SOUTH ASIA

A faction of the Taliban was first to claim responsibility for the attack, when the Haqqani group’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid telephoned a reporter with the Associated Press and confirmed that five suicide bombers took part in the operation, and that foreigners were the target.

Later in the evening, a man introducing himself as Hussain Burki called the BBC Urdu Service in London, to claim that the suicide bombing in Kabul was a joint operation of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and the Afghan Taliban. "Three of our fidayeen [suicide squad members] fighters, Mohammad Owais, Aftab Ahmad and Daresh Khan, carried out the attack, along with the Afghan Taliban and offered the supreme sacrifice of their lives. This was revenge against the Indians for the atrocities they are committing in Kashmir and Afghanistan’.

A few hours later, however, the ‘Afghan Taliban’ ruled out the involvement of the JeM in the Kabul attack, claiming that the assault had been executed by Taliban fidayeen alone.

These claims and counter-claims were, however, mere smokescreens, intended to mislead investigators and keep the focus away from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s external intelligence agency, which simply does not want the Indian presence in its Afghan ‘backyard’, and which has been the architect of the succession of earlier attacks on Indian interests.

Initial speculation, based on past trajectories, lent credibility to the idea that the attack was engineered by the Haqqani faction of the Taliban, at the behest of the ISI. Afghan intelligence officials leading the investigations, however, quickly found that the top leadership of both the Taliban and al Qaeda were ignorant of the attack for more than five hours after its initiation. Afghan investigators found a trail that led directly to Pakistan and to the ISI's currently preferred terrorist formation, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). Afghan security officials soon confirmed the responsibility of the ISI-LeT combine. Saeed Ansari, a spokesman for Afghanistan's intelligence service, on March 2, disclosed that his agency had evidence that Pakistanis, specifically LeT, were involved in the attacks. "We are very close to the exact proof and evidence that the attack on the Indian guest house ... is not the work of the Afghan Taliban, but this attack was carried out by Lashkar-e-Toiba network, who are dependent on the Pakistan military." Ansari also noted that the February 26 Kabul attacks bore similarities to two suicide bombings at the Indian embassy in Kabul in 2008 and 2009, and the car bomb attack in January at a residential hotel in one of the safest neighbourhoods in the capital, Kabul. Ansari further stated that the Taliban lacked the logistical capabilities for the attack, since the gunmen appeared to have detailed knowledge, including names, of Indian guests at the hotels. "This kind of information, where the Indians are, is not the ability of the Afghan Taliban to know," Ansari insisted. He also claimed that the Taliban "had no knowledge" of the Kabul attacks at least five hours after they started. Investigators also established that the attackers spoke Urdu, not Pashto or Dari. Sources also indicated that the staff at the targeted guesthouses generally comprised Pakistani nationals who were recruited by the Kabul ISI station to keep tabs on the Indian residents.

Crucially, the style of the attack was very different from past suicide attacks on the Indian establishment in Kabul. Unlike previous suicide attacks on the Indian embassy, the latest attack was the ‘trademark’ LeT-style assault, using explosives to bring down defences and then launching a small-arms raid, hunting for specific targets, particularly Indian nationals, similar to the November 26, 2008, Mumbai attacks. Confirming this, the Indian Ambassador in Kabul, Jayant Prasad, noted, "It was a 26/11 type of attack. The attackers searched each and every room and killed people." Further, sources revealed that the terrorists searched a senior Indian Foreign Service Officer’s room at Park Residence several times and even lobbed in grenades, because they thought he could be hiding inside. When they did not find him in the room, the terrorists spoke to their handlers over their mobile phones to notify his absence, a pattern significantly similar to the LeT cadre’s modus operandi on 26/11.

Though LeT’s global presence is now widely acknowledged, the ISI had not previously used the group to target Indian establishments outside Indian soil. In Afghanistan, Indian targets had earlier been hit by ISI using its preferred anti-India Afghan terrorist faction – the Haqqani network. India, US and Afghanistan investigators had recovered clinching evidence that the July 2008 and October 2009 Indian Embassy suicide bombings were orchestrated by the Haqqani network, under real-time operational control of the ISI. In an effort to create a measure of ambiguity, the ISI chose to utilize the LeT to target Indian interests in Afghanistan. The move is also part of ISI's design to keep the pressure on Indian projects and presence in the country, and also skirt around the handicap of US pressure against the Haqqani network’s operations on Afghan soil at a time when Islamabad is eager to ‘repackage’ its proxies as the ‘good Taliban’, for inclusion in the power structure at Kabul.

