ATTACK ON INDIAN EMBASSY - KABUL

AWAKE and ARISE – We are without too many friends in our neighbourhood

So finally the Taliban and ISI have managed to sneak in and blow up a big portion of our embassy. After killing nearly 46 members of the International Security force in June 2008, What better place than the Afghan capital and what better time than in the middle of the big Pakistan - Afghanistan controversy over the statements of President Hamid Karzai they have managed to hit out at the Indians.

Anyways getting back to our embassy, the sequence of events is as follows:
At 8.31 AM, just as the visa office opens at the embassy, the Jawans of the ITBP along with the Afghan interpreter were questioning a man driving a Toyota, who was following the defence attaché’s car. The minute this bomber to be saw the car of the defence attaché moving inside the heavy iron gates of the Indian Embassy, he blew his vehicle killing nearly 41 people including 4 Indian patriots and injuring 150 people. Being just 30 yards away from the convoy, the impact was so powerful that it blew up a portion of our Main embassy building even though it was being protected by newly built dirt filled sand bag wall. The strength of the impact could also be gauged by the fact that the body of Mr. V Rao (consular - political) was not even found till nearly an hour of the blast and was later retrieved from a nearby roof top and only the wrist watch of Brig Mehta was found.

Also a point to be noted is that our embassy is surrounded on one side of the road by the Interior Ministry offices and the other side by the Indonesian Embassy. The impact was such that two diplomats of the Indonesian Embassy working well inside their own highly secured embassy were also injured in the blast.

One silver lining was the fact that an Army Signals unit had set up VSAT communication link between MEA in New Delhi and Indian Embassy, Kabul; a 24-line exchange for the trunk and local voice communication and a Local Area Network (LAN) at the Embassy. This provided the much- needed voice, data and internet access to the Indian Embassy which was useful to alert the MEA and even the other consular offices in Afghanistan moments after the blast.

Couple of pointers if this could have been averted:

1. Was the Indian Embassy staff provided with Armoured Vehicles for their official duty?
2. Why was the bullet proof/ Mobile Jammer jeeps not provided to them during these duties as pictures show at least 2 of such vehicles (with their windows shattered) being parked in the Embassy compound after the blast?
3. Why was a perimeter fence of just 30 yards being formed near the main gate of the Indian Embassy?
4. Were we complacent due to the fact that the afghan interior ministry was located next to our embassy and they could/would protect our embassy from such threats?
5. What have we done NOW to protect our consulates that have been established in the outlying cities of Kandahar, Jalalabad, Herat, and Mazar-i-Sharif?
6. Why cannot the Indian Government supplement the office of the Military Attaché with some support staff? Does he need to be a sitting duck without any sort of officially or unofficially authorised eyes and ears on the ground?
7. What are we going to do now? Wait for the Taliban to attack at some other location in Afghanistan?

I am reproducing the words of an enlightened Pakistani with reference of the threat that we face in Afghanistan:

Ikram Sehgal, a political analyst in Pakistan, said he doubts Pakistan's intelligence service was behind the attack. He instead blamed Pashtuns — the largest of Afghan ethnic groups that also forms the core of the Taliban insurgency.

"The Indians were asking for it," Sehgal said. "They have set up so many consulates along the border," Sehgal said. "It was question of time. The (Pashtuns) see them as enemies, actually. They had to react to the Indians setting up consulates there."

AWAKE and ARISE – We are without too many friends in our neighbourhood