Why the fall of Afghanistan is bad news for India’s war on terror

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I plant these lines scribbled in Urdu with the legend‘Mujahideen ki lalkar ( war cry of the Mujahideen)’– in a tablet in Afghanistan in December 2001. It was in a former military camp called Rish Khor, around 10 kilometres north of Kabul. It would have been unusual to find an Urdu tablet in a country where Dari is the main language. Pakistan, where the language is extensively spoken, is over 200 kilometres down.

The tablet, which I latterly had restated in New Delhi, had formerly belonged to a Pakistani pupil novitiate. The camp was a former terror training academe run by Al Qaeda- trained rookies from Pakistan. They had been transferred there by colorful Pakistani jihadist tanzeems, including the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and the Al Qaeda- combined Harkat-ul Jihad Islami (HuJI). It was run by one Qari Saifullah Mehsud, who was also a crucial figure in HuJI.

An INDIA TODAY platoon visited this camp two months after the Taliban had been routed and a new interim administration headed by President Hamid Karzai installed in Kabul. Rish Khor was one of several similar camps set up across the country. At one of several similar camps in the late 1990s, a Pakistani Al Qaeda operative named Khalid Shaikh Mohammad incubated the plot to use commandeered airliners to destroy the tTwin Towers,

Capitol Hill and the Pentagon. These attacks in which people were killed, led to the irruption of Afghanistan by the US and its abettors. In October 2001, the camp had been bombed to debris by US fighter spurts taking off from aircraft carriers situated in the Arabian Sea and B-52s flying in from the Indian Ocean islet fort of Diego Garcia.

On the night of November 11, 2001, the Taliban melted down without a fight and the coalition forces captured the capital.