The Attacks: Karachi for Kabul?
By Ahmed Quraishi
Islamabad, Pakistan
Pakistani government officials are investigating the possibility that the recent trail of seven bombings in Karachi was retaliation for the attack in Kabul around ten hours earlier that almost wiped out India’s embassy in the Afghan capital.
India suffered important casualties in Kabul. According to one report, the dead include Brigadier R. Mehta, the military attaché, and V. Venkat Rao, an Indian Foreign Service officer who was the Press Councilor and two Indian paramilitary troopers guarding the embassy.
Indian officials are paranoid about the long arm of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, especially the ISI, accusing it of fomenting some 13 insurgencies inflaming India’s northern and northeastern borders. Pro-Indian Afghan officials who dominate the Karzai government have also been following a similar policy, blaming Pakistan for their own failure in pacifying the Taliban, which is the real problem in Afghanistan, and not the alleged Pakistani support for the Afghan resistance.
The Indians and Karzai government officials will be tempted, privately if not publicly, to blame Pakistan for the Kabul attack and will do their best to convince US officials. This is why it is a matter of interest for Pakistanis to see a swift reaction in Karachi, which has long been the focus of Indian intelligence operatives for its geographical proximity to India (land and sea), its importance as Pakistan’s business hub, and its vulnerability to political unrest.
India worked overtime back in the 1980s to incite an insurgency in Sindh. It failed in that job. Most of the Indian assets inside Pakistan at the time packed up and left. But India maintained links with some local assets. Pakistani security services have known about this and have been countering it quite effectively. But with the land link to India through the Sindh desert and the Arabian Sea, no counter-terrorism job can be perfect. Low-level bomb making material and agents can always slip in.
There is also no question that such operations are made easier by local Pakistani recruits. And Pakistanis have been found involved in scores of suicide bombings across Pakistan for the past year and many of them were traced back to our tribal region.
The religious groups in the tribal region are also frontline suspects in the Karachi bombings and this possibility is under investigation as well.
But an important distinction needs to be made here. There is no question that most of the suicide attacks in Pakistan over the past year were executed by misguided Pakistanis. But who recruited them and whose agenda they were serving, knowingly or unknowingly, is open to speculation. All the other bombings in Pakistan during the same period that were not suicide attacks but conventional terrorism, such as the events in Balochistan and some cities of the NWFP and Sindh, are strongly suspected to be the work of our good neighbors who are successfully using America’s war in Afghanistan to create problems for Pakistan and make Islamabad pay for its support to the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s.
Zaid Hamid, a Pakistani defense analyst, explains it this way: “There were 70 suicide blasts in 2007 and dozens already. Many suicide attackers have been caught before they could attack. All were from tribal areas sent by militant groups. You cannot pay a man to kill himself. He needs to be highly motivated to go to [paradise] to do such a thing. As professionals who deal with these things everyday, we have enough tapes, recordings, confessions and literature to prove that some deviant ‘jihadi’ groups are involved in these attacks. They are being used by Indians, RAW and CIA but the local boys are used for the purpose. There is no doubt in this.”
Interestingly, the bomb blasts in Karachi and the one in Islamabad on Sunday were not suicide attacks. The reports about a suicide attacker being involved in the Islamabad attack are disputed.
The Indians, who have the largest number of ‘consulates’ in Afghanistan acting as fronts for RAW, have been successful in the years since 2002 in infiltrating the Pakistani tribal region using Afghan citizens with help from the security departments of the Karzai government.
Islamabad has some evidence that the Indians were even indirectly supplying weapons and money to extremist Pakistani Taliban inside Pakistan. Of course it is expected that Indian officials will now go running to Washington and complain about the good work they’re doing in Afghanistan and how Pakistanis are trying to sabotage that. But the details provided here give the other side of the Indian presence in Afghanistan, which effectively cloaks itself in development projects.
The Indian plan has been simple: exploit the anger of religious tribal Pakistanis toward Islamabad for its links to Washington and encourage them to fight the Pakistani government and military as a form of holy struggle. The clearest manifestation of this thinking was the Red Mosque in July 2007.
There were reports, not confirmed yet by any side, that some hardcore foreign elements with links in the border areas with Afghanistan led the tough fight against the well trained commandos of the Pakistani military during the Red Mosque siege. This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that some of the best commandos of the Pakistan Army died during the fight, which came as a surprise to many. Some theorists go as far as saying that a few of the foreigners who died fighting inside the mosque could have had links with anyone on the Afghan side of the border. After all, everyone in that area claims to be a Mujahideen fighter and the region is swarmed with intelligence operatives working for multiple sides.
The problem for the Pakistani government is that events like the mysterious bombings in Karachi and Islamabad can push the Pakistani government deeper into the tribal region, which in return will generate more tribal resistance. This will provide opportunity to those fishing in troubled waters to pump in money, weapons and provocative literature to push the locals to fight the Pakistani government, ultimately destabilizing Pakistan and benefiting those who want to see NWFP get out of Pakistan’s control for good. The Karzai government is actively working on this agenda and it is clear to Pakistanis that Karzai is not acting alone.
The situation in the Pak-Afghan region is such that analysts are forced to take into account the worst and the most farfetched possibilities. After all, Pakistan was peaceful for three years after 9/11. The western regions of Pakistan, from Balochistan to Swat, became gradually inflamed from 2004 and onwards with the gradual expansion in the Indian presence on Afghan soil. That’s the year that also saw the unprecedented international pressure on the Pakistani nuclear program.
So can the seven Karachi blasts be retaliation for the Kabul attack, imagined by the Indians and their paid agents inside Karzai government to be the work of Pakistani intelligence?
