text: The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : Making the water boil in Afghanistan
  Was the attack on the Indian mission in Kabul a one-off terror attack, or part of a calibrated Pakistani strategy? "The water in Afghanistan," Pakistan President General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq told his spymaster Lieutenant-General Akhtar Abdul Rehman Khan in December 1979, "must boil at the right temperature."
  How plausible are these allegations?
  Answers lie in the quiet war India and Pakistan are waging in Afghanistan. Several commentators have suggested that India's role in Afghanistan has something to do with its evolving strategic relationship with the United States. On point of fact, this assertion is ill-founded. From Afghanistan's independence until the triumph of the Pakistan-backed mujahideen in 1992, New Delhi backed whoever was in power in Kabul. India's motives were simple. Ever since 1947, Pakistan had waged what Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called "an informal war" to seize Jammu and Kashmir. By supporting Pakistan's Afghan adversaries, India was returning the compliment.
  Islamabad, for its part, backed not a few plots of its own. Its covert services cultivated Islamists exiled by the Daud government, using religion to combat Pashtun nationalism. In July 1975, the ISI financed an attempted coup led by the future mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Even the 1992 mujahideen capture of Kabul did not fundamentally alter India's strategic objectives in Afghanistan. Internal fighting between Hekmatyar and other mujahideen groups soon led to a situation where New Delhi was backing one or the other faction which found itself in opposition to Pakistan. It was only with the rise of the Taliban that India, for the first time in the history of Afghanistan, found itself supporting an opposition group — the Northern Alliance led by Ahmad Shah Massoud. In 1996-1997, RAW initiated negotiations for the use of the Farkhor military airbase, 130 kilometres south-east of Tajikistan's capital, Dushanbe. India operated a small military hospital at Farkhor but also used the base to ship high-altitude warfare supplies to the Northern Alliance, service the group's Soviet Union-built MI-17 and MI-38 helicopters, and execute electronic intelligence-gathering operations.
  In July 2003, Islamabad officially expressed concern about Indian activities along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. Allegations followed that India was printing fake Pakistani currency in Afghanistan, to fund cross-border terror strikes. Pakistani newspapers quoted officials as claiming that India's consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar were supplying cash and weapons to terrorists in south Waziristan. India was also accused of inciting Nangrahar province warlord Hazrat Ali to shell Pakistani forward positions in the Mohmand Agency. Soon after, Pakistan also accused India of running terror networks out of several Afghan military bases, including Qushila Jadid, north of Kabul; near Gereshk, in southern Helmand province; in the Panjshir Valley, northeast of Kabul; and at Kahak and Hassan Killie in western Nimruz. Weeks after these allegations surfaced, India's new consulate in Jalalabad came under grenade attack. Although no lives were lost in the September 1, 2003 strikes, India correctly understood them as a warning. Afghanistan investigators later arrested seven local residents for their role in the attack. They are believed to have confessed that they carried out the strikes on orders from intelligence handlers in Pakistan. As the Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti-led Baloch insurgency against Pakistan escalated from 2004, Islamabad's allegations grew more strident. In August 2004, Balochistan Chief Minister Jam Mohammad Yusuf declared that India was running 40 terror camps targeting the province — this after months of claims that the Baloch Liberation Army did not exist! At the beginning of July 2006, Mushahid Husain, the chair of the Pakistan Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, asserted that RAW was "training 600 Balochis in Afghanistan." He charged India with "propping up the Baloch war" and lashed out at the Riyast-i-Amniyat-i-Milli and the Afghan border police for liaising with RAW.
  Having said that, such support could have been provided whether or not India was in Afghanistan — and some of Pakistan's allegations have been farcical. Senator Hussain, for example, charged India with building up a military presence in Afghanistan. Just why Hussain was so alarmed by the presence of what he himself admitted was a "company strength" presence of Indo-Tibetan Border Police Guards — assigned to Afghanistan after the killing of an India road-construction engineer in November 2005 by the Taliban — is unclear. Some Pakistani newspapers have also reported that India has decided to send peacekeepers to Afghanistan at the behest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. In fact, both the U.S. and the United Kingdom, ever-sensitive to actions which might hurt Pakistan, have been pressuring India to scale down its diplomatic presence in Afghanistan — let alone sending troops there.
  As the French scholar-diplomat Frederic Grare has pointed out, India and Pakistan are "fighting an emerging proxy-war in still war-torn Afghanistan." "The real question," he suggested in a paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "is not whether it is happening but its actually intensity." Grare argued that while there is "little doubt that India has a strong intelligence presence in Afghanistan, this does not necessarily mean it is conducting special operations. But even if it does so, are they militarily significant? The local situation in both Waziristan and Balochistan has been such that Pakistan would have been in trouble in the two areas, irrespective of whether India engaged actively in subversive operations in these regions." From the point of view of Pakistan's covert services, though, time is running out. Despite the revival of its Islamist allies in Afghanistan, Pakistan is more estranged from the country's political elite and its people than at any time in the past.
  At the same time, India has succeeded in consolidating its presence. Farkhor, India's only military base outside its territory, is thought to have been in a state of full operational readiness since last year, offering New Delhi's armed forces unprecedented strategic reach. Afghanistan's membership of the South Asia Free Trade Agreement will strengthen its trade ties with India, which is now the largest regional donor to that country's reconstruction programme. India has helped to rebuild roads — including the crucial Kandahar-Iran highway that will relieve Afghanistan of its dependence on Pakistan — airlines, and power plants, and provides support to the health and education sectors. Afghan civil servants, diplomats, and police officials are being trained by India and its elected representatives meet in a building India helped to construct.