India needs to make Obama understand that all Taliban are bad: ex-NSA Miishra
New Delhi, Mar. 21 : The Indian Government should try to convince the Brack Obama administration that all Taliban are equally bad and dangerous, former National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra suggested here today.
"There is nothing like good Taliban or bad Taliban. Taliban is bad. We should try to make President Obama and his team understand this," Mishra said during a keynote address at the Observer Research Foundation''s seminar on China "Internal Scene: Political, social and political".
Mishra, now Trustee of the ORF, said: "India is going to have enough opportunities in the immediate future to convince the Obama Administration."
He said the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, should raise this point when he meets President Obama in London on April 2 during the G-20 summit.
He said India will have the opportunities at the SCO meeting in Moscow and NATO meeting at The Hague also where India is sending its representatives.
Mishra said, after the Mumbai attack, though the Government said that there won''t be any military action but would launch diplomatic action, but in fact there was no action at all. "There was no diplomatic action", he remarked.
Saying that India is now low on the US radar, he said the Obama Administration is shifting its policy regarding Taliban and is eager to ensure more Pakistani assistance to fight a section of Taliban.
Though Obama is in need of China now to fight the economic crisis, he said the China-US relations is not going to be a rosy path.
Mishra, who held lengthy negotiations with the Chinese during the Vajpayee regime, said the Chinese are keen to solve the boundary dispute, but they felt the present government lacked the political will to do so.
He said if the NDA came back to power, it would have made significant progress, if not solving the problem itself. He said India had got two good opportunities to solve the boundary problem - once during the prime ministership of Jawarharlal Nehru and another in during the period of Indira Gandhi government in 1980. "There was no political problem then, but we created problems ourselves," he said.
Saying that the situation now is grave, he said steps should be taken to see that no conflicts arise between China and India.
He suggested that negotiations and dialogues with China, especially in the fields of culture and science and technology, should continue to give the impression of some kind of normalization process. "This we have to keep going," he said.
The seminar was inaugurated by former Foreign Secretary M. K. Rasgotra. The seminar had sessions on `Overall Political Scene', `Centre-Province Relations; Regional Trends and Developments', `Social and Cultural Scene' and `Impact of Globalisation on China and China's Handling of the Process'.
It was attended by ex-bureaucrats and academics like Salman Haider and K. Raghunath, C. V. Ranganathan, D. S. Rajan, Air. Commodore Jasjit Singh, Dr. Srikanth Kondapalli, Dr. Ravi Prasad Narayanan, Dr. Alka Acharya, Dr. Ravni Thakur and others. (ANI)