New Delhi wary of Pak role, Af soil being used as terror launch pads against India
With uncertainty prevailing in Afghanistan, India on Wednesday said it is wary of Pakistan’s role due to its close links with the Taliban and asserted that Afghan soil must not be used to foment terrorism. Conveying this concern to Russia and the USA, New Delhi also sought an assurance about safety and security of minorities, including Sikhs and Hindus there.
These points were main takeaways of the separate high-level meetings between National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval with his Russian counterpart General Nikolai Patrushev and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief William Burns.
While the India-Russia talks were held on Wednesday, the interaction between Doval and Burns took place on Tuesday.
As regards the talks between Doval and Patrushev, sources said India underlined Pakistan’s ties with the Taliban and other international terrorist organisations.
India wanted Pakistan to ensure that Afghanistan soil is not used for stoking terrorism while highlighting close ties between the ISI and the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, they said.
A Russian read-out of the delegation-level talks said the two countries paid attention to intensifying joint work by “special services and military bodies”. They also decided to hold further interactions on the anti-terrorist tracking, combating illegal migration, and drug trafficking.
“As a follow-up to the telephone conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 24, an exchange of views took place on the military, political and socio-economic situation in Afghanistan,” the Russian read-out said.
It said the two sides agreed to coordinate on the Afghan issue in multilateral formats. They also touched upon humanitarian and migration problems in this country, as well as prospects for the Russian-Indian joint efforts aimed at creating conditions for launching a peaceful settlement process on the basis of an intra-Afghan dialogue, the statement said.
The importance of defining parameters of the future State structure of Afghanistan by the Afghans themselves, as well as the need to prevent the escalation of violence, social, ethnic and confessional contradictions in the country, were emphasised, it added.
The two NSAs also deliberated on threats from drugs networks operating from Afghan territory, the role of regional countries and details of Indo-Russia cooperation to meet the current and future challenges, sources said.
On Tuesday, the Ministry of External Affairs said Patrushev was visiting India at the invitation of Doval. After the Modi-Putin conversation, Russia said the two leaders expressed the intention to enhanced cooperation to counter the spread of “terrorist ideology” and the drug threat emanating from Afghanistan and agreed to form a permanent bilateral channel for consultations on the issue.
On Monday, Russian ambassador to New Delhi Nikolay Kudashev said that there is “ample scope” for cooperation between India and Russia on Afghanistan and both sides have been in regular touch with each other on the latest developments in the war-torn country.
He also said that Russia is as concerned as India that the Afghan soil should not be a source of spreading terrorism to other countries and there is a “danger” of terror being spread to the Russian territory as well as Kashmir.