New Delhi expected too much from Taliban

By C. Raja Mohan

NEW DELHI, DEC. 31. The collapse of the efforts to secure substantive cooperation from the Taliban leadership in Kandahar and the political reluctance here to prolong the hostage crisis forced the Government today to swallow the bitter pill of trading with the terrorists.

The unwillingness of the Taliban leadership to get the hijackers drop all their demands, left India with the unenviable task of delivering three militants to the hijackers in return for the freedom of the hostages aboard IC-814. The terrible failure to hold the aircraft back in Amritsar and the inability to detain it in the United Arab Emirates, left India totally at the mercy of the Taliban.

Controlling the ground situation as it did in Kandahar, the Taliban was in a position to define not just the final outcome of this ugly episode of terrorism but also the terms on which it would end.

India was totally dependent on the Taliban to ensure the safety and security of the passengers and crew of the aircraft as well their eventual release. The Taliban certainly would claim it delivered on the safety and security of the hostages. Any additional killings aboard the aircraft would have put unbearable pressure on the Government.

But India was hoping for more, much more. It led itself into believing that there was a prospect, however slim, of the Taliban facilitating an unconditional release of the hostages. This turned out to be an illusion.

But the Government's contacts with the Taliban during the initial period of the hostage crisis and the public statements issued from Kandahar generated an assessment that there could be some political distance between the Taliban and the hijackers. The expectation that India could bank upon the Taliban to secure an unconditional release of the hostages, was based on an assumption that Kabul might be looking for a way out of its international isolation and that it could use the hostage crisis to begin a process of its own global rehabilitation.

These assumptions proved to be untrue. The Taliban, in the end, showed that it wants to be true to its proclaimed ideology and less interested in charting out a new path. After having argued for years that the Taliban is a creature of Pakistan, India in the last few days appeared ready to rethink this premise and probe the prospects for a bilateral understanding. This Indian attempt to delink the Taliban from its patrons in Pakistan proved to be impossible.

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