I was relaxing at breakfast this morning until the Sky News anchor quoted a Reuters report off the wire that two rockets had just struck the presidential palace deep inside Kabul’s green zone. Looked like I wasn’t going to relax at the hotel and write as planned. I called the taxi service and told them to swing by in exactly twenty minutes. I got dropped off near General McChrystal’s office, the site of Saturday’s early morning suicide bombing, and asked “Kujost arg-e-Karzai? (“Which way to the palace?”) Karzai’s American-trained guards first lied saying the rockets did not strike the palace at all and then sent me on my way. About 100 feet away, I talked to one of the private security guards I’d met on Saturday and he duly told me the rockets did indeed strike the palace, one in the kitchen and the other in some part of Karzai’s living quarters. For two hours, I tried to talk my way through the palace’s four different entry points eventually circumambulating the entire green zone. It was a total no go. Ironically, the only other people that showed up were the Kabul bureau of Sky News to confirm their own Reuters-quoted reporting and they had equally as difficult a time. In this instance, big budget, bureau journalism did not have an edge over my own shoe leather travails.
After such an enormous waste of time, I went to interview a higher up at one of candidate’s offices and realized I really needed a day off from the breaking news beat to focus on what’s truly important:Afghan domestic politics. Arriving back at the hotel, I flip on my laptop to see on the BBC site that there’s just been a suicide bombing on a convoy, on what I figured was Jalalabad Road. I’ll pass. The American’s bringing their Baghdad blast wall culture to Kabul is an unequivocal disaster and Kabul’s green zone is the most dangerous part of the city. As the Canadian Brigadier General said to me a Saturday, “It’s very difficult to stop a determined suicide bomber”. Peter Bergen said at a conference I attended “There will never be a Tet offensive on Kabul” regarding the Taleban’s lack of strategic ambition. I hope Mr. Bergen is right. Kabul is certainly not under siege from the NVA and Viet Cong but it is well within the Taleban’s sights. Blast walls work against President Obama’s hoped change of course in Afghanistan, for they entrench a war mindset on an already gravely embattled society. Blast walls can be made thicker and green zones can be enlarged and further militarized but unless they can reach the sky, they cannot solve Afghanistan’s Taleban problem.