The Longest August (57 page)

Almost a year later 150 paramilitaries from Pakistan's Frontier Corps crossed into Afghanistan near Khost and exchanged fire with Afghan border guards. Later that day two separate groups of Afghan soldiers, each 30 strong, retaliated by targeting Pakistani border posts. The firefights ended only when the tribal elders from both sides met at the frontier and resolved the dispute.
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In mid-May there was a three-day exchange of fire between Afghan and Pakistani troops in the Aryub Zazai district of Afghanistan's Paktia province. It left seven Pakistanis and eight Afghans dead. The clash was triggered by the demolition of Afghan security checkpoints by Pakistanis, who wanted to build their own posts.
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This was a spillover from the disturbed conditions in FATA. Afghan-Pakistan tensions inflamed to the point at which Karzai warned Islamabad that if it did not repress the jihadists in FATA, he would dispatch Afghan troops into Pakistan to accomplish the task.

Deadly Attack on Indian Embassy in Kabul

The lethal car bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008, set a new low in Indo-Pakistan and Afghan-Pakistan relations. It killed 58 people, including the Indian defense attaché Brigadier Ravi Datt Mehta and Indian foreign service officer V. Venkateswara Rao, and injured more than 140. The suicide bomber struck just as the embassy's main gate was opened to let in a car carrying Mehta and Rao.

“The sophistication of this attack and the kind of material that was used in it, the specific targeting, everything has the hallmarks of a particular intelligence agency that has conducted similar terrorist acts inside Afghanistan in the past,” said Karzai's spokesman, Humayun Hamidzada. “We have sufficient evidence to say that.”
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This was a thinly disguised reference to the ISI. Hamidzada thus implicitly rejected the Taliban's claim that it had carried out the terror attack. Karzai waded in. “The killings of people in Afghanistan, the destruction of bridges in Afghanistan . . . are carried out by Pakistan's intelligence and Pakistan's military departments,” he asserted.
26

A few weeks later India pointed its finger at the ISI for its role in the blasting of its embassy. Its spokesman referred to the analysis of the explosives used in the terrorist act by forensic experts of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. ISAF had concluded that these originated from the Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF) in the northern Pakistani garrison city of Wah.
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In their report for the
New York Times
of August 1, 2008, Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt said that US intelligence agencies had concluded that ISI personnel helped plan the bombing of India's embassy. This was based on intercepted communications between ISI officers and militants, belonging to the North Waziristan–based, Al Qaida–affiliated Jalaluddin Haqqani network, which caused the massive bomb blast.
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The conclusion of US intelligence agencies dovetailed with the findings of Afghanistan's NSD.

Further details and evidence became available when Carlotta Gall, a senior reporter with the
New York Times
, published her book
The Wrong
Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014
in March 2014. “The embassy bombing was no operation by rogue ISI agents acting on their own. It was sanctioned and monitored by the most senior officials in Pakistani intelligence,” she noted. “American and Afghan surveillance intercepted phone calls from ISI officials in Pakistan and heard them planning the attack with the militants in Kabul in the days leading up to the bombing,” she added. “At the time, intelligence officials monitoring the calls did not know what was being planned, but the involvement of a high-level official in promoting a terrorist attack was clear.” But, she continued, “The evidence was so damning that the Bush administration dispatched the deputy chief of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, to Islamabad to remonstrate with the Pakistanis.” However, the bomber struck before Kappes reached Pakistan. “Investigators found the bomber's cell phone in the wreckage of his exploded car. They tracked down his collaborator in Kabul, the man who had provided the logistics for the attack. That facilitator, an Afghan, had been in direct contact with Pakistan by telephone. The number he had called belonged to a high-level ISI official in Peshawar. The official had sufficient seniority that he reported directly to ISI headquarters in Islamabad.”

