The terror attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul in 2008 that left 58 people - including two top Indian officials — killed and over 140 injured, was sanctioned and monitored by senior officials of Pakistan’s ISI, according to a new book.
“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 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 intelligence information through intercepts of phone calls, could not prevent the attack, wrote Gall, one of the only women reporters on the ground in Afghanistan after 9/11.
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. The evidence was so damning that the Bush administration dispatched the deputy chief of 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 car. They tracked down his collaborator in Kabul. That facilitator, an Afghan, had been in direct contact with Pakistan by telephone,” Gall wrote.
{{/usCountry}}“Investigators found the bomber’s cell phone in the wreckage of his car. They tracked down his collaborator in Kabul. That facilitator, an Afghan, had been in direct contact with Pakistan by telephone,” Gall wrote.
{{/usCountry}}“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,” she claimed in her book.