Impact on India continues....

The Soviet departure from Afghanistan was hailed as a victory of jihad by the Pakistan Army and its terrorist proxies. The army quickly turned the euphoria to create a momentum for a jihad in Kashmir where it had lost all military wars in the past. The situation inside Kashmir was ripe for such an intervention. The ISI plan called ‘Operation Topac’ was prepared by General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, the then ISI Director who, incidentally, was also the mastermind of the Afghan jihad. The blueprint was prepared with the advice of Amanullah Khan, the Chairman of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), a secessionist group which came into existence in the Kashmir valley in the late 1980s, but was soon

usurped by the ISI. The plan was initiated with the dispatch of

Mohammad Rauf Khan, senior vice-president of the JKLF, to the

valley to mobilise the youth to join terrorist training camps across

the border. Several thousand youth were taken to these camps,

some tempted by easy money, others by false glory.

The ISI’s honeymoon with JKLF, however, did not last long. JKLF had an

agenda altogether different from that of Pakistan. The group wanted independence of Kashmir and no amount of ISI persuasion could shake its resolve. ISI’s goal was to annex Kashmir as part of its grand strategy to engineer the secession of Muslim-dominated

areas in India.

To gain decisive control over the agitation sweeping across

Muslim-dominated areas in Kashmir, the ISI lost no time in marginalising JKLF by floating a rash of terrorist organisations, such as the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Hizb-ul-Islam, Allah Tigers, AlUmar Mujahideen, Muslim Mujahideen, Harkat-ul Ansar and Jamaat Hurriyat Conference. Besides funds, the ISI supplied them with assault rifles and other sophisticated arms, which included Draganov sniper rifles, anti-aircraft missiles and remote explosives.

It also flooded the Valley with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) which, in subsequent years, took a heavy toll on security forces deployed for counter-insurgency operations.

To be continued...