India: Impending Taliban Threat and Response

For India’s military, the Taliban is a threat looming large on the horizon. The perception of the Taliban making inroads into India had increased since December 2008, when Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Baitullah Mehsud vowed to fight alongside the Pakistan army if a conflict broke out between India and Pakistan. The verbal threat has since been underlined by the Taliban’s eastward movement inside Pakistan, from its bases in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the city of Lahore, close to the Indian border in Pakistan’s Punjab province. The advance on Lahore was marked initially by the Manawan police academy siege just outside of Lahore on March 30, in which eight policemen were killed and 95 wounded, and more recently by the May 27 suicide bombing of the Lahore headquarters of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Manawan is strikingly close to the international border with India; hence, the fear of the Taliban reaching India through the Wagah border drew enormous public and military attention at the time. The Taliban bombing in Lahore now reinforces these fears.

Particularly problematic were the conversations intercepted by India’s intelligence services between Lashkar-e-Taiba militants in Jammu and Kashmir that gave hints of a Taliban presence inside Kashmir. TTP spokesman Muslim Khan refuted the reports but said if the Taliban ever decided to fight the Indians in Kashmir, no power on earth could stop them.

Amidst these developments, speculations are rife about the possible impact of the Taliban’s growing strength on India’s security. Fears are being expressed by political and military elites about a potential Taliban incursion into Indian territory in the near future. At the time of the Manawan police academy siege by Taliban militants, the Indian army second-in-command, Lieutenant General Noble Thamburaj, responded to the threat cautiously, though asserting that the army would thwart any jihadi spill-over. General Deepak Kapoor denounced the impending threat of the Taliban and noted that a three-tier defensive system would meet any attempt by terrorists to infiltrate the border.

Any Indian military response to a Taliban threat from Pakistan would take place within the context of India’s “Cold Start” military doctrine, implemented in early 2004. This doctrine was devised in response to the slow mobilization of the Indian Army and the hesitation of its command structure in “Operation Parakram”, the Indian Army’s reaction to the December 2001 attack by Pakistani militants on the Parliament buildings in New Delhi.

Amid India’s Taliban anxiety, former Chief of Army Staff Shankar Roychowdhury wrote a column in a leading daily urging India to “recognize the Taliban threat” as far as India’s national security is concerned. Still, it cautioned India’s leaders and media “not to hype it” beyond a certain point. He warned that the Taliban could create an “existential threat” to India if they succeeded in seizing power in Pakistan through a radicalized government under their control. He also noted the threat of “nuclearization of jihad” in this scenario cannot be ignored and demands serious attention from the security establishment.

Brahma Singh, a retired Army officer and commentator, claimed that the Taliban is the real threat to India, urging the security establishment and the political leadership to “recognize the inevitability of a confrontation with the state-sponsored Taliban sooner rather than later.”

Following the Manawan incident, reports from border areas of Indian Punjab indicated that civilians had begun to feel insecure following the Taliban’s advance into that region. There are growing fears that Punjab’s jihadi groups are now aiding the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in carrying out bombings and other operations close to the Indian border in Pakistani Punjab. Recognizing the people’s apprehensions about the geographical spread and the emergence of the Taliban forces as a grave security threat, the Indian military has just finished an exercise code-named Hind Shakti to check the operational readiness of its elite Kharga Corps in southwest Punjab.

Hind Shakti was a three-day exercise carried out in the Punjab plains (about 100 km from the Pakistan border) beginning on May 3. It involved India’s “premier corps” conducting what the Indian Army described as a “blitzkrieg type armoured incursion, emphasizing rapid penetration into enemy territory.” The exercise included “intensive electronic and information warfare” and the coordinated use of various intelligence and surveillance equipment, including satellites, helicopter-borne systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground-based surveillance systems. The exercise began with a mass mechanized attack, followed by a parachute drop by airborne troops and the insertion of assault troops by helicopter.

Undoubtedly, the three-day operational exercise at the Indo-Pakistan border was aimed at any Taliban or al-Qaeda threat emanating from Pakistan as well as serving as a confidence-building measure for a worried population back home.

NB: A more extended version of this article was published in Terrorism Monitor, Vol. 7 (15), June 04, 2009.