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— The leaders of India and Afghanistan on Monday decried last month's bombing of New Delhi's mission in the Afghan capital — but made no mention of the country both hold responsible for the attack: Pakistan.
India and Afghanistan — and, reportedly, the United States — believe Pakistan's powerful spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence, orchestrated the bombing that killed 58 people in an effort to undermine growing ties between New Delhi and Kabul.
Instead, it may have only strengthened them. Indian Prime Minster Manmohan Singh said Monday that India would give another US$450 million to aid in the rebuilding of Afghanistan.
He called the bombing "an attack on the friendship between India and Afghanistan" and pledged that "we will not allow terrorism to stand in our way."
Singh spoke after meeting Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who told reporters: "Afghanistan will stand with our friends in India in fighting the menace of terrorism."
"As India has suffered immensely from this menace, Afghanistan has too," added Karzai, who arrived Sunday and was heading home later Monday.
Singh and Karzai conspicuously avoided any direct reference to Pakistan, which both have repeatedly accused of harboring and aiding Islamic militant groups behind numerous attacks in India and Afghanistan, including the embassy bombing.
That attack is being widely viewed as the latest salvo in the six-decade rivalry between predominantly Hindu India and largely Muslim Pakistan, which were born in the bloody partition of the subcontinent at independence from Britain in 1947.
Pakistan has long considered Afghanistan a strategic rear base in any potential conflict with India, and is wary of New Delhi's efforts to forge strong ties with Kabul since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
But, if anything, the attack has mainly strained the stagnating India-Pakistan peace process. Indian officials say the talks are now at their lowest point since the process began in 2004.
Apart from the Kabul bombing, the peace process is also suffering from a repeated exchanges of gunfire in recent months across the frontier in Kashmir, an overwhelmingly Muslim region split between the two and claimed entirely by both.
The Himalayan region has been the focus of two of the countries' three wars, although the frontier had been largely quiet since a truce was declared in late 2003.