The ultimate purpose of the operation transcended damaging Indian interests. “The [overarching] aim was to make the cost too high for everyone to continue backing the Karzai government,” Gall concluded. “The ISI wanted them all to go home.” As the authorities in Kabul investigated the attack, they became convinced that the “ISI was working with Al Qaida, the Taliban, the Haqqanis, and Pakistani groups such as Lashkar-e Taiba, which was behind most of the attacks on Indian targets.”
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After this outrage, India advised Karzai to set up a foreign intelligence agency, just as it had done in 1968. He agreed. The subsequent Research and Analysis Milli Afghanistan (RAMA), formed with the active assistance of RAW, started functioning a year later. Rama is the name of a Hindu god. That provided enough ammunition to Pakistani commentators to attribute evil designs to the newly established Afghan agency, the principal one being to destabilize their country.

As in the past, the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, held in Colombo on August 2, 2008, provided a chance for the prime ministers of India and Pakistan to confer with each other. Singh broached the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul with his counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, who promised to investigate but later asked Singh to provide “concrete evidence.”
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Meanwhile, much to the chagrin of Islamabad, Kabul's economic relations with Delhi blossomed. Protected by the three-hundred-strong contingent of the Indo-Tibetan Border Force, the Indian Army's Roads Organization completed the building of the 150-mile Zaranj-Delaram Road, which linked with the Kushka-Herat-Kandahar Highway, by the end of 2008. It did so in the face of assaults by the Taliban. Indian engineers built digitized telecommunications networks in eleven Afghan provinces. And one thousand Afghan students were offered scholarships to Indian universities annually.
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Emulating its earlier practice, India channeled its development aid for mutually agreed-on wells, schools, and health clinics into the Afghan government's budget.
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This procedure was dramatically different from the one followed by the United States and its allies, who paid the civilian contractors directly or the approved local and foreign nongovernmental organizations.

Karzai's Changing Pakistani Interlocutors

Facing impeachment for violating the constitution by the six-month-old democratically elected coalition government in Islamabad, Musharraf resigned as president on August 18, 2008. While the Indian cabinet withheld comment, Karzai hoped Musharraf's departure would boost democracy in both countries.

The Afghan president called Prime Minster Yusuf Raza Gilani “a good man” with “the right intentions.” He welcomed General Ashfaq Parvaz Kayani, Pakistan's army chief, during the latter's visit to the US Air Force base at Bagram on August 19. “Afghanistan cannot achieve peace or prosperity without friendly relations with Pakistan,” he told Kayani. Speaking to Aryn Baker of
Time
, Karzai said, “I hope [Kayani] recognizes that what they are doing [in terms of supporting militancy in Afghanistan] is causing immense damage to Pakistan itself. Someone has to recognize this need for change and for a modern relationship with Afghanistan, a civilized relationship. I hope it will occur.”
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Karzai's hope was unfulfilled. Kayani was committed to upholding the Pakistani military's doctrine that India is its number one enemy and that makes it mandatory for Pakistan to acquire strategic depth in case of an Indian invasion by securing unrivaled influence in Kabul. Karzai, on the other hand, was scathing about both the concept of strategic depth and the means being deployed by Islamabad to achieve it. “If Pakistan is using
radicalism as a tool of policy for strategic depth in Afghanistan, well, I wish to tell them that it won't work,” Karzai averred.
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Once Asif Ali Zardari was elected president by the provincial and federal lawmakers in September 2008, a civilian democratic system was fully in place in Islamabad as the final arbiter of power—in theory. In reality, though, as before, real power in national security affairs rested with the military. Zardari had neither the intelligence nor the charisma of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, nor the political cunning of Muhammad Nawaz Sharif. However, he held moderate views about both Afghanistan and India.

He met Karzai in Ankara on December 5 at the initiative of Turkey's president Abdullah Gul. At the end of the trilateral summit, Karzai said that relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan had improved extremely well since the election of Zardari as president. Both of them discussed fresh ways of curbing Islamist extremists and pledged stronger cooperation against terrorism. “The foreign ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan are now working together and developing joint strategy against Al Qaida and other terrorist groups [operating in our border regions],” stated their joint communiqué.
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As a follow-up, Karzai and Zardari met again in Ankara, hosted by Gul, on April 1, 2009, to boost military cooperation against militant Islamists. But civilian control over the military was lacking in Pakistan. This became crystal clear in May 2009, when Zardari transferred the ISI from the military to the interior ministry. General Kayani rejected the order. Within hours, Zardari backtracked.

