2008 Indian Embassy attack in Kabul sanctioned by ISI: book

 

 

The suicide car bomb attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008 left 58 people - including two top Indian officials - killed and over 140 injured.

 

"The embassy bombing was no operation by rogue ISI agents acting on their own. It was sanctioned and monitored by the most senior officials in Pakistani intelligence," wrote senior journalist Carlotta Gall in her latest book 'The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001-2004', to be out next month.

 

The then Bush Administration, that received advance intelligence information, mainly through intercepts of phone calls, could not prevent the deadly attack, wrote Gall, one of the only women Western reporters on the ground in Afghanistan after 9/11 and covered the Af-Pak conflict for 10 years.

 

The bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul "revealed the clearest evidence of ISI complicity in its planning and execution", according to excerpts from the book provided to PTI.

"American and Afghan surveillance intercepted phone calls from ISI officials in Pakistan and heard them planning the attack with the militants in Kabul in the days leading up to the bombing. At the time, intelligence officials monitoring the calls did not know what was being planned, but the involvement of a high-level official in promoting a terrorist attack was clear.

 

"The evidence was so damning that the Bush administration dispatched the deputy chief of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, to Islamabad to remonstrate with the Pakistanis. The bomber struck, however, before Kappes reached Pakistan," she said.

 

"Investigators found the bomber's cell phone in the wreckage of his exploded car. They tracked down his collaborator in Kabul, the man who had provided the logistics for the attack. That facilitator, an Afghan, had been in direct contact with Pakistan by telephone," Gall wrote.

 

"The number he had called belonged to a high-level ISI official in Peshawar. The official had sufficient seniority that he reported directly to ISI headquarters in Islamabad. The embassy bombing was no operation by rogue ISI agents acting on their own. It was sanctioned and monitored by the most senior officials in Pakistani intelligence," she claimed in her book, running into more than 300 pages.