Posted on 06/17/2007 8:19:43 PM PDT by Clive
KABUL, Afghanistan -- In a bizarre display of curious morbidity, dozens of market shoppers and their kids gathered at the scene of a mass murder Sunday that was brutal by even this capital city's historically bloody standards.
They just stood there and stared at pools of body fluids, pointing to bits of skin clinging to the top of the brick wall that surrounds police headquarters in the country's largest city.
Four hours earlier, the Sunday morning launch of another work week had been interrupted by the second suicide bombing in as many days, a blast heard across the city as it ripped apart two buses less than 100 metres from the place where the crime would be investigated, killing 35 Afghan police and civilians.
A large slab of white bus siding was the only unclaimed hard evidence of the carnage by the time I arrived.
Clean-up crews had done their grizzly duty on the remains with determined efficiency. But even after a prolonged hosing down of the area, flies were swarming dark puddles of queasy remains which had yet to soak into the dirt.
My usually gregarious fixer became extremely apprehensive. "This is not safe for you here. They are looking for foreigners," said Abdul Ghafoor as he rushed me back to the car only to find it with a flat tire.
A few minutes earlier, Ghafoor had defied the heavily fortified police presence by negotiating our way inside the investigation's nerve centre using only my Ontario health care card as a fake press pass.
Ali Khan Paktiawal, the Kabul police criminal investigation chief, could offer no explanation for the size of this attack or why the suicide bombing campaign has been renewed.
"They are what they are, which is Taliban terrorists," he shrugged in broken English while a handful of officers stared at the floor. "They're trying to hurt us more and more. I have captured many of them, but some, well ..." His ringing cellphone prevented a complete answer.
Things seem to be unravelling in Kabul which, until now, had been held up as proof of a sanctuary reclaimed from random terrorism. There have been five suicide bombings this year and Sunday's was by far the worst. The Taliban promised a "bombing a day" to inject a fear factor in the general population.
But life rebounds though. A few hours later, I was veering through the same crowded shopping district on the back of a dirt bike, chasing one carrying Norine MacDonald, the Vancouver lawyer who founded the Senlis Council think tank and humanitarian agency here in Kabul.
She heard the 8:40 a.m. bomb blast and suggests the campaign shows the deadly political sophistication of the Taliban.
"This is guerrilla warfare that's designed to destabilize the country," she sighed. "It puts fear into he hearts of people who live in the city and it questions the ability of the Karzai government to govern effectively."
"Even if the numbers of victims isn't as high here as in the south, the potential impact is even more dramatic," she continued. "If they destabilize the Afghanistan people here, they destabilize the government."
If the purpose of killing police and civilians at the wrong place and the wrong time is disruption by fear, it worked like a charm.
United Nations personnel are now prohibited from leaving their compounds without an escort. At the 165-room Serena Hotel, the only five-star operation in the country, business fell dramatically after the bombings, thwarting the intention of a chain that specializes in bringing luxury accommodation and local employment to undeveloped areas.
Hotel managers looked around their empty restaurant and lamented how the second suicide bombing in as many days was killing their efforts to toehold the luxury hotel chain in the war-ravaged country.
There may be a partial explanation with a Canadian connection for the sudden flareups in the north. The theory kicking around military intelligence is that the insurgents know the decision on extending Canada's mission beyond February 2009 must be made next summer at the latest.
If the Taliban can inflict enough casualties on nations with a weak stomach, they might just push our politicians to opt Canada out of the Kandahar killing fields with no other nation willing to step in.
"There is some speculation that in 2008 the Taliban will try to push harder than [in] 2007," Gen. Hillier told me in an interview before his Sunday visit to the troops in Kandahar. "They're watching decisions by various nations and if they can push hard in 2008, they might be able to affect that decision. That's speculation, but having us continue to knock off their leaders and build Afghanistan's own security forces makes that possibility much lower."
Hillier insists there's steady progress in rebuilding the cringingly dangerous southern half of Afghanistan, even as reports from the field hint at resilient strength by the Taliban and their allies as the death count ramps up again.
The threat of an organized insurgency has been watered down to scattered remnants who plant bombs in the roads or blow themselves up for collateral damage, he said.
A regular visitor to the war theatre, Hillier recalled smoking cigars while looking out over a valley one night last October and seeing nothing but blackness. "When we were there in March, I was smoking a few cigars with fellas in the battle group and the entire valley was lit up."
People are returning to their homes in the day -- and the more dangerous night. They're asking Canadian troops for reconstruction assistance and staking an ownership claim when the improvements are completed. The age of building a school or digging a well only to watch the Taliban storm into the village and blow them up are not as prevalent anymore, Hillier said.
"The issue now becomes governance, how do you help Afghans build the kind of governance they need or want. We have a lot of concern about the corruption of government and its inability to deliver what the population needs."
The question being raised by events in Kabul now is what to do if Afghanistan terrorism isn't on the wane, merely on the move.
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No Taliban spring offensive this year.
NATO seems to have the initiative in the south.
Less willingness on the part of the Taliban to try to stand and hold.
There are still IEDs but the Taliban are resorting more and more to suicide bombings which I see as a sign of a weakening ability to project force.
My gut feeling is that the Taliban is shifting its theatre of operations from the south to seek soft targets in the vicinity of Kabul and the Khyber Pass.
How say you?
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That's for sure. The Taliban can't win militarily, so they have to resort to propaganda, like this article, foisted on us by a willing leftist press.
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