by Dilip Hiro
As in the past, he maintained a suspicious eye on Pakistan and its intelligence network in Afghanistan. He looked benignly on India, allowing it to set up its own intelligence network. RAW agents cooperated actively with NSD operators to monitor pro-Pakistan and pro-Taliban elements.
The Kicking Conjoined Twins
The Taliban announced its rebirth dramatically a week before the first anniversary of 9/11—a bomb explosion in Kabul, which caused fifteen fatalities, and an assassination attempt on Karzai during his visit to Kandahar.10 While the Pentagon trumpeted its swift victory in Iraq during March and April 2003, the Taliban staged guerrilla assaults in the southern provinces of Helmand and Zabul adjoining Pakistan—the Taliban’s prime source of volunteers, cash, and arms, and the site of several training camps.
During his visit to America in the last week of June 2003, Musharraf was received by Bush at Camp David, indicating that he was being treated as “a close friend” of the US president. When questioned by reporters about cross-border attacks on Afghanistan from Pakistan, he replied that the writ of Karzai did not run beyond the edges of Kabul. This remark angered Karzai. On July 7 he accused Musharraf of interference in Afghanistan’s domestic affairs.
At the same time reports circulated in Kabul that Pakistani forces had intruded sixteen miles into Nangarhar province along their common border. This led to protests in Kabul outside the Pakistani embassy the next day. A well-organized mob, armed with sticks, stones, and sledge hammers vandalized the mission while the staff locked themselves in the basement. Pakistan closed its embassy in Kabul as well as its consulate in Jalalabad.11
Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American serving as the special US presidential envoy for Afghanistan, intervened to cool passions. Karzai apologized for the damage done to the Pakistani mission and agreed to compensation. The representatives of the United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan together decided to send a joint team to investigate reports of border clashes between Pakistani and Afghan forces. Pakistan reopened the embassy on July 23. On the source of the extremists’ cross-border attacks on Afghanistan, however, Khalilzad was unequivocal: “We know the Taliban are planning [attacks] in Quetta.”12
During the diplomatic spat, Karzai stressed the vital importance of Pakistan to his country. “We are like conjoined twins, and like such twins sometimes we cannot stop kicking each other,” he said in his interview with Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and author. Regretfully, Karzai realized that the “brotherly feeling” between him and Musharraf was evaporating. “We have one page where there is a tremendous desire for friendship and the need for each other. But there is the other page of the consequences if intervention continues. . . . Afghans will have no choice but to stand up and stop it.”13
In a move designed to put both Karzai and India, governed by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, on the defensive, on July 27 Islamabad expressed its “deep concerns” about Delhi’s activities along the Pakistan-Afghan border. It alleged that the Indian consulates had “less to do with humanitarian aid and more to do with India’s top-secret intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.” A hand-grenade assault on India’s Jalalabad consulate on September 1 drew the attention of the international media. In a subsequent report for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, filed from Jalalabad, Scott Baldauf summarized Pakistan’s claims. It held the Indian consulates responsible for printing fake Pakistani currency and orchestrating acts of sabotage and terrorism on Pakistani territory. It accused Delhi of establishing networks of “terrorist training camps” inside Afghanistan—at the military base of Qushila Jadid, north of Kabul; near Gereshk in Helmand province; in the Panjshir Valley northeast of the capital; and at Kahak and Hassan Killies in the Nimruz province. During his visit to Jalalabad, however, Baldauf found the consulate “swamped with delegations of Indian diplomats and businessmen who were snapping up many of the lucrative projects to rebuild the roads and infrastructure of Afghanistan.”14
Having maintained for a long time that the Baluchistan Liberation Army was a fiction, Chief Minister Jam Muhammad Yousaf announced in mid-August 2004 that India’s RAW was running forty terrorist camps in the province.15 As the Baluch insurgency, led by Sardar Akbar Bugti, intensified, it became routine for the Pakistani media to refer to the involvement of the Indian consulates in Afghanistan and claim that evidence had been found. But it was never made public. The insurgency reached a peak in the summer of 2006.
