Mohammad Jamil
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera Upfront aired on Friday, former Afghan president Hamid Karzai said that the US government allowed Daesh (ISIS) to flourish in Afghanistan. Je went on to say that the US administration made Daesh as an excuse to drop a massive bomb called ‘Mother of all bombs’ in Afghanistan in April this year. Last month, speaking with the Afghan service of the Voice of America (VOA), he had said that he considered Daesh a tool of the US, as by dropping mother of all bombs on Afghanistan, it did not eliminate Daesh but killed innocent Afghans. “The US Army helicopters and army bases are being used to provide assistance and weapons to ISIS terrorists,” he said. In an interview with the BBC Pashto, Karzai claimed that Kabul’s requests to attack terrorist ‘safe havens’ in Pakistan were declined by the US.
Despite his rhetoric that Afghanistan should not be used against neighboring countries, one can infer from his above statement that he had been asking the US and NATO commanders to attack, what he called, safe havens in Pakistan. It has to be mentioned that on one hand he had given free hand to the CIA, RAW and Mossad to set up shops to have a liaison with TTP militants and other groups for conducting terror acts in Pakistan. On 13th February 2017, a suicide bombing took place on the Mall Road in Lahore where a group of chemists and pharmacists was holding a protest at Charing Cross near Punjab Assembly. Fifteen people were killed including several police officials, and at least 87 were injured. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the banned TTP claimed responsibility for the attack, which is unarguably affiliated with Daesh and supported by NDS and RAW.
As of July 2016, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) group had established a secure footing in four districts of Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. Those outfits are supported by NDS and RAW nexus, yet India persistently blames Pakistan for terror acts in Afghanistan. Despite having reasonable proofs of Indian involvement in fostering terror within country, Pakistan has not been persistent at diplomatic level to expose them. Having that said, Daesh in the name of the worldwide Islamic Jihad has launched a malicious campaign to radicalize people particularly youth by showing graphic images and videos from conflict zones. According to recent reports, Daesh is using females to promote and to project its vile ideology. A young, western woman has usually a role in the workplace as well as the role of motherhood; and some of them experience anxiety in the process.
Daesh simplifies all that for women by promising them that they will be well taken care of by their Daesh husbands. A Malaysian bride of Daesh ‘Bird of Jannah’ showed her photos alongside her widely smiling Daesh husband bearing the caption, “The love of Jihad, Till martyrdom do us apart”. Another poster depicts women shooting a rifle with the slogan, “Islam has made me free”. However, in reality women suffer immensely, as Daesh controls every step of the integration process. The women already in Daesh are forced to play an active supporting role in recruiting other women or girls via social media. The New York Times article had highlighted the rapes of over 200 Yazidi women by Daesh, which knocked the bottom of its pretence about respect and care for the women folk. ISIS or Daesh in Afghanistan does not appear to have direct link with its leadership in Iraq and Syria.
But this is not to say that ISIS doesn’t pose a threat; in fact it does. Early on, Afghan Taliban commanders and fighters disillusioned with their own leadership defected to ISIS, which also teamed up with TTP elements as well as militants from Chechnya and Uzbekistan. In October 2016, the ISIS franchise in Afghanistan cooperated with a radical organization called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in an assault on a police academy in the Pakistani city of Quetta that left 63 people dead. However, Pakistan military has decimated militants infrastructure and networks of various groups. However, the question is what westerners have done on their part to stop that recruitment network? Their oblivion or lack of action to stop the recruiting from Europe was reflective of their duplicity and hypocrisy. There have been news about presence of ISIS militants in Pakistan, but it was a handful of dissidents of the Taliban who out of frustration tried to showcase their strength using the ISIS name.
Earlier, with ISIS gains in Syria and Iraq and effective propaganda blitz, terrorist organizations in other countries were inspired, and wished to be its part with a view to benefiting from the resources and capacity of the ISIS. But ISIS has been defeated and had retreated in Syria and Iraq; and if Afghanistan pursues policy of peace with the Afghan Taliban, ISIS would not be able to pose any palpable threat to Afghanistan, Pakistan and the region at large. They should understand that they cannot defeat the Taliban, as the US at one time had a 100,000 plus soldiers in Afghanistan; and with NATO troops, the number was over 150,000. Moreover, NATO had raised and trained 150000 Afghan army and about 100000 police, but they could not defeat the Taliban who control about 50 per cent of Afghanistan. In this backdrop, Haqqani militants or other groups do not need Pakistani soil, as they have enough territory to train and operate from there.
