It seems my Newsweek story on Lashkar-e-Taiba was well-timed (more by luck than any particular foresight on my part.) In the past two days, a debate has erupted over whether the Pakistan-based terrorist outfit was involved in last Friday’s attack on two guest houses in Kabul that killed 16 people, including six Indians, a French filmmaker and an Italian diplomat, and wounded more than 60.The spokesman for Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, Sayed Ansari, says yes. He says his government believes LeT was involved in the attack because the terrorists made an effort to deliberately target Indians and at least one of the attackers spoke Urdu, the Pakistani language, not Dari, which most Afghans speak. (Now, to me, that seems like somewhat weak evidence to use to pin the attack on LeT — after all, there are other groups that recruit Urdu-speaking militants — but there you go.)

And, in fact, others are less sure. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. And in a conversation with The New York Times’ Alissa Rubin, a Taliban spokesman said the attack was aimed at Europeans and other Westerners, not Indians. He denied it had anything to do with disrupting detente between India and Pakistan, which the day before the bombings had held peace talks in New Delhi for the first time since the November 2008 Mumbai attacks (which were the work of LeT.)

An unnamed U.S. military intelligence official quoted by The Washington Post yesterday in a story that was widely picked up by the Indian press said he believed that the Haqqani Network was behind the attack. Others have speculated that some combination of groups, perhaps the LeT working with the Taliban, or perhaps the LeT working with the Haqqani Network, carried out the attacks. (The Indian authorities believe LeT, working with the Haqqani Network, carried out the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul in the summer of 2008.)

The prevailing view in New Delhi is that the jury is still out. Indian officials quoted in today’s Hindu said they were looking at several possible suspects including the Haqqani Network, LeT, the Pakistani Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, or some combination of those groups. (This idea of combinations of terrorist groups is interesting and I will explore it more below.)

But what New Delhi is certain about, and not for the first time, is that Richard Holbrooke is wrong. Holbrooke, the American special envoy for Af-Pak issues, responded to a question about the Kabul attack at a press conference on Wednesday by saying that he did not accept that “this was an attack on an Indian facility.” Noting that there were other foreigners killed and injured, he said the guest houses were simply “a soft target” and pleaded with people to “please, let’s not draw a conclusion for which there’s no proof.”

This drew a sharp rebuke from Indian officials who described Holbrooke as “absolutely incorrect.” The Indians say that no matter who was responsible, they are sure Indians were deliberately targeted. They said that from Afghan officials they know that the terrorists had specific information about Indians occupying the guest houses including the fact that some of them worked for an NGO aimed at empowering Afghan women and that a certain senior diplomat on secondment to the Afghan Interior Ministry lived in one of the buildings. The terrorists apparently went room to room asking for certain individuals.

So it is possible that Holbrooke is wrong. But the reason the Indians are so keen to point out that he’s wrong is all about the fact that the Indians really dislike Holbrooke.  Not personally, of course (although that may also be true), but his role. No matter how many times he denies it, the suspicion in New Delhi is that Holbrooke and the Obama Administration see India’s dispute with Kashmir as ultimately linked to Washington’s policy toward Pakistan. (The logic being that the U.S. can’t have an effective Afghanistan policy until it fixes Pakistan and it can’t fix Pakistan until it fixes Kashmir.) This suspicion seems impossible to dislodge no matter what Holbrooke does. And Holbrooke certainly tries. He now goes out of his way at every press conference to deny that he has anything to do with India or trying to resolve the on-going dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. He won’t even mention the K-word, choosing instead to refer to it in his Wednesday press conference as “that certain area between [India and Pakistan] that I’m not going to mention by name.” And he said on Wednesday that he thinks that linking Kashmir to Af-Pak “runs counter to stability in Afghanistan. Afghanistan must be dealt with on its own merits.”

