The PMs of India and Pak focused elsewhere as the Taliban forced its way into Kabul
Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have finally chaired a high-level meeting on the unravelling situation in Afghanistan on Tuesday, but until a day earlier he was busy hosting the Indian Olympics athletes for breakfast. The event hit headlines as“choorma” and ice-cream, the favourites of Gold medallist javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra and Bronze winner PV Sindhu, respectively, were part of the fiesta. A little to the west of India’s border, meanwhile, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was endorsing the Taliban takeover of Kabul. As embattled Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the presidential palace and the country, four carloads and a chopper full of cash stash in tow, Imran sang paeans to the militia group, saying that Afghanistan had finally broken the “shackles of slavery”. The situation on Ground Zero, meanwhile, was heart-wrenching. The locals were crowding the tarmac at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in an attempt to get a ride out of the country. So desperate were these people to escape from the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate regime that they held onto the sides, wings and fuselage of an American military jet as it was taking off, and then tragically plunged to their death.
The lightning advance by the Taliban towards and into Kabul, especially over the past week, has taken security experts by surprise. The reversal of fortunes can be gauged from the fact that Afghanistan watchers and experts in the US had proclaimed just last fortnight that Kabul will not fall to the marauding Taliban “at least for months”, if ever at all. However, their prophecy flew out of the window in just about a week. But what is especially saddening is that in this darkest hour of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, its immediate neighbour Pakistan, which is alleged to have slyly engineered the return of the Taliban to power after 20 years of democracy in the country, isn’t concerned about the loss of innocent lives and property. Actually, not even India seems to be proactively playing any role to extend a helping hand to the democratic set-up in the country that has quickly spiralled from a republic to an emirate. It’s in India’s own interest to keep a sharp eye on the goings-on in Kabul and nip any burgeoning trouble in the bud, lest Pakistan play its game of proxy terrorism through Afghan soil now so as to beat the FATF sanctions.