KABUL, (Reuters) – India’s top diplomat inspected the site of a huge bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul yesterday but declined to assign blame for a strike that has renewed focus on India’s tense relations with Pakistan.
India has in the past accused Pakistan’s ISI spy agency of being behind attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan. An attack on the same Kabul embassy last year killed 58 people.
Thursday’s blast killed 17 people but harmed no embassy staff. The Taliban claimed responsibility. Pakistan condemned it.
Separately, U.S. forces said on Friday they had abandoned remote outposts in the east of the country near the Pakistani border, six days after Taliban fighters stormed the positions, killing eight Americans.
The withdrawal was part of a strategy by top NATO and U.S. commander General Stanley McChrystal to redeploy from remote areas to population centers. Fighters have frequently responded to such moves with attacks designed to assert control of areas after U.S. forces pull out.
This year has seen a dramatic rise of violence in Afghanistan where 100,000 Western troops, two-thirds of them American, are battling to contain an increasingly fierce insurgency.
In Washington, U.S. officials said the White House had been presented with intelligence estimating that Taliban-led forces battling U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan had grown nearly four-fold in the past four years to roughly 25,000 from 7,000.
U.S. President Barack Obama had a strategy session with his national security team at the White House on Friday that was expected to discuss a request by the U.S. military to send up to 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan next year.