KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — The massive car bomb that killed more than 40 people outside the Indian Embassy here Monday has stoked regional tensions and threatened to erode already diminishing confidence in the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Afghanistan's Interior Ministry indirectly blamed Pakistan for the suicide attack, the deadliest in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban movement in 2001. Nearly 150 people were injured in the bombing, an audacious strike in what had previously been considered a well-secured area of the capital.
Pakistan swiftly condemned the attack, which nonetheless was expected to generate more acrimony between the two neighbors, both considered key U.S. allies in the fight against Islamic militants. Afghan officials accused Pakistan's main intelligence service of having had a hand in an assassination attempt against Karzai in April. Last month, the Afghan leader threatened to send troops into Pakistan if authorities there could not stem the cross-border movement of insurgents into Afghanistan.
Long-standing tensions between India and Pakistan have at various times become entangled in the Afghan conflict. However, it was not immediately clear who carried out the bombing or why the Indian Embassy was targeted.
The bombing came amid surging violence in Afghanistan and as the writ of the Karzai government has been weakening across the country. Many ordinary Afghans are bitterly disillusioned that daily life remains filled with hardship and fraught with danger six years after the U.S.-led invasion.
The bombing drew condemnation from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, which is battling to subdue Taliban fighters in the country's south and increasingly violent east. New data released last month by the U.S. military showed attacks in the east were up 40%. In the south, the Taliban's traditional homeland, the military deployed more than 2,000 additional Marines in March to help allied forces.
Fatalities among Western troops are running at their highest levels since the start of the war, with 127 killed so far this year, according to the website icasualties.org -- on pace to surpass last year's toll of 232.
But attacks like Monday's, even if aimed at official installations, tend to hit the most vulnerable.
Witnesses said the bomber tried to ram a pair of diplomatic vehicles entering the Indian Embassy complex just after 8:30 a.m. But passersby on the busy thoroughfare in central Kabul, including women, infants and children, took the brunt of the powerful explosion, which reverberated across the city.