But this sort of thing just leads to jibes that Holbrooke doth protest too much. The Indians know that some people on Holbrooke’s staff, if not Holbrooke himself, do indeed think that a solution to Kashmir might be one thing they could offer Pakistan that would really get the Army and the ISI fully on board with the campaign against the Taliban and other Islamic militants based on both sides of the Af-Pak border. And Holbrooke is a consummate dealmaker.  He lives for the big peace settlement — for the grand bargain. He doesn’t just want to tinker around the edges of a policy (although that seems to be the role he’s been boxed into now.) It must be extremely frustrating to be in his job and not be able to really get involved in how India interacts with both Pakistan and Afghanistan. For a really good exploration of Holbrooke, his team and the frustrations created by his limited mandate, I highly recommend George Packer’s fantastic profile of Holbrooke from the September 28 The New Yorker. (Full disclosure: I am among those who thinks that it makes sense to at least explore the impact that peace between India and Pakistan would have on both Afghanistan and the support for Islamic militants in Pakistan. As I argue in my Newsweek story, a peace settlement between India and Pakistan would certainly remove the ISI’s prime excuse for continuing to allow the LeT to operate with impunity from within Pakistan.)

So it is not surprising that whenever Holbrooke comes to New Delhi for consultations, the press is full of stories about how he may be secretly plotting to link India to US Af-Pak strategy. Or why Indian officials leap all over him if he implies that Pakistan is not using terrorist groups to fight a proxy war against India in Afghanistan. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for Richard Holbrooke, and that’s no easy thing.

Now, enough about Holbrooke. Let’s circle back to the suggestion that LeT might be working with the Taliban or the Haqqani network to carry out attacks in Afghanistan. This is interesting and the source of a lot attention among Western security analysts at the moment.  Stephen Tankel, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington, DC, and an expert on LeT, has pointed out that, traditionally, LeT was disdainful of the Taliban and stayed well away from them. The LeT came out of the Ahl-e-Hadith school of Islam, whereas the Taliban come out of the Deobandi school and they have significant differences in their religious interpretations. And while the Ahl-e-Hadith school is much closer to other Salafi movements, such as Al Qaeda, LeT became wary of Al Qaeda too in the late 1990s because it was working so closely with the Taliban. (Meanwhile, Al Qaeda, while relying on certain logistical support from the LeT in Pakistan — primarily safe houses — after the loss of its safe haven in Afghanistan in late 2001, was also  somewhat distrustful of the LeT because of its close relationship with the ISI, which it thought could betray the group to Western intelligence.)

But all of this has started to change. In 2006, the LeT made a decision to belatedly get involved in the Afghan conflict. This may have been, as Tankel writes in his forthcoming book on the LeT, because Pakistan had begun curtailing its activities in Kashmir so the LeT was looking for a new venue to practice jihad. Or it may have been because the ISI, which has always maintained close contacts and a good deal of influence with the group, wanted the LeT involved in Afghanistan to check what it saw as growing Indian influence there.

In response, the LeT began shifting more of its activities from the Punjab, in Pakistan’s heartland, and Pakistani Kashmir, where it had traditionally operated training camps and staged operations, to the lawless tribal belt along the Afghan border. Here the group mingled more with fighters from other militant organizations, and seems to have been able to transcend ideological differences to begin closer affiliations with some of them. On a tactical level, the groups share many of the same goals. And it is also the case, as I argue in my Newsweek piece, that LeT has become increasingly close to Al Qaeda in recent years. Al Qaeda, in turn, maintains close links to the Haqqani network. So there is quite a lot of overlap here and this may explain the alleged joint Haqqani-LeT operations, such as the Indian Embassy attack in 2008 — and perhaps the guest house attack last week.

As an unnamed Indian official told The Hindu today, various militant groups operating out of the Af-Pak border region are now “all mixed up with one another.” That also seems to be the assessment from Western intelligence officials and security analysts I talked to recently. Individual militants, who may get to be friendly because they have bases in close physical proximity, may have attended the same training camps, or share certain facilities now, are coming together to plan and carry out attacks. And as a result, it is becoming much harder to say which group executed which attack. Instead, the model is much more like producing a movie, where a bunch of people from different organizations may come together for a specific project, but then go their separate ways. And Al Qaeda, which has maintained close ties with both the Salafi and Ahl-e-Hadith organizations as well as the Deobandi groups, may act as a kind of broker and facilitator in this process.

Getting to the bottom of who attacked the Kabul guest houses last week may shed valuable light on the extent of these connections. And if it turns out the LeT was involved and that Indians were deliberately targeted, it will once again highlight the extent to which India’s role in Afghanistan matters when trying to think about a strategy for, not just Afghanistan, but the entire region.