The change in Islamabad's official stance on the Karzai government had no impact on Afghans' popular perception of Pakistan. According to the February 2009 opinion poll by the Kabul-based Afghan Centre for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research for the BBC, ABC News, and ARD (Germany), 91 percent had somewhat or very unfavorable view of Pakistan. The corresponding figure for India was 21 percent, with 74 percent having a somewhat or very favorable view of that country.
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Part of the reason was the popularity of Bollywood movies and Indian TV soap operas shown widely on Afghan TV channels often dubbed in Dari, the state language of Afghanistan.

Unsurprisingly, Zardari had failed to convince the Obama administration that Pakistan's security services had ceased their traditional backing for the militant groups fighting NATO and local forces in Afghanistan.

The second terror assault on the Indian embassy in Kabul on October 8, 2009, showed that not much had changed. A massive bomb carried in a
sport utility vehicle killed seventeen police officers and civilians, wounded seventy-six people, and destroyed vehicles and buildings. The explosion was heard across the capital, as shock waves shattered windows and a huge plume of brown smoke rose hundreds of feet. But because after the July 2008 attack, India had fortified its embassy with high blast walls, heavy steel gates, and a more circuitous entrance, the mission building was unscathed. As in the case of the earlier terror assault, the Taliban claimed responsibility. And as before, this turned out to be a feint. The finger was pointed at the ISI with the telephone intercepts recorded by Washington's National Security Agency providing the evidence.
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Karzai's Second Term of Office

In the August 20, 2009, presidential election, marred by wide-scale fraud, the all-Afghan Independent Election Commission (IEC) declared Karzai the winner with 54.7 percent of the vote. Facing a flood of complaints, the IEC audited the results thoroughly. In mid-October it awarded Karzai 49.67 percent of the ballots, a shade below the 50 percent plus one vote required for the win. But the second round was called off on November 2, when his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out. Karzai was victor by default. He took his oath of office on November 19.

While US-led NATO forces were engaged in fighting Taliban insurgents and training rapidly expanding Afghan troops and policemen—called Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF)—their political masters had to devise and implement an exit strategy. This was the main purpose of the International Conference on Afghanistan in London on January 28, 2010.“We must reach out to all of our countrymen, especially our disenchanted brothers, who are not part of Al Qaida, or other terrorist networks, who accept the Afghan constitution,” said Karzai. He agreed to establish a “national council for peace, reconciliation and reintegration,” and reinvigorate peace overtures to senior Taliban leaders with the help of Saudi king Abdullah. Washington backed his move. “The starting premise is you don't make peace with your friends,” said US secretary of state Hillary Clinton. “You have to be able to engage with your enemies.”
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The 2009 BBC/ABC News/ARD opinion poll showed that 64 percent of Afghans favored talks with the Taliban.
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Though India attended the London conference, the prospect of the Karzai government, encouraged by the United States, negotiating with the Taliban worried its policy makers.

There was no love lost between India and the Taliban. Fresh evidence of the Taliban's hostility toward Delhi came on February 26, 2010, with a terrorist attack on an Indian target in Kabul. This time it was the Arya Guesthouse, home to Indian doctors, near the luxury Safi Landmark Hotel in central Kabul. It was demolished by Taliban bombers equipped with suicide vests and automatic rifles. The occupants of the guest house were army doctors. But respecting Islamabad's touchiness about Delhi providing Afghanistan with military assistance, all army doctors and nurses working at the Indira Gandhi Child Health Institute were dispatched to Kabul, unarmed and in civilian dress. Nine Indian physicians perished in the attack, and many more were injured.