Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institute wrote on 09/11/08 about How 9/11 is Connected to December 13. His educated guess is that the December 13, 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament building was instigated by Al Qa'ida in order to create tensions along the Pakistan-India border and draw Pakistani troops away from trying to seal the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
It certainly did have that effect. And the two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, had conventional troops massed along their common border for around a year after that.
As Riegel writes, "The al-Qaeda is too often seen in the West only in its Middle East dimension; its roots in South Asia are often ignored or misunderstood."
And the fact that Pakistan likely sees Afghanistan more in the context of its relations with India is also little discussed, but could be as important than the troop movements, or more so. Pakistan backed the Taliban prior to 9/11/2001 because they provided "strategic depth" in the ongoing conflict with India over the Kashmir province. And they wanted to make sure that Afghanistan was not going to become an ally of India.
Right now, the Karzai government in Kabul most likely looks even more like a pro-India government to the Pakistanis than it did before.
Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay wrote in their 2003 book, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy:
Just as he had reoriented America's foreign policy agenda to focus single-mindedly on defeating terror, so Bush expected every other country to reorient its foreign policy as well. But the rest of the world had more to worry about than the terrorist attacks on the United States.And if Pakistan decides that their need to have Afghanistan as an unquestionably reliable ally in their conflict with India is more important than the need to please the Americans, that could complicate matters inside Afghanistan even more.
Tags: afghanistan war, india, pakistan
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