An Afghan police officer at the site of a suicide attack near an Indian consulate in Afghanistan.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Armed with assault rifles and an explosives-laden Toyota, three men tried to assault an Indian consulate in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing at least nine people and offering a brutal reminder that tensions beyond this country’s borders threaten to fuel the conflict here long after the United States and its allies depart.
The carnage appeared to have been kept well away from the actual consulate in Jalalabad, a prosperous commercial hub near the border with Pakistan. The attackers, traveling in a Toyota Corolla, were instead stopped at a checkpoint near their apparent target. Two then jumped out of the vehicle and began spraying bullets down a bustling street.
Moments later, the driver detonated the explosives in the car. The blast ripped through nearby houses and a mosque, said Ahmadzia Abdulzai, a spokesman for the provincial government of Nangarhar Province, where Jalalabad is located.
The three attackers died along with the nine civilians they killed, according to a statement from the Nangarhar government. In Delhi, the Indian foreign ministry said the consulate staff was unharmed, The Associated Press reported. There were no indications that the attack was related to the warning by the State Department of a global threat of an Al Qaeda attack in the coming days.
The Taliban was quick to deny any role in Saturday’s attack. Zabihullah Mujahid, an insurgent spokesman, said, “We did not have any operation planned in Nangarhar for today.”
But such Taliban denials – and claims of credit – have at times proven less than credible, and the immediate suspicion fell on Afghan insurgents with links to Pakistan, India’s longtime foe.
Since 2001, Afghanistan has often found itself subject to the crosscurrents of the tense rivalry between India and Pakistan. The government of President Hamid Karzai, who studied in India, enjoys warm relations with New Delhi; Pakistan is widely seen as supporting the Taliban in part to assure it ends up with a pliable Afghan government that is not too close to its archrival.
The rivalry between Indian and Pakistan has repeatedly had deadly implications for Afghanistan. The Indian Embassy in Kabul was subjected to car bomb attacks in 2008 and 2009, for instance. The first assault left 58 people dead, including senior Indian military officers and diplomats; the second killed 17 people, all of them Afghan.
Citing communications intercepts and other intelligence, American, Afghan and Indian officials blamed both previous attacks on the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction closely associated with Pakistan’s spy service, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence.
Pakistan, for its part, has denied any role in the attacks, or other assaults on Indian interests in Afghanistan, such as an attack in 2010 on a Kabul guesthouse that was used mainly by Indian government employees.
Publicly, Pakistan has maintained it respects the sovereignty of Afghanistan, saying it has no stake in the country’s foreign affairs.
But the discourse in Pakistan about the Indian role in Afghanistan can sometimes veer into paranoia. Many there, for example, believe that India has built dozens of consulates up and down the Afghan border with Pakistan, and that the missions are used to aid the Pakistani Taliban, an offshoot of the Afghan Taliban.
Afghan and Indian officials say that India, along with its embassy in Kabul, has four consulates in the country’s major cities – the same number Pakistan has.
Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, and Khalid Alokozay from Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
