Afghan Militants Kill 9 Near Indian Consulate By MATTHEW ROSENBERG The New York Times August 3, 2013 KABUL, Afghanistan — Armed with assault rifles and an explosives-laden vehicle, three men tried to attack 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 in Nangarhar Province, near the border with Pakistan. The attackers, traveling in a Toyota sedan, were instead stopped at a checkpoint near their intended target. Two then jumped out of the car and began firing 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 Nangarhar provincial government. The three attackers died along with the nine civilians they killed, according to a statement from the Nangarhar government. In New Delhi, the Foreign Ministry said the consulate’s staff members were 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, a spokesman, said, “We did not have any operation planned in Nangarhar for today.” But such Taliban denials — and claims of responsibility — have at times proved less than credible, and the immediate suspicion fell on Afghan insurgents with links to Pakistan, India’s longtime enemy. 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 of Afghanistan, who studied in India, enjoys warm relations with New Delhi; Pakistan is widely seen as supporting the Taliban in part to ensure that 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 said the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction closely associated with Pakistan’s spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, was responsible for both previous attacks. Pakistan, for its part, has denied any role in the attacks, or other assaults on Indian interests in Afghanistan, like an attack in 2010 on a Kabul guesthouse that was used mainly by Indian government employees. Publicly, Pakistan has maintained that 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 border between Afghanistan and 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, in addition to its embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, has four consulates in the country’s major cities — the same number as Pakistan. Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, and Khalid Alokozay from Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 15:25:13 +0000
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