Kabul wakes up to suicide
attacks By Ricardo Grassi
KABUL - Relatively calm just a month ago,
the Afghan capital has been hit by a spate of
deadly suicide bombings, unnerving the residents
toughened by a quarter-century of constant
warfare.
"You know, every morning I have
to cross the city on my way from home to the
office," said Rahimullah Samander, one of
Afghanistan's best-known journalists and founder
of an independent national association of
journalists. "You cannot know
when
it might happen to you too," he said, referring to
random bombings.
Last Saturday saw the
bloodiest of a wave of attacks since September 1
that has left 41 people dead and 105 others
wounded. A Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up
at the gate of the well-guarded Interior Ministry,
killing four Afghan soldiers and eight civilians
and wounding 42 others, according to police
sources.
Analysts say the suicide bombings
represent a major shift in tactics by the Taliban,
from fighting US-led coalition forces in the
rugged hinterland to taking them on in the urban
areas, especially Kabul and the southern cities.
Through the wars against the invading
forces of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the civil
war that followed and the US-led invasion in 2001,
Afghan fighters were never known to resort to
suicide bombings, but seem now to have borrowed
the idea from Iraq.
Only two weeks ago, US
military spokesman Colonel Tom Collins admitted
that at least one suicide-bombing cell was
operating in Kabul and dedicated to targeting
foreign troops.
Mir Rohullah Sadat, design
and layout manager of the Killid Group, a media
company owning two national weeklies and two radio
channels, in Kabul and in the western city of
Herat, was to visit last weekend a printing house
in Pul-e-Charki, a village 20 kilometers out of
Kabul, to oversee production of a magazine on
human rights in the country. "It is risky. But I
just go," he said.
Sadat was lucky once
again. Monday saw the latest suicide attack on the
Kabul-Jalalabad road. The target was a North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) convoy and the
blast left six injured. A second suicide bomber
was neutralized before he could set off the
explosives strapped around his body.
The
Kabul-Jalalabad road leading to Pul-e-Charki has
been hit four times this month, killing one
British soldier and four civilians. Those injured
include two engineers from the United States,
three British soldiers and seven Afghans.
Sadat is young but remembers the fight to
capture Kabul between Ahmad Shah Masoud's Northern
Alliance and the Taliban 10 years ago. It was the
fiercest battle in the civil war that followed the
defeat of the Soviet army, in 1989, and ended with
the Taliban taking the city on September 26, 1996.
"It was terrible, though with open fighting you
know what to expect - not with bombs and suicide
bombers," he said.
On September 20, the
Killid Group and Inter Press Service (IPS)
together with three local media organizations were
to open "Media is Development - First
International and Afghan Media and Civil Society
Forum". But after a suicide bombing that killed
two US soldiers and 14 Afghan civilians at the
Great Masoud Square on the morning of September 8,
the organizers, on the advice of NATO, decided to
postpone it.
"This is not isolated, nor
linked to the anniversary of Masoud's death, and
we expect it to continue," NATO advised. Masoud
was killed on September 9, 2001, by two suspected
al-Qaeda members masquerading as television
journalists with a bomb concealed in their camera,
two days before the aerial attacks on New York and
the Pentagon.
What next? The winter snow
brought calm in previous years, but military and
United Nations estimates warn that this year will
not be the same. The open war, now in the south,
will move to terrorist actions in the cities,
mainly Kabul, they predict.
The category
needed to frame international intervention still
names Afghanistan as a "post-conflict country".
"We hope so," said Samander with a bitter smile.
Perhaps the most accurate description of
the Taliban is the one given by NATO commander
General David Richards. In July, soon after
arriving in Kabul, he said that the Taliban were
not terrorists but insurgents. Two weeks ago, in
an interview given to British Channel 4 TV, he
estimated that it would take a three-to-five-year
campaign to defeat the Taliban.
With
41,000 US and NATO troops fighting the "war on
terror" and no political plan to lead the country
out of corruption and the drug business derived
from poppy farming, the country is beginning to
shows signs of disintegration.
The
resurgence of the Taliban using bases across the
border in Pakistan's Waziristan region has already
soured relations between the two neighbors that
share a long and porous border. It has led to
serious differences between Afghan President Hamid
Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart President
General Pervez Musharraf.
Last week,
Karzai and Musharraf, both regarded by the US as
allies in the "war on terror", were in Washington,
where during separate and joint meetings with
President George W Bush they agreed anew to
cooperate, according to White House press
briefings.
After fighting the Taliban on
Pakistan's side of the border, Musharraf signed a
truce with the insurgents in June and then
followed it up last month with a comprehensive
pact under which the Taliban are supposed to stop
launching attacks into Afghanistan against US and
NATO troops.
But IPS earlier reported
evidence of suicide bombers being recruited,
trained and armed in Pakistan before being sent to
Afghanistan to carry out their deadly missions.
Not only do the Taliban openly condole or
congratulate the families of suicide bombers who
die in Afghanistan, but the bodies of Pakistani
insurgents who die battling US and NATO troops in
the restive southern provinces of Kandahar,
Helmand and Uruzgan are routinely taken across the
border for burial in lawless Waziristan and other
border regions of Pakistan.
The Taliban,
who have vowed to topple the Karzai government and
drive out the foreign forces that support it, have
enormous sympathy among their Pashtun ethnic
kinsfolk who straddle the rugged
Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
