Foreign secretary Ranjan Mathai has quite literally been through a trial by fire recently.
Flying into Kabul on September 13 for consultations with senior Afghan officials after resuming his new charge, Mr Mathai is understood to have landed in the Afghan capital almost at the same time that gunmen launched terrorist attacks against the four dispersed targets in the city, including the US embassy and the headquarters of the International Security Assistant Force (ISAF), which are adjacent to one another.
The foreign secretary and his team apparently stayed put for a few hours at the Kabul airport, which is barely three kilometres from the scene of action in the broad Wazir Akbar Khan area, home to diplomatic missions, including India.
Even so, Mr Mathai’s entourage is understood to have braved its way into town. Knowledgeable sources said the Indian diplomat kept all his assignments on this get-to-know trip. The last of the terrorist siege ended only on Wednesday morning, some 20 hours after it had commenced the previous afternoon, diplomatic sources said from Kabul. The Taliban have sought to take credit for the strike, which sought to make a point or two.
However, in a statement, US ambassador Ryan Crocker, who is a veteran of the region having served in the same capacity in Islamabad earlier, appear-ed to suggest that the militants — who rained rocket propelled grenades and bullets in a string of episodes that together constitute the most “complex” terrorist strike on Kabul in the past 10 years under US watch — were from the Haqqani group that is based on the Pakistan side of the border. The Afghan side, however, is still to make a proper determination, well-placed sources said.
The Haqqani group operates independent of the Taliban but is said to have good relations with the Quetta shura, the name given to the top conglomerate of the Taliban leadership headed by Mullah Omar which is based in the Balochistan capital. More worrying, the Haqqani group is thought to be all but an extension of the Al Qaeda. Pakistan had been keen not long ago to involve the Haqqani group into talks with Kabul to prepare for the aftermath of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, scheduled for 2014.
Kabul is one of the seven places in Afghanistan from which US and Nato troops have been transferring responsibility to the Afghan security forces since July this year, although the latter are widely believed to be a work in progress after the destruction of their organisational core in more than three decades of continuous war and national disruption. This has caused some observers to conclude that the Afghan forces weren’t quite up to it in dealing with the terrible situation on Tuesday through Wednesday. Mr Crocker, however, did not think so, as was apparent from his statement.
The moot point, however, is that even under Nato and US supervision, the security situation had been continually plunging in the last four years, with dramatic strikes occurring even in the early part of this year.