India is sponsoring vocational training of Afghan nationals
Posted on 07/07/2008 9:40:35 AM PDT by CarrotAndStick
The attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul is a setback for a country which has been one of Afghanistan's closest allies in recent years.
After the fall of the Taleban in 2001 India moved quickly to regain its strategic depth in Afghanistan.
It opened two new consulates in Herat and Mazhar-e-Sharif and reopened two others in Kandahar and Jalalabad which had been shut since 1979.
India also became one of Kabul's leading donors - it has pledged to spend $750m on helping rebuild the country's shattered infrastructure.
Funds have been committed for education, health, power and telecommunications. There has also been money in the form of food aid and help to strengthen governance.
India is erecting power transmission lines in the north, building more than 200km (125 miles) of road, digging tube wells in six provinces, running sanitation projects in Kabul, and working on lighting up 100 villages using solar energy.
It has given at least three Airbus planes to Afghanistan's ailing national airline. Several thousand Indians are engaged in development work.
'High profile'
Bilateral trade has grown rapidly, reaching $225m in 2006-2007.
"India's reconstruction strategy was designed to win over every sector of Afghan society, give India a high profile with Afghans, gain the maximum political advantage and, of course, undercut Pakistani influence," says analyst Ahmed Rashid, who has written extensively on the region.
Pakistan has had misgivings about increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan since the Taleban were ousted.
President Pervez Musharraf has openly accused Afghan President Hamid Karzai of kow-towing to India. Islamabad has also said that the Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad are funnelling arms and money to insurgents in Pakistan's troubled Balochistan region.
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India is sponsoring vocational training of Afghan nationals
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All this once provoked President Hamid Karzai, who went to university in India, to say: "If Pakistan is worried about the role of India, let me assure [you], I have been very specific in telling the Indians that they cannot use Afghan soil for acts of aggression against another country."
Analysts say Pakistan believes its influence is declining in post-war Afghanistan.
"India's success in Afghanistan stirred up a hornet's nest in Islamabad which came to believe that India was 'taking over Afghanistan'," says Ahmed Rashid in his new book Descent Into Chaos.
Also, local Taleban have attacked and kidnapped Indians in the country.
Changing fortunes
There have been explosions and grenade attacks on the Indian consulates in Herat and Jalalabad.
In January, two Indian and 11 Afghan security personnel were killed and several injured in an attack on the road that India is building, which will link the western cities of Zaranj and Herat with Kandahar in the south.
In November 2005, a driver with India's state-run Border Roads Organisation was abducted and killed by the Taleban while working on the road.
There have been other attacks on Indians too.
In 2003, an Indian national working for a construction company was killed by unknown attackers in Kabul's Taimani district.
In 2006, an Indian telecommunications engineer was abducted and killed in the southern province in Zabul.
India's fortunes in Afghanistan have swung back and forth for much of the past two decades
A staunch ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, India supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
This decision made India vastly unpopular among Afghans.
 President Musharraf has accused Afghanistan of kow-towing to India
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A decade later, it continued to back the Communist-regime of President Najibullah, while Pakistan threw its entire support behind the ethnic Pashtun mujahideen warlords, particularly the Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who were fighting the Soviet Union.
So when the Taleban swept to power and put an end to a bloody civil conflict among warlords, India was left without any influence in the country.
It ended up backing the Northern Alliance, which controlled territory north of the Shomali plains near Kabul.
Pakistan, on the other hand, backed and recognised the pariah Taleban regime and gained further strategic depth in the region.
Afghanistan's interior ministry says it believes the attack on the Indian embassy was carried out "in co-ordination and consultation with an active intelligence service in the region".
It is clearly alluding to Pakistani agents, who have been blamed for a number of attacks in Afghanistan.
We may never know precisely who carried out the attack.
But the bombing points to the "Great Game" still being played out between neighbours seeking to gain influence in Afghanistan.
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