Afghan Bombing Sends Stark Message to India

By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: July 9, 2008

NEW 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.

The body of India’s defense attaché in Afghanistan, Brig. Ravi Datt Mehta, arrived in New Delhi on Tuesday. He was one of four Indians killed in Kabul on Monday.
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Times Topics: India

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.”

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.”