18 Jan 2010

Afghan attack: Kabul is a target because of its profile

Alex Thomson reflects on the attacks in Kabul and why the Afghan capital city has become such a target.

The logic is simple, effective and unchanging. An attack in the centre of Kabul is worth fifty in some distant bazaar in Uruzgan, Zabol, Kandahar or yes, Helmand too.

The LTTE knew this which is why they would send their youngsters wearing suicide bomb-belts into the streets of Colombo. The Provisional IRA knew this, hence the years of attacks from the Balcombe Street gang to Canary Wharf.

I would not be blogging about this if it were not Kabul – and nor would my esteemed colleague and friend Mr Nick Paton Walsh.

That is why this has happened again and why it will continue as far as one can divine, long into the future.

No big city (or small) can be protected from gangs prepared to infiltrate, plan, bide their time, recce and then strike. Still less when they are doing it in the uniforms of security or perhaps even medical services, if today’s reports are accurate.

Of course the prestige targets will be obvious – the government ministries hit before; the vast IASF compounds or the diplomatic buildings and so forth. But they are harder to get to.

For many years now Kabul has been partially Baghdad-ised. Large sections of the city restricted behind vast blast walls with all adjacent streets blocked off to traffic. To be prosaic for a moment, it is one of the reasons why traffic around Kabul is so appalling on everyday except Friday, the day of rest.

So it is that the latest attack is merely bigger in scale and scope. It doesn’t really matter that it is one of the city’s largest shopping centres. It could be any area or building of prominence. But not even that is definite.

The last time I was in the city another gang appeared one morning and took over a minor branch of a bank and not in any major city centre site by any means.

The simple point is that any hit in Kabul means headlines. The bigger the better in terms of numbers of people and methods of attack. Typically – as appears to be the case today – there is a mixture of suicide bombers and automatic rifles in the armoury.

Typically they will have come from the east. The Haqqani network is reported to have mounted this attack. Jalaluddin Maulavi Haqqani – like so many others – was once a darling of the west during the Soviet occupation.

These days he’s a maverick figure. Not completely aligned to The Taliban – in the sense of the men running the Quetta Shura – the effective leadership of the movement in Quetta in Pakistan and directly aligned to Mullah Omar.

He himself has known links to the ISI, the all-powerful Pakistani Intelligence Service, and his teams operate widely across eastern Afghanistan and beyond – Ghazni and Khost Provinces have seen many of his suicide teams attack. But Kabul is the prize.

I have spoken to several would-be suicide bombers in Kabul prison. All were from over the border in Pakistan. None was Afghan – let alone Kabuli.

Though they would not admit to it, the smart money would say at least some of these young men would have been working within Haqqini’s organisation, possibly without even knowing it. Don’t forget we have a group here that might be up to 10,000 strong.

And when it comes to young suicide bombers, fresh from the madrassa in Waziristan, we are not talking about educated, searching souls.

The hand of Haqqani would look likely given the scope of this attack. At least three suicide bombers in different locations. The hallmark hold-up strategy and all of it carefully timed in order to produce one potent symbol of today’s Afghanistan and it is this:

A president with no mandate, forced to interrupt the business of desperately swearing in some kind of government, in order to tell the world that his own capital is now under the control of his forces.

All this in a Nato-backed war that is now longer than World War II.