India warns against appeasing Afghan terror groups

By Arul Louis

United Nations, March 11 (IANS) Recalling the tragedies of 2001, India has warned against appeasing terrorist organisations operating in Afghanistan.

"The Taliban, Haqqani Network, Al Qaeda, Islamic State (IS), Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and others of their ilk are all terror organisations, many of them proscribed by the UN," India's Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin told the Security Council on Friday.

"They should be treated like terrorist organisations and their activities universally opposed."

"There is also a need to neither differentiate between good and bad terrorists, nor to play one group against the other," he said during a debate on Afghanistan.

He did not directly comment on attempts to hold negotiations with the Taliban, beyond pointing out that the political process started by the UN has "not quite worked".

Sima Samar, the chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, brought the issue to the fore asking the Council, "If Daesh (IS) and other terrorist groups are not to be negotiated with, then why are some countries talking to the Taliban?"

Negotiations with the Taliban, however, had the support of several countries, including the US, even as they condemned its attacks on the Afghan people and troops.

Some nations see a deal with the Taliban as a way of stopping the IS that has been making inroads into the country.

Akbaruddin decried the failure of the Council to effectively impose sanctions on the Taliban leaders.

"The fact that the Council has not acted on the Taliban leaders as it had vowed in resolution 1988 is now well documented," he said.

"It took the subsidiary body of this Council four months to confirm the death of the Taliban leader. It is now seven months and we are still counting as we await the decision of the Council's same subsidiary on freezing the accounts of that slain terrorist."

He reminded the Council of the steep price the world paid in 2001 for allowing terrorists to control Afghanistan.

"Can all of us who have invested so much in support of the Afghan people remain watching on the sidelines?" he asked.

"We must not forget the implications the world faced in 2001 for its lack of action. History never forgives those who forget it," he aded.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)

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