Kabul bombing: Ruse to send Indian troops to Afghanistan?

Categorized | Afghan, Current Affairs, India CA, Pak CA

Kabul bombing: Ruse to send Indian troops to Afghanistan?

Posted on 09 July 2008. Tags: Afghan, Bombing of Indian embassy, Kabul

The Indians are not wanted in Afghanistan. This is evidenced by the number of attacks on them. The undeniable defeat of NATO, President Obama’s promise to withdraw from Afghanistan, and an exit strategy from Kabul has made Delhi Analyst’s jittery. What started as a whispering campaign has now reached panic proportions. The Indians forsee an unmitigated disaster for this plans of “Akhand Bharat”. This has started a chorus of Indian writers asking for Indian military intervention in Afghanistan. This would be in addition to the 4000 Indians who are already present in Afghanistan.

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The bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul Afghanistan has started a chorus of Indian writers asking for Indian military intervention in Afghanistan. This would be in addition to the 4000 Indians who are already present in Afghanistan. This map shows the four Indian Consulates spreading violence in Pakistan. Additioanlly there are 13 “information centers”. All this for a few dozen visas!

Indian Consulates spreading terror across borders

Many Indian analysts are pushing for military support for the Indians who are in Afghanistan building roads that would make it easier for Indian troops to move to Kabul. Some intellectuals are asking for boots on the ground for the construction workers who are building bases and roads so that Indian army can move freely.

Some are wondering if the bomb was a ruse to achieve military results. This map shows the much heralded link between Zaranj to Delaram. The short Indian built road will link up to the “ring road” which goes around Pakistan.

Zarang Delaram Road links the Afghan "ring road" to Kabul

The plan is simple. Send a few troops ostensibly to protect the 4000 Indians who are there, then keep sending troops to protect the troops. British “Charge of the Light Brigade” in Afghanistan AGAIN: Unfortunately the lessons of the unmitigated disaster of “Auckland’s Folly”, (First Anglo-Afghan War 1838–42) have not been taught to the Oxbridge students.

There is a precedent for this–Sri Lanka. The Indian troops were attacked by the Sri Lankans. The suicide bombing against Rajiv Gandhi killed the Indian Prime Minister and New Delhi lost its stomach for adventurism on the island paradise. Right now there is much bravado in the Indian circles about staying the course and protecting the investment in Kabul. However much of the investment is in terms establishing an Indian presence in West Asia and expanding it to Central Asia. The lessons of history are lost on the Indian hawks. Britain’s unnecessary wars in 1879-1939-2001

The next few mongths will be seminal in deciding the course of Indian foreign policy. Will India be following Cruzon’s “on to the Oxus policy” or will it learn its lessons and follow Curzon’s nuanced back to New Delhi policy.

This map shows the Afghan road network hooked up to the Iranian port of Chahbahar. The port is being built by India and competes with the Pakistani port of Gwader.

Zarang Delaram Road links the Afghan "ring road" to Kabul

July 9, 2008 Afghan Bombing Sends Stark Message to India By SOMINI SENGUPTANEW DELHI – The suicide bombing on Monday outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul was the latest and most audacious attack in recent months on Indian interests in Afghanistan, where New Delhi, since helping to topple the Taliban in 2001, has staked its largest outside aid package ever.

India has poured unprecedented amounts of money and people into the reconstruction of Afghanistan, a vital passage into resource-rich Central Asia. It has spent more than $750 million, building a strategic road across the country’s southwest, training teachers and civil servants, and working on erecting a new seat of the national Parliament.

That engagement has come at a mounting cost to the 4,000 Indian citizens working in Afghanistan. In the last two and a half years, an Indian driver for the road reconstruction team was found decapitated, an engineer was abducted and killed, and seven members of the paramilitary force guarding Indian reconstruction crews were killed.

Last year alone, the Indian Border Roads Organization came under 30 rocket attacks as it built the 124-mile stretch of road across Nimroz Province that will ultimately link landlocked Afghanistan to a seaport in Iran.

The embassy bombing on Monday seems to have been the most effective strike: a bomber blew himself up as two Indian diplomats drove into the embassy early in the morning, reducing the compound to rubble and blood. Four Indians, including the two diplomats, were killed. The bulk of the 41 dead were Afghan civilians who had come for embassy services, like visas.

To much of the world, the bombing may have appeared to be another in a series of escalating attacks by militants looking to destabilize the American-backed administration of President Hamid Karzai.

Here in the Indian capital the message of the bombing was explicit: India, get out of Afghanistan.

“It is a notice saying you quit or we are going to hit you,” said Lalit Mansingh, a retired Indian diplomat who served in Kabul in the 1970s.

In condemning the attack, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, sent a plain message that his country would not quit, and that the Indian engagement in Afghanistan would “continue with renewed commitment.”

Not surprisingly, Pakistan was swiftly blamed for the bombing, and just as swiftly, denied having a hand in it.

But the attack also set off a lively policy debate, first over whether India should complement its reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan with military boots on the ground, and then whether Pakistan, and its backers in Washington, would allow India to play a more robust military role.

Pakistan has long been nervous about India’s penetration into Afghanistan, including its five consular missions there, along with an air base in Tajikistan, across Afghanistan’s northern border.

C. Raja Mohan, an Indian foreign policy analyst who teaches at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the time had come for India and Pakistan to look beyond their traditional rivalries and fuse a joint strategy to confront extremists operating on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Such an initiative, he argued, would be to both countries’ advantage.

“Whatever problems we had with Pakistan, Pakistan had been a buffer between India and the badlands,” he said. “Now the buffer is falling apart. Afghanistan needs to be stabilized. Pakistan needs to be stabilized. This requires more drastic remedies.”

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The attack on the embassy in Kabul has also stirred a simmering debate about whether India, as a rising economic power in the world, ought to also flex its muscle in areas of strategic interest.

The United States, for instance, long ago leaned on India to send troops to Iraq and to use its influence on Myanmar to push for democracy. India refused both requests. Sri Lanka invited India to mediate in its long-running ethnic war, but India’s intervention there 20 years ago left the Indian military with a bloody nose, and it has since refused to meddle.

“I don’t know where is an example of India punching its weight,” said K. Subrahmanyam, a defense analyst. “It is India that is keeping a restrained posture. It goes back to how India became free and what kind of state India is.”

Indian newspaper editorials on Tuesday urged the government not to buckle under the new threats in Afghanistan. “As India mourns the murder of its two diplomats in Kabul, it must brace itself up to a new burden that comes with increasing global weight,” The Indian Express wrote. “New Delhi cannot continue to expand its economic and diplomatic activity in Afghanistan while avoiding a commensurate increase in its military presence there.”

Afghanistan is in some ways the test case of the extent to which India is willing to use its hard power to advance its strategic and commercial interests.

“As India’s influence grows it will become increasingly involved in the local politics of a foreign country,” said Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, a research fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. “It cannot afford to see itself as an innocent bystander anymore.”

Gurmeet Kanwal, head of the Center for Land Warfare Studies, said that Indian paramilitary troops were ill prepared to face the insurgents in Afghanistan, and that India’s development aid to that country needed to be secured by a military presence.

“I wouldn’t use the expression flex its muscles,” he said. “I would say the time has come to live up to our responsibility. If it involves military intervention, so be it.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

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