New Delhi, Aug. 1: Indian, American and Afghan interests on the role of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as a sponsor of terrorism are converging for the first time.

Intelligence agencies in New Delhi, Washington and Kabul are separately picking up a trail of evidence on the July 7 attack on the Indian embassy that leads to Rawalpindi.

The common conclusion on the role of the ISI is likely to be more prominently played up during Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s scheduled visit to New Delhi on Monday.

Also, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to bring the subject up when he meets his Pakistani counterpart, Yousuf Raza Gilani, tomorrow evening in Colombo on the sidelines of the Saarc summit. Indian officials said today that talks with Pakistan were at the lowest point in four years.

Karzai and Indian leaders frequently say that their countries are hit by “cross-border terrorism”. Karzai’s interior minister, like India’s national security adviser M.K. Narayanan, has said the attack on the Indian embassy was orchestrated by the ISI.

This morning The New York Times reported that “American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials”. Intercepts of communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and the militants who carried out the attack are said to be with US agencies.

The convergence of Indian and American interests on the ISI is rare. The Manmohan Singh government has achieved — by accident or by design — what the best efforts of the Vajpayee-led NDA government, after the hijack of an Indian aircraft in 1999 and the Parliament attack in 2001, could not.

Despite the efforts following those acts of terrorism, Washington was still chary of accepting New Delhi’s insistence that the apparatus of militancy was located within Pakistan.

Now, after moving closer to the Indian position on the ISI, the US is piling pressure on the Gilani government but hard-hitting options are being kept in abeyance.

This is because the US is already embroiled in two separate wars with too many boots on the ground, because of a question mark over Iran and the fact that US and Nato forces in Afghanistan are heavily dependent on supplies through Pakistan.

On July 12, M.K. Narayanan put it on record for the first time that there was solid evidence of the ISI’s sponsorship of the attack on the embassy.

An Indian diplomat and India’s defence attache were among more than 50 killed by the suicide bomber who rammed his bomb-laden Datsun into the mission in Kabul’s Shahr-e-Now.