Pakistan, that they were not happy with what they had done by bringing the hijacked plane on Afghan soil.

How the Indian mindset about the Taleban being "a bunch of thugs" will accept these subtle moves remains to be seen. The Indian external affairs minister has so far shown extraordinary swiftness, uncommon in Indian diplomacy, by positively responding to Taleban moves. His willingness to go personally to Kandahar to oversee the deal, though unconventional by all standards of diplomacy, demonstrated to Taleban authorities that India can take decisive steps to improve the strained, relations between the two.

The next Indian step will be crucial. India publicly advocated for a long time that in the ongoing civil war in Afghanistan, the territorial integrity of that country should be maintained and Kabul should have a broad-based government. While conceptually, the Taleban seems to be in no disagreement with the Indian formulation on civil war, they are not willing to accommodate the anti-Taleban forces in the governance of Afghanistan. At the same time, they are not in a position to ignore people like Ahmed Shah Masoud, who is a leader in his own right in today's Afghanistan.

Whether Indian diplomacy can play a role in bringing these warring factions to the conference table and put an end to the 20-year-old civil war in that country remains a debatable point. The mandarins in South Block had better ponder over this. Afghanistan's neighbours, other than Pakistan, would welcome such a role by India.

The writer is a senior research associate at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, New Delhi.

The Rediff Specials

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