Indian projects and nationals in Afghanistan remain vulnerable to the Pakistan-backed terrorist enterprise because of its large presence in the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country. India has a huge assistance programme for Afghanistan’s reconstruction. Since 2002, after the defeat of the Taliban regime, India has pledged over USD 1.3 billion aid to Afghanistan, making India the fifth largest donor nation, after the US, UK, Japan and Canada. In the 2010-11 Indian budget, a total of INR 2.9 billion has been allocated for various aid programmes to Afghanistan. Indian engagement in Afghanistan has focused on long-term economic stabilization, institution-building and social welfare, as well as a commitment to integrate Kabul into the South Asian framework. With Indian involvement in developmental works steadily increasing, some 4,000-5,000 Indian nationals are currently working on several reconstruction projects across Afghanistan. The Indian Embassy at Kabul notes: "India has undertaken projects virtually in all parts of Afghanistan, in a wide range of sectors, including hydro-electricity, power transmission lines, road construction, agriculture and industry, telecommunications, information and broadcasting, education and health, which have been identified by the Afghan Government as priority areas for development." In January 2009, India handed over the 218 kilometre Zaranj-Delaram highway, constructed at a cost of USD 266 million, linking Kabul with Iran and, more importantly, with the Iranian port of Chabahar, to facilitate movement of goods and commodities across an alternative route from the links through Pakistan, which are periodically held at ransom by the Pakistan establishment and their terrorist proxies. The construction work on the Zaranj-Delaram highway was disrupted repeatedly due to Pakistan's denial of all transit facilities from India to Afghanistan through its territory. The project was also opposed by the Pakistan-backed Taliban, who relentlessly attempted to block work by attacking and killing Indian nationals. Some of the more prominent attacks directly targeting work on the Zaranj-Delaram highway project included:

November 19, 2005: A 36-year old Border Roads Organisation (BRO) employee, Ramankutty Maniyappan was abducted. His decapitated body was found four days later, on a road between Zaranj, capital of Nimroz, and the Ghor Ghori area.

January 3, 2008: In the first-ever suicide attack on Indians in Afghanistan, two Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) soldiers were killed and five injured at Razai village in Nimroz.

April 12, 2008: Two personnel of the Indian Army’s BRO, M.P. Singh and C. Govindaswamy, were killed and seven persons, including five BRO personnel, sustained injuries, in a suicide-bomb attack in Nimroz.

June 5, 2008: An Indo-Tibetan Boarder Police (ITBP) trooper was killed and four others injured by the Taliban in the south-west Province of Nimroz.

[Nimroz lies along the 218 kilometre Zarang-Delaram Highway Project].

Since 2002, Pakistan has continuously attempted to block India’s capacity-building initiatives in Afghanistan. For instance, blocking the movement over Pakistani territory of heavy equipment meant for a 202-kilometre transmission line in Afghanistan. India has, nevertheless, managed to overcome such obstacles, engineering one of the largest airlifts in the region, over four years, to bring electricity to power-starved Kabul.

India’s growing influence in Afghanistan has always been opposed by Islamabad, in pursuit of Pakistan’s blatant ambitions to establish a proxy regime at Kabul. Pakistan fears that India’s ‘soft power’ among the Afghans will leave Pakistan encircled by hostile neighbours. Pakistan has historically sought a zero Indian presence across its western borders, and has aggressively lobbied diplomatically against any Indian role in Afghanistan, even as it intensifies terrorist intimidation in physical attacks against Indian targets. Significantly, at a meeting of the Indian National Security Council (NSC) on February 12, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) chief reportedly told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that his agency had picked up a conversation between ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Shuja Pasha, and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, in which Pasha asked for a scaled down Indian presence in Afghanistan, including its cultural presence, in return for mediating a truce between Karzai and the Taliban.

After the ferocious February 26 attack, sources indicate that the ISI is planning more attacks on the Indian presence in Afghanistan. Intelligence inputs confirm that Indians are under a constant threat from Pakistan-backed terrorist groups. Regarding the February 26 incident, Indian Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram stated, on March 2, "there were intelligence alerts that Indian assets may be targeted, following which adequate steps were taken... but Afghanistan is a vulnerable area." Union Government sources indicated, on March 12, that India has received ‘credible’ intelligence inputs on a terrorist plot to abduct Indian diplomats.

Coming against a backdrop of a growing threat perception from ISI backed terrorist outfits, India has sent 40 Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) personnel to step up the security of its diplomatic corps in Afghanistan. Earlier, there were 163 ITBP personnel, deployed at the Indian embassy in Kabul and its consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Despite growing threats from Pakistan-backed terrorist outfits, India has declared that it will continue its developmental activities in Afghanistan without scaling down its presence, even though it suspended operations of its medical mission in Kabul, which were hit by injuries to most of its members. National Security Adviser (NSA) Shivshankar Menon nevertheless asserted that India would continue to fulfil its developmental commitments towards the Afghan people, although there may be some adjustments in the way things were being done.

Threat perceptions from Pakistan backed terrorism at India’s many projects and establishments in Afghanistan have always been high. It is evident that India will have to invest much more in the security of its assets in that country, though it would be physically impossible to secure every place and every Indian life. India’s overwhelming emphasis in Afghanistan has been on ‘soft power’, and in the region, on minimal defensive capability, relinquishing the entire initiative to a malignant Pakistani intent. Since India has refused to evolve the necessary offensive capacity, and to seize the initiative, it will have to go on battling perceptions that it is running scared.