I will quickly mention two. One is a capacity development project that has three partners, the governments of India and Afghanistan and the United Nations Development Programme. Twenty middle level officers of deputy secretary and director rank are working under this scheme in key Afghan ministries. They are not advisors. They do not perform line functions. They serve as coaches and mentors. They have been positioned expressly to develop Afghan skills.

Typically, when an Afghan public servant has to execute a piece of work, the Indian mentor demonstrates how he would do a similar job in India. This is the secret of the programme's success.

Another innovative project being executed for us by the Gujarat-based NGO, SEWA. It is unique that they have decided to train 1,000 Afghan war widows, orphans and destitutes. They are being taught how to augment their family income by developing skills in food processing, horticulture, stitching and embroidery, and marketing.

Five SEWA volunteers, who are, in turn, helped by 35 Afghan women trainers who have spent time in India, supervise batches of 250 Afghan women in Bagh-e-Janana (a women's-only park). The idea is to turn Kabuls Bagh-e-Janana into a Bagh-e-Khazana.

How does the Taliban view these projects?

The people of Afghanistan desire progress. Around the highway we have constructed, the value of properties have gone up. The number of passengers who travel between Zaranj and Delaram has multiplied. In the last three years, the number of container trucks that come up to the Iranian side of the border, carrying goods for Afghanistan, has gone up from five to fifty-five. Travel and trade are both growing steadily.

The population of Zaranj, the capital of Nimroz province, has doubled from 55,000 to 1.1 lakh. The time of travel for ordinary Afghans to Delaram has been reduced from 14 hours to two-and-half hours.

The benefits of Indian projects are there for anybody to see.

We don't make any distinction between ethnicities. We don't ask questions about whose children get the biscuits in schools, distributed by WFP in 33 out of the 34 Afghan provinces.

I was asking about the Taliban's view of India's involvement. Do they have any reservations about India's presence in the country?

Well, they may not like India's presence in Afghanistan, but they have to ask the people of Afghanistan. Over 90 percent of Afghans either approve or strongly approve of India's presence in Afghanistan because they believe India is making a contribution to their development.

Has there been any effort to hold the perpetrators of the attack on the Indian embassy on July 7 last year accountable for their actions?

Several local facilitators who assisted in the preparation and execution of the attack were taken into custody by the Afghan authorities, who are continuing to pursue the leads provided by the arrested individuals. They have a fair idea of how the attack was conceived and executed by terrorists outside Afghanistan.

As in the case of the Mumbai attacks, where we were fortunate to have an overwhelming body of evidence about the perpetrators of the attack, we are determined to continue investigations about the Kabul attack in a way that there would be a final reckoning to bring the attackers to justice.

Image: The garden pavillion built by Shah Jahan at Bagh-e-Babur, Kabul.

Also see: 'May God not put any country in the fire that we were in'

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