Karzai’s First Term as President
In the October 2004 election held under the new constitution, Karzai was elected president by 55 percent of the ballots on a voter turnout of an impressive 73 percent. His vice presidents were Fahim, a Tajik, and Karim Khalili, a Shia Hazara.
During the two-day visit to Kabul in August 2005, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh led a foundation-stone-laying ceremony for the Afghan parliament complex, which was to be financed by Delhi. It was to be built opposite the ruinously damaged Dar ul Aman royal palace on the outskirts of the capital. Singh hoped the seed of democracy in Afghanistan would grow into a robust tree. As a result of the inordinate delays in starting the construction, the original cost of Rs 3 billion ($60 million) would balloon to Rs 7.1 billion ($140 million) in eight years.
Such a gesture—graphically highlighting India’s generosity toward Afghanistan while underscoring its commitment to democracy—caused heartburn among Pakistani policy makers, then facing rising insurgency in Baluchistan as well as FATA. In March 2006, when Pakistan’s troops encountered considerable resistance to their offensive against militants in North and South Waziristan Agencies, an unnamed official in Islamabad claimed that Pakistan had collected “all required information about the involvement of India in fomenting unrest in North and South Waziristan.” He alleged that “the Indian consulates in Southern Afghanistan have been supplying money as well as arms and ammunition to the militants that has added to the trouble and violence in the tribal belt.”16
In his interview with Delhi-based Outlook magazine in April 2006, Mushahid Hussain Sayed (aka, Mushahid Hussain), chair of the Pakistan Senate’s foreign relations committee, claimed that RAW had established training camps in Afghanistan in collaboration with the NA’s remnants. “Approximately 600 Baluch tribal dissidents are getting specialized training to handle explosives, engineer bomb blasts, and use sophisticated weapons in these camps.” He added that “the Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad and their embassy in Kabul are used for clandestine activities inside Pakistan in general and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Baluchistan in particular.” According to Sayed, “Indian diplomatic and RAW officials have significant ingress in the Afghan ministry of tribal affairs, and they are exploiting it to conduct covert activities. Indian agents are instrumental in arranging meetings of tribal elders and Afghans with dual nationalities with Indian consulate officials in Jalalabad, and assisting them in spotting and recruiting suitable tribal elders from Jalalabad and Pakistan’s North and South Waziristan Agencies for covert activities.” He added that “meetings of tribal elders are arranged by the Afghan intelligence agency [Riyast-i-Amniyat-i-Milli] at the behest of those RAW officials who serve in different diplomatic offices of India in Afghanistan. Indian agents are carrying out clandestine activities in the border areas of Khost and in Pakistan’s tribal areas of Miranshah with the active support of Afghan Border Security Force officials.”17
Years later a former Indian consul general in Kandahar “privately” admitted to a Delhi-based interviewer that “he had met with Baluchi leaders at his consulate there” while claiming that his ambassador gave him “strict instructions not to aid them in any way against Pakistan.” He “hinted” that “RAW personnel were present among the staff at the Kandahar and Jalalabad consulates.”18
The truth was hard to determine. What really mattered was the extent and intensity of the insurgent operations sponsored by India. These could be rationalized as Delhi’s quid pro quo to Islam
abad’s involvement in stoking the separatist movement in Indian Kashmir, even though RAW’s activities never rivaled those of the ISI in India-held Kashmir. On the other hand, just as Pakistan condemned India periodically for its egregious human rights violations in Kashmir, Delhi expressed concern at the fighting in Baluchistan and recommended dialogue. Overall, it is fair to say that even without the subversive activities of RAW, Islamabad would have encountered security problems in its tribal belt and Baluchistan, both of which had a long history.
