:: Editorial

Kabul attack: Pak gets more brazen

Oct 11 : Fortunately, Thursday morning’s deadly terrorist attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul — which came exactly 15 months after the first attack on July 7 last year — did not take a serious toll of our personnel in Afghanistan, besides injuries to three brave jawans of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police on duty guarding the mission. The anti-blast barrier, erected after the last attack on the road where the structure stands, took the shock. But the massive impact caused by the explosives-laden vehicle has killed and injured a large number of Afghans who happened to be present on the scene, and destroyed unprotected commercial buildings in the area. Tragically, many of the dead and injured were those waiting to obtain visas to come to India. While investigators and forensics specialists will seek to gain a professional understanding of events that may help to prepare better against future strikes, only the naïve will think that this assault is not linked to the larger Pakistani design of ousting India from Afghanistan. The explosion was similar in intensity to the one caused in July last year. The logistics needed to organise a strike on such a spectacular scale is beyond the capability of small-time operators. Communications intercepts put together by the Afghans and the Americans after the 2008 strike showed that elements linked to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence had orchestrated it through the Pakistan-based Haqqani network. A similar prognosis cannot be ruled out this time.

Such is Pakistan’s brazenness in the matter of seeking India’s ejection from Afghanistan — Islamabad sees India’s development role there as being inimical to its strategic ambition of dominating Afghanistan politically — that three months ago a deal was conveyed to Washington: "help us to get the Indians out of the country and we’ll organise for you direct talks with Mullah Omar and the Quetta-based top Taliban leadership". Regrettably India didn’t protest or react to this development in any manner. No less regrettably, the United States too did not rebuke the powers-that-be in Islamabad for openly sheltering the Taliban leadership and making no bones about it. Since then, the "multi-disciplinary assessment" made by US Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, barely a fortnight ago has argued that India’s "influence" in Afghanistan — although it is acknowledged to "benefit" the people of that country — was likely to provoke "countermeasures" against both India and Afghanistan by Islamabad, and raise regional tensions. It is hard not to see this as an indirect encouragement to the Pakistani military-security establishment to mount destructive physical attacks against Indian interests in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan. More, to hear of retaliatory "countermeasures" by Pakistan is a bit rich. Islamabad has been unleashing violence against both India and Afghanistan long before India gained a profile with the government and people of Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era in Kabul. Indeed, it is appropriate to view India’s development support to Afghanistan aimed to help build a peaceful and democratic state there as a "countermeasure" to Pakistan-inspired violence in the region. New Delhi will be remiss if it didn’t take up this and related matters with Washington.

American policy in relation to Afghanistan is confusing, uncertain, and unpredictable. But that need not detain us here. What matters is clarity about our own policy and goals in the context of our bilateral equation with Afghanistan. These cannot be brewed in Islamabad or Washington. A day before the blast, at a seminar in New Delhi, foreign secretary Nirupama Rao indicated that the Indian view on Afghanistan was to "invest and endure" for peace, democracy and development. This is fair enough. Perhaps it should be reiterated that a sovereign and nonaligned Afghanistan works best for us.