Afghanistan Casualties: Pakistan Under Twin Attack
July 14th, 2008
By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
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Pakistan has come under a blistering attack from Afghanistan and India. Afghanistan alleges that Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI) and army are behind the bloody Taliban-led insurgency, calling the security forces the “world’s biggest producers of terrorism and extremism.” While India has blamed Pakistan’s ISI for the suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, and said: “ISI is playing evil. The ISI needs to be destroyed.” (What is ISI?…Click here…)
Could it be that Pakistan’s ISI believes that Taliban would be the ultimate winner in Afghanistan?
Last year the newly released US official documents stated that the Pakistani government gave substantial military support to the Taliban in the years leading up to the September 11 attacks, sending arms and soldiers to fight alongside the militant Afghan movement. The suspicion has lingered that some elements of Pakistani intelligence are still protecting the Taliban and its al-Qaida allies in the autonomous tribal areas along the Afghan border.
Islamabad has acknowledged diplomatic and economic links with the Taliban but has denied direct military support, The Guardian reported. The US intelligence and state department documents, released under the country’s freedom of information act, show that Washington believed otherwise.
Afghanistan has accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of involvement in a number of recent attacks in the country — an attempted assassination of President Hamid Karzai in April, the July 7 suicide bomb attack outside Indian Embassy in Kabul that left over 60 people killed and a spate of suicide bombings and roadside bombs blamed on Taliban militants. More here…
The New York Times says: “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.” The NYT quotes Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, a research fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies: “As India’s influence grows it will become increasingly involved in the local politics of a foreign country. It cannot afford to see itself as an innocent bystander anymore.”
The NYT adds: “C. Raja Mohan, an Indian foreign policy analyst, 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.” More here…
Another Indian expert has this to say: “Neither the Afghans nor the Pakistanis, as distinct from their governments, concede that they and the US-led forces have a common enemy. The ‘war on terror’ is perceived widely as a war on the people, and not only because of allegedly accidental strikes on Pashtun homes and hamlets in the border areas. The fact is that the antiterrorist credentials of ‘the Americans and the agencies’ lack credibility because of a pro-Taliban past.
“Nor do the governments of the triangle see a common enemy in terrorism as such. On paper, New Delhi, Islamabad and Kabul may be allies in a US-headed antiterror front. But, in practice, they have only been busy trying to turn the alliance and its leader against each other. There would seem to be no sound reason to hope for early arrival of a time when the region won’t reverberate with terrorist blasts.” More here…
Meanwhile here is how Taliban recenly breached NATO base in a deadly clash…Please click here.. And here…
Even Pakistan’s capital city Islamabad is under serious militant threat with foreign diplomats making preparations to flee at short notice. Read the full story here…
This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Taliban, Afghanistan War, USA, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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