One Off Or New Strategy

Yesterday I wondered if the latest car bombing in Kabul was a change in Pakistan's strategy towards Afghanistan. Today Praveen Swami writes about how the security and intelligence apparatus is approaching the suicide bombing targeting Bharatiya embassy.

“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.”

Ever since a car bomb ripped through the Indian mission in Kabul on Monday, India’s National Security Adviser, M.K. Narayanan, as well as top officials of the Research and Analysis Wing, the Intelligence Bureau and the Ministry of External Affairs, have all been focussed on just one question: was the attack a one-off strike by Islamist terror groups, or part of a focussed operation by Pakistan’s covert services to make the water in Afghanistan too hot for India to swim in?