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.
British and Afghan security forces hold the line after suicide attack rocked ISAF Headquarters in Kabul. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood.
Kabul awoke to a good size suicide attack this morning at 8:30 a.m. Kabul-time killing several civilians and injuring five NATO ISAF troops. Twelve Afghan security forces were injured as well as six Afghan civilians. ISAF Commander General Stanley A. McChrystal blazed through to assess the situation escorted by Italian Carabinieri. McChrystal only said “I am concerned about anyone who is trying to kill innocent Afghans” before he and his guards barged through to the crime scene leaving the media in their wake. Canadian Brig. Gen. Eric Trembley briefed the press about 50 metres from the site of the attack. A lone bomber worked his way through various checkpoints and detonated a VBIED in front of the main gate. A coup for insurgent intelligence gathering and an embarrassment for NATO just five days before the presidential election. “It tells a lot about the Taleban code of conduct” Trembley told those assembled, referring to the tete-a-tete NATO and Mullah Muhammed Omar have been having this summer over the limiting of civilian casualties. I asked Trembley whether the bomber was working along or with another operative guiding him to the target. He stated that it was too early to get into anything that specific until the ANA finished conducting its forensic investigation. Italian, French, American, British and Canadian soldiers milled about while the local fire department dealt with the smoking debris. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack very close to the fortified blast walls of the American embassy in Kabul’s Orwellian diplomatic quarter.
I disconnected with my driver and was waiting around for a taxi when two educated local boys approached me in perfect English saying the such suicide attacks, the de rigueur method of the post-modern jihadist, are forbidden within the ideological confines of Islam. One of them presciently asked “Why do you think we muslims are doing this to each other?” Not wanting to get into a debate, I replied that there was a sickness that had permeated very deeply in the political core of the ummah, the global Muslim community, and things like literacy and opportunity were the only weapons against such narrow barbarism. “What is your religion?” the other asked. “I’m a (Catholic) Christian” I replied.
“Ahh you Christians have big hearts. You are here trying to help us. Who is your bishop?”
I tried to explain that I’m an avid secularist which is unfathomable in such a pious, poor country where belief in God is the only thing millions have to cling to.
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