After the Kabul bomb attack

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN Again the Taliban or insurgency have left their mark on the Afghan capital. Its city centre shopping centre and Safi Hotel left a shattered wreck.

In the gooey mud of Kabul’s semi-paved roads and non-paved pavements, piles of glass mingle into the freezing, oozy mud.

Up aloft, several floors above ground level, men are already at work pulling out any remaining bits of glass and hurling them into the streets below.

Some hit the small zone below, other bits seem to carry in the wind and land at will, shattering or thudding into the muddy slime.

I asked people here what they made of it as they took snaps with their phones of the four foot deep crater which once contained a car bomb plus bomber.

Kabulis are a phlegmatic bunch at the best of times but the consensus was that the Americans should just go. If they left – so goes the logic on the street – the Taliban would leave the city alone.

They always say “the Americans” in Afghanistan, their brutal realism sensing at once who runs this country in reality: not NATO, not ISAF, certainly not Hamid Karzai.

Several thought that if the Americans did leave then they would all be free once again simply to slug it out Pashtun against Hazara, Tajik against Uzbek, and there’s little doubt that would be true.

Though it is also true that this course of action reduced large areas of Kabul to rubble.

But there’s anger and real frustration on the streets here. The sense that they cannot fight back. Somehow this unseen enemy has free passage to target and bomb at will. And that is true, they do.

And the Kabulis who gather to take pictures, gossip or just gawp at the areas of glasslessness and rubble, know only too well that the insurgents will be back one day soon.

And they know of course that the suicide bomb is by its very nature the no-warning bomb.

That being so and the place where these bombs detonated, it is little short of astounding that only sixteen people are confirmed dead, thus far.