'Today with Taliban at our doorsteps literally, we can't even put up our national flag. Only Allah knows, what will happen to Afghanistan now'
The Border Security Force has been put on high alert along the India-Bangladesh border in Assam and Tripura following intelligence inputs of Islamic terrorists planning to infiltrate the country.
Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban foreign minister when the Indian Airlines plane, IC-814, was hijacked from Kathmandu to Kandahar in December 1999, tells Jyoti Malhotra that India should not look at Afghanistan through the Pakistani lens.
In India, the anniversary of 26/11 comes and goes with only the bare minimum of remembrance. We don't even bother very much about honouring those who acted with great bravery that day, rues Vir Sanghvi.
Former Union minister Yashwant Sinha, a bitter critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi regime, on Saturday joined Trinamool Congress days ahead of the high-octane West Bengal assembly polls.
Unless the Taliban goofs up in a big way, which seems highly unlikely, we are looking at a regime that will be around for quite a long while and present a level of governance that the puppets of the richest and most advanced countries failed to provide, predicts Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader L K Advani appears to have got it wrong when he contends that he spoke to former United States Ambassador Robert Blackwill, seeking Washington's help, to end the 1999 Kandahar hijack crisis. Blackwill, while responding to Advani's contention made in his memoirs My Country, My Life, said he was in the US during the Kandahar crisis and had come to India as Ambassador two years after the hijack crisis.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar briefed the leaders on the latest situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban captured power there last week.
'Afghanistan is a beautiful country but has no luck as far as lasting peace is concerned'
Major Ravi's Kandahar will be based on the IC-814 flight hijacking.
Pakistan has too much at stake to allow even an iota of rapprochement between India and the Taliban, says Vivek Gumaste.
Karzai warned Pakistan that Afghanistan was no longer weak.
The Afghan tradition of gaining control of areas does not necessarily involve combat. Most engagements are settled through negotiations and pay-offs before battle is joined. This style of fighting is peculiar to Afghanistan, explains Ajai Shukla, who witnessed such a transaction between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in November 2001.
The founder of the dreaded terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed undergoes regular dialysis at an army hospital in Rawalpindi in Pakistan.
Mullah Naqibullah, the commander of Taliban's militia in Kandahar and his close colleague Mullah Abdul Qayum were reportedly among those arrested.
The billions India invested in dams, schools, etc in Afghanistan will be gone. The Hindu and Sikh population of Afghanistan has already shrunk from some 200,000 to about 500, points out Rajeev Srinivasan.
Mullah Abdul Fayaz, a supporter of President Hamid Karzai, was shot while driving in the center of Kandahar city.
India is apprehensive about the Taliban's return as it would mean loss of access to Baluch rebels and help to the restive tribals of Waziristan. This would be a setback to the Indian strategy of returning the compliments of death by a thousand cuts to Pakistan, notes Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
What was the experience of meeting Vajpayee like?
'India has to ensure its borders are properly sealed and there is no infiltration from PoK.
Washington wants to extend the newly built Kabul-Kandahar highway.
Ahmad Wali Karzai left his house moments before the explosion, said to be an accident.
'The Afghans used to say that if there is any person whose name should be taken after Allah, it is Hindustani.'
But why should India be talking to the Taliban in the first place? There is no love lost there. India will never forget or forgive the humiliation to which the Taliban subjected it in the IC-814 hijack, notes Shekhar Gupta.
Mehrajuddin Wani, a militant suspected to be involved in the 13-year-old Kandahar hijack case, will be sent to the Joint Interrogation Cell for thorough questioning to garner more information about his role in various terror attacks, besides the IC-814 hijack.
Rahul reiterated that there was massive corruption in the Rafale deal.
At least ten Taliban insurgents were killed and 14 others captured in joint operations by coalition and local forces in different parts of Afghanistan, authorities said on Saturday.
Former Director General of Sikkim Police Avinash Mohananey interrogated Azhar many a times during his two-decade tenure in the Intelligence Bureau.
'It's waging an offensive with no seeming precedent.' 'The fact that it's now entering cities, as opposed to remaining massed around their perimeters, is a game changer.'
For two decades after his release in exchange for passengers of a hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1999, Azhar has since been the darling of Pakistan's external snooping agency Inter-Services Intelligence.
'It is a testing time for our foreign policy which may involve a certain element of taking risks, assessing costs, and expecting failures,' asserts Commodore Venugopal Menon (retd).
Gateway House interviews Sarah Chayes, Foreign Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi award-winning former reporter at National Public Radio, on the anti-corruption and democracy movements around the world as a response to governments turning into mafia syndicates.
The American soldier who went on a shooting spree, killing 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children in Kandahar villages has been identified as Staff Sgt Robert Bales.
Slamming the United States for lack of cooperation in the probe into the massacre of 16 villagers in a house-to-house rampage by an American army sniper, an enraged Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai on Friday said he is at the "the end of the rope".
An American soldier who massacred 16 people, including women and children, in a house-to-house shooting rampage in Afghanistan could face death penalty if convicted, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has said.
The arrest of Mehrajuddin Wani from Kashmir was considered to be a big breakthrough in the 1999 Kandahar hijack case. However, the question is whether the police picked up an informer of the Intelligence Bureau, who many allege is a double agent, reports Vicky Nanjappa.
Hollywood actor Hugh Jackman's personal make-up artiste Rose Hill is behind Ganesh's look in Panithuli.
The United States army has charged eight of its soldiers in connection with the death of their fellow soldier Danny Chen, who had shot himself during his deployment in Afghanistan after apparently being subjected to repeated racial harassment and abuse by them.
The United States Army continues to investigate the tragic killing of 16 Afghan civilians in Kandahar, the Pentagon has said but remained unclear as to when the suspected American soldier would be charged.
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