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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
we were having a meeting in the cool morning air on the terrace when we heard the explosion... the sound had come from roughly the center of town but it wasn't until later looking at news reports that i learned it was near the ministry of the interior and the indian embassy...
Afghan soldiers carry body of a victim after a blast in Kabul, Afghanistan on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009. The powerful explosion rocked the center of Afghanistan's capital early Thursday near the Interior Ministry and the Indian Embassy, where dozens of civilians were killed in an attack last year.
[A] suicide bomber struck at the Indian Embassy in Kabul, killing 28 persons and wounding 141. The Indian ambassador was not there at the time, but Indian embassy guards and possibly other Embassy personnel appear to have been killed.
India has 3,000 nationals doing reconstruction work in Afghanistan. Since the neo-Taliban want to pull down the Karzai government, trying to scare the Indians into leaving would be a way of removing one foreign pillar of support from the edifice of state.
Since the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence is alleged to be secretly backing some Taliban elements, there is a danger that New Delhi will read this assault on its embassy in Kabul as an indirect strike by Pakistan. Pakistan had long considered Afghanistan its sphere of influence (which the military called its 'strategic depth' against India). Pakistan exercised its regional hegemony through the Taliban in the 1990s. The Northern Alliance gradually allied with India, Russia and Iran. The Taliban were mostly Pushtun, while the Northern Alliance was Tajik (Persian-speaking) , Hazarah (ditto but Shiite) and Uzbek. So from a Pakistani and Pushtun Taliban point of view, when the US put the Northern Alliance in charge of Kabul in late 2001, it more or less turned Afghanistan into an Indian sphere of influence. Pakistan and the Taliban are fighting back against this change.
The bombing in Kabul came after allegations over the weekend that the US had mistakenly bombed a wedding party and earlier had also killed civilians in another area in an air strike aimed at militants.
virtually every afghan i talked to when i was there made the same point - that pakistan is working diligently to destabilize afghanistan and has been the force behind the most deadly attacks... meanwhile, the u.s. continues to pour billions of dollars into the pakistan military, knowing full well what's going on...
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