Bombing India's Embassy in Kabul, July 7, 2008

Summary: A suicide bomber detonated a carload of explosives at the gates of India's embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, on July 7, 2008, killing 41 people and injuring about 150. No group claimed responsibility, and the Taliban-fighting against the government of President Hamid Karzai-specifically denied that it was responsible. In the weeks after the bombing the Central Intelligence Agency presented Pakistan with evidence, gleaned from intercepted communications, that Pakistan's military spy agency, the ISI, had helped coordinate the attack. Pakistan's prime minister said in early August that his government would investigate the charges. The attack on India's embassy may have been part of a long-standing rivalry between Pakistan and India for influence in Afghanistan, a rivalry heightened by increasingly cozy relations with India nurtured during the administration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Date: July 7, 2008.

Place: Kabul, Afghanistan.

Incident: A suicide bomber following a diplomat's vehicle drove a car loaded with explosives into the gates of India's embassy in the Afghan capital at about 8:30 A.M. The explosion killed 41 people, including India's defense attaché, another senior diplomat, six police, three embassy guards, and five Afghan security guards at the nearby Indonesian embassy. Most victims were civilians, either waiting in line for visas or pedestrians. Officials said 150 people were injured. The explosion occurred in a tightly guarded area of the Afghan capital regarded as safe. General Zahar Azimi, a spokesman for the Afghan defense ministry, said the attack was the deadliest in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban in autumn 2001. It was the first attack on an embassy in Kabul in seven years.

Known or presumed perpetrators: No group claimed responsibility for the attack. A spokesman for the Taliban, the radical Islamist organization fighting American and other NATO troops after being overthrown by the U.S. invasion of 2001, specifically denied responsibility. A Taliban spokesman was quoted by the New York Times as saying: "The suicide bomb attack was not carried out by Taliban. We strongly reject that accusation. We don't know who carried it out."

Suspicion fell on the Haqqani Network, a group of Afghan guerrillas led by the Taliban's chief military commander before the U.S. invasion. Afghan officials were also quick to suspect Pakistan's military intelligence organization, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The Afghan Interior Ministry said on the day of the attack that it was conducted "in coordination and consultation with some of the active intelligence circles in the region."

Two weeks after the attack the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Stephen R. Kappes, traveled to Pakistan to confront the government with evidence-in the form of intercepted communications-linking the ISI to Afghan militants who carried out the attack. According to news accounts the ISI had helped coordinate the bombing; the information obtained by the CIA was not sufficiently detailed to prevent the attack. Anonymous CIA officials quoted by the New York Times in early April 2008 said contacts with the Kabul bombers were not renegades operating within the ISI, suggesting higher-level involvement by the Pakistan spy agency. On July 21, 2008, India's foreign minister, Shivshankar Menon, met with Pakistan's foreign minister and said afterwards: "All our information points to elements of Pakistan being behind the blast." In early August 2008, at a summit meeting in Sri Lanka of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation, Pakistan's prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, told India's prime minister Manmohan Singh that his government would investigate to see whether the ISI was involved. Pakistan had denied any involvement in the bombing.

Context: The bombing was the latest in a series of attacks in the Afghan capital during a period in which the Taliban appeared to be resurgent and in which American and NATO casualties rose to levels exceeding those in Iraq. Among attacks in Kabul during 2008, most of which were blamed on the Taliban, were an assassination attempt on President Karzai in April, a car bomb attack on a coalition convoy in March, and an attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul in January.

The embassy bombing, and allegations of Pakistani involvement with Afghan militants, underscored the complex relations among the three countries and the prospect of rising tensions.

• India and Pakistan have been bitter rivals since both countries achieved independence in 1947. The main focus of their rivalry has been Kashmir, the predominantly Muslim area of northwest India whose ruler, a Hindu, elected to become part of India, which is predominantly Hindu, instead of Muslim Pakistan. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir. In the same month as the embassy bombing in Kabul, Indian and Pakistani troops fired on one another for about 12 hours, marking the worst violation of a 2003 cease-fire negotiated as part of a continuing "peace process" between the two countries. The ISI has long been accused of encouraging Kashmiri terrorist groups dedicated either to Kashmir independence, or to annexing the province to Pakistan.
• Often overlooked in the West in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Afghan Taliban's sheltering of Al Qaeda, is the decades-long competition between India and Pakistan for influence over Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has engineered particularly close relations with the government of India; he was also the target of an intricate assassination effort in April 2008 in which the ISI was also named as a possible suspect. India negotiated an agreement to help build a new parliament building in Kabul, a deal cited by many analysts as a particular thorn in the side of Pakistan. As outlined by Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic.com, from the Indian perspective an alliance with Afghanistan represents a possible counter-pressure point on Pakistan's northern border; from the Pakistani perspective, Afghanistan is a link to other central Asian Muslim countries that could help block India's access to potential petroleum resources in those former Soviet republics to the north. In this view, India's interests lie in having a secular regime in Kabul, such as Karzai's, rather than a militant Islamist government like the one represented by the Taliban, which Pakistan strongly supported during Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s. In this context the Karzai government has allowed India to open new consulates in four cities--Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif--and raised the prospect of asking India to help train the Afghan army. One of those cities, Kandahar, is relatively close to the provincial capital of Balochistan (also spelled Baluchistan), Quetta, where separatist rebels are active. According to Kaplan, the ISI worries that India provides aid to those rebels. These developments are viewed with strong suspicion in some quarters of Pakistan.

Bibliography

Kaplan, Robert D. "Behind the Indian Embassy Bombing." The Atlantic.com. August 1, 2008. Online at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200808u/kaplan-pakistan

Masood, Salman. "Pakistan Denies Report Its Spy Service Planned Kabul Blast." The New York Times, August 2, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/world/asia/02pstan.html?scp=2&sq=Pakistanis%20Aided%20Attack%20in%20Kabul,%20U.S.%20Officials%20Say&st=cse

Mazzeatti, Mark and Eric Schmitt. "Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, U.S. Officials Say." The New York Times. August 1, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/world/asia/01pstan.html?scp=1&sq=Pakistanis%20Aided%20Attack%20in%20Kabul,%20U.S.%20Officials%20Say&st=cse