At least eight people were killed in a car blast near New Delhi’s historic Red Fort on Monday. Less than 24 hours later, a district courthouse was targeted by a suicide bombing in Islamabad, killing 12 on Tuesday. These successive blasts in the capitals of India and Pakistan have raised tensions between the two nuclear-armed rivals, who clashed in May following a terror attack in the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Pakistan has already accused New Delhi of being responsible for the Islamabad bombing. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called it one of the ‘worst examples of Indian state terrorism in the region’, asking the world to ‘condemn such nefarious conspiracies of India’. While the Pakistani government blames India, it also pointed out that the courthouse attack originated in Afghanistan, with the Jamaat-ul-Ahraar (JA), an affiliate of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or the Pakistani Taliban, claiming responsibility. Pakistan clashed with Afghanistan last month, accusing the Afghan Taliban of sheltering their Pakistani counterparts, while maintaining that New Delhi backs the TTP – officially dubbed ‘Fitna al Hindustan’, meaning ‘unrest from India’, by Islamabad.
New Delhi appears to be replicating Islamabad’s notorious ‘Good Taliban, Bad Taliban’ policy
Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that the ‘conspirators’ behind the New Delhi blast ‘will not be spared’. While the Indian government hasn’t yet named Pakistan, numerous suspects have been arrested, including Jammu and Kashmir-based doctors, allegedly connected to the Pakistan-based jihadist outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). The Indo-Pakistani clashes this year, the closest the two countries have come to a full-blown war this century, saw a jihadist attack on tourists in the Pahalgam town of Jammu & Kashmir, which Indian investigators claimed was carried out by an affiliate of the Pakistan-based jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). During the clashes in May, India bombed infrastructure in Pakistan linked to the LeT and the JeM.
While Pakistan has long used jihadi outfits as a security strategy against India, government officials now insist the state is ‘no longer’ shielding such groups and that any camps affiliated with the LeT and the JeM in the country are defunct. Indian political figures, including Modi, meanwhile, have been talking up New Delhi’s involvement in Pakistan in recent years, especially in the volatile western provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, which have borne the brunt of the growing militant attacks in the country. Less than 24 hours before Islamabad was rocked by the bombing this week, a TTP-linked terror raid targeting a cadet college in the town of Wana, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had been foiled.
Even so, Pakistan’s eastern provinces and the federal capital Islamabad have largely been safeguarded by the state amidst the rising militancy on the western front. Tuesday’s blast is the first suicide bombing in Islamabad for three years, the first attack on civilians in the capital for a decade, and the city’s deadliest terror incident since 2008.
Similarly, the last major terror attack in New Delhi was 13 years ago. While jihadist raids have been frequent in Jammu & Kashmir, the rest of India has witnessed a tangible decline in terror attacks since the 2000s, when radical Islamist militancy was at its peak across the region. Monday’s New Delhi blast comes a couple of weeks before the 17th anniversary of the 2008 Mumbai attacks carried out by the LeT, killing over 175 people. While Pakistan’s backing for India-bound jihadists contributed to the rise in terror incidents across India at the time, New Delhi today appears to be replicating Islamabad’s notorious ‘Good Taliban, Bad Taliban’ policy.
Last month, Afghan Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi visited India. New Delhi announced afterwards that it would reopen its embassy in Kabul after four years, becoming the second country to recognise the Taliban regime after Russia. The rationale behind the move is to capitalise on the continued strains in the relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan, as Islamabad increasingly clashes with its erstwhile ‘strategic assets’, the Afghan Taliban, now at the helm in Kabul.
But by reviving diplomatic ties with Taliban-run Afghanistan, India is not just discrediting its narrative against jihadist groups and providing credence to Islamabad’s claims of New Delhi’s support for militants aligned against Pakistan. It is also making the same mistake as its South Asian rival by trying to control the Afghan Taliban for its own strategic goals. The Taliban are a separate entity, guided by their own self-interests, and are unlikely to completely align with any country, even more so with a Hindu nationalist government in India that has increasingly manifested an anti-Muslim alignment.
The ultimate goal of jihadist groups remains the imposition of Islamic sharia, whether they are targeting India or Pakistan – which also isn’t Islamic enough for the Taliban. Even jihadist groups backed by certain powers have a knack for acting independently when their interests are threatened; precedent has shown that attempts to reconcile diplomatic relations between Pakistan and India have often been followed by terror raids over the decades. The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have a common theological foundation and the same geopolitical ambition of merging Pakistan’s western front with Afghanistan. But even groups like the LeT and JeM share ideological roots with the Taliban, with whom they have historically combined training and personnel. In the shape of the Afghan Taliban, they have a template and a regional success story of jihad.
These jihadist groups are most likely further motivated by regional dynamics that are conducive to militant expansionism. Where Pakistan’s omnipotent military justifies its powers via regional hostility, the Hindu nationalist government in India is increasingly warmongering to seek political capital as well, with both countries edging closer to an all-out war. As such, with New Delhi and Islamabad willing to back competing militant groups, jihadists are bracing to unleash the next wave of terror across South Asia.
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