By attributing the violent anti-Pakistan activities in FATA to India working in cahoots with Afghanistan, Islamabad motivated its forces during its later offensives against the militant jihadists in FATA. They were made to believe that in the final analysis their campaign in FATA was against their number one enemy, India, which has been the unchanging doctrine of the Pakistani military.
As the Afghan Taliban regrouped, and insurgency gathered momentum especially in southern Afghanistan in early 2006, relations between Karzai and Musharraf turned testy. To defuse the situation the Afghan president met his Pakistani counterpart in Islamabad in mid-February. Among other things he handed his interlocutor a list of Afghan Taliban militants allegedly living in Pakistan, including their leader, Mullah Omar. When no action followed, Kabul leaked the list to the media. Musharraf would later claim that “much of the information was old and useless.”
On his part, Musharraf complained of an anti-Pakistan conspiracy hatched by the defense and intelligence agencies of Afghanistan run by ethnic Tajiks—Fahim and Serwari respectively—one-time stalwarts of the pro-Delhi NA. “[Karzai] better set that right,” he said.19 His hectoring angered Karzai, who regarded it as open interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs.
During Bush’s brief visits to Kabul, Delhi, and Islamabad in early March, the strained Afghan-Pakistan relations were discussed. An unnamed senior Pakistani official close to Musharraf told Agence France-Presse: “We have provided sufficient evidence to President Bush what certain Afghan officials are doing to fund and supply arms to militants in Pakistan. . . . One Afghan commander in Jalalabad is sending arms into Pakistani areas, for example. As a result our soldiers are dying and their soldiers are dying too.”20
Jalalabad figured as prominently in Pakistan’s accusations against the Karzai regime as it did in the case of the Singh government in Delhi.
Meanwhile, resurgence of the Taliban led to intense fighting in the southern Afghan provinces of Kandahar and Helmand. Suicide bombings exacted heavy losses among British and Canadian forces operating under the aegis of the US-led NATO. By the summer of 2006, NATO intelligence had obtained irrefutable evidence of the ISI’s alliance with the Afghan insurgents, covering recruitment, training, and arming and dispatching of partisans as well as overseeing their leadership.
By contrast, in his interview with Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, on September 19, Musharraf claimed that Mullah Omar was in Kandahar and therefore “the center of gravity of this [Taliban] movement is in Afghanistan.” Two days later, in his interview with Zakaria, Karzai retorted: “Mullah Omar is for sure in Quetta in Pakistan. . . . We have even given him [Musharraf] the GPS numbers of his house—of Mullah Omar’s house, and the telephone numbers . . . when we had a nasty meeting that day [in February] and subsequent to that as well.”21
Bush invited Karzai and Musharraf to a working dinner at the White House on September 27, 2006, at which he hoped to help the feuding duo turn the page. When Karzai complained bitterly about Pakistan’s policy of harboring the Afghan Taliban, Musharraf accused him of basing his allegations on “outdated” intelligence and kowtowing to India. Despite the many billions the US treasury had poured into Afghanistan since 2002, and the $5.5 billion given to the Pakistani army to assist the Pentagon’s operations in Afghanistan, the American president failed abysmally to reconcile his quarrelling chief guests.
Durand Line Dispute—Continued
The ill-defined Afghan–Pakistan border continued to be a running source of tension and periodic skirmishes. For instance, during an armed confrontation in September 2005 precipitated by the posting of a Pakistan flag inside Afghanistan, 120 Afghan soldiers gathered on the border in Khost province. They threatened to attack Pakistani soldiers if the latter did not abandon a disputed checkpoint. It required intervention by an American officer to calm the disputants.22
In May 2007 Afghan troops assaulted Pakistan’s military outposts, which they claimed were illegally built on their soil, and killed eight Pakistani soldiers. In response Pakistan’s artillery fire on targets in Afghanistan led to seven deaths among the Afghan forces.
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.23
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.24
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.”25 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.27
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.28 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 wit
h 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.”29
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.