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Friday, March 05, 2010
India, Pakistan locked in a ‘proxy war’ in Afghanistan
* New Delhi says Islamabad was involved in 2008 and 2009 attacks on its embassy in Kabul
* FO spokesman says New Delhi uses Afghan soil to destabilise PakistanNEW DELHI: India and Pakistan, implacable South Asian rivals, are locked in a new struggle for influence in Afghanistan, which analysts say is fuelling attacks on Indian interests there.
A suicide bomb assault in Kabul last week killed seven Indians, including government employees, which followed two bomb attacks at the Indian embassy in July 2008 and October 2009. “The attacks are aimed at forcing India to withdraw from Afghanistan,” Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, a South Asia specialist at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, told AFP. “Both India and Pakistan are trying to limit each other’s influence as they have competing interests.” After more than two decades without any influence in Kabul, India swiftly established diplomatic ties with the new government there after the 2001 US-led invasion toppled the Taliban.
New Delhi has poured money into the country since, becoming the largest regional donor with $1.3 billion in aid and about 4,000 Indians are busy building roads, sanitation projects and power lines in the volatile country. Even the new Afghan parliament is being built by Indian architects and engineers.
It is this steadily accumulating “soft power” in a country, which Pakistan sees as its backyard that has increased insecurities in Islamabad, analysts say. “Pakistan has existential concerns about Indian involvement in Afghanistan, as they see it as a form of encirclement,” J Alexander Thier of the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace, told AFP.
“Pakistan relies on Afghanistan for ‘strategic depth’ that it would support Pakistan in the event of another war with India,” added Thier, an Afghan-Pakistan expert.
In Islamabad, the government is clear that it sees India’s involvement in Afghanistan as a danger and an “unnecessary complication”. “We have strong evidence that India is using Afghanistan against Pakistan’s interests and wants to destabilise Pakistan,” Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said without elaborating. “Obviously we do have concerns regarding India.” New Delhi accuses Pakistan of supporting militants that target India and the government accuses the Pakistani intelligence agencies of involvement in the embassy attacks in Kabul.
Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, blamed by India for the Mumbai attacks in 2008, denied on Thursday it was behind the Kabul assault last week, adding that it had no network in the country. “Increasingly Pakistan and India have become engaged in some kind of proxy war in Afghanistan,” said Pakistani analyst Rahimullah Yusufzai. CU Bhaskar, who heads the National Maritime Foundation think tank in New Delhi, agreed. “All these terrorist attacks have linkages with Pakistan either by way of material support or sanctuary for the perpetrators,” he told AFP.
Islamabad denies supporting militants and points to its own fight against the Taliban in Pakistan, which has been blamed for an intensifying campaign of attacks in the country. But the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke said on Tuesday the deaths of the Indians in Kabul should not necessarily be seen as an attack on India. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” he urged. Reflecting the US policy of encouraging dialogue between Pakistan and India, he said both countries had “legitimate interests” in Afghanistan that needed to be accommodated. “Terrorism is an internal threat to India,” Thier said. afp
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk