A bomb exploded in the Peshawar restaurant where a “close relative†of Mullah Dadullah—the charismatic leader of the Taliban who was killed this past weekend—had been arrested, though there is no confirmation that said arrest provided the intelligence which helped us find Dadullah. The attack is especially ominous because it indicates that the war in Afghanistan is spreading to Pakistan [via PI].
The suicide bomber’s severed leg, found in the rubble of a restaurant where he killed 25 people, was wrapped with brown tape used to seal packages. On the tape, scrawled in the Pashto language, was an ominous warning.
“Those who spy for America will face this same fate,” it said.
The bomb went off yesterday in the four-story Marhaba Hotel in an old quarter of this frontier city, which served as the main staging point for mujahedeen in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s and is still synonymous with violent Islamic radicalism and political intrigue…
In addition to the warning for those who spy for the United States, provincial police chief Sharif Virk said, the parcel tape bore the Persian word Khurasan – often used in extremist videos to describe Afghanistan.
The timing of the attack is noteworthy:
The bomb went off shortly after the restaurant’s Afghan owner, Saddar Uddin, returned from a trip outside with some relatives, said waiter Hassan Khan. Uddin, his two sons, two other relatives, and seven employees were among the dead, he said.
A local intelligence official said Uddin, an ethnic Uzbek, had links to the party of anti-Taliban warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, part of the Northern Alliance that helped the United States topple the old regime.
“war in Afghanistan is spreading to Pakistan”
War in Afghanistan always involved Pakistan. Today’s events are linked to the day of invasion of Afghanistan by the erstwhile Soviet Union.
I agree with anindo – Afghans have been complaining about Pakistani interference in their affairs, even before the Russians invaded. What this is blowback, not expansion.
That’s really an extraordinary statement. And I would ask KXB to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.
Blowback does not mean “they deserved it”. It simply means that when any nation begins to get involved with the affars of another, there can be unforseen repurcussions. Is there a straight line between America’s support o Afghan mujhedeen and 9/11? No, but there is a relation. Rajiv Gandhi’s assasination was blowback from India’s involvement in Sri Lanka.
The fact that Musharraf is seen as a close friend of the West does not help the case.
I figured that with the recent ultimatum that was given to him, things might have changed a little bit, but last weeks riots lead me to think otherwise.
In most cases like this – the innocent are the victims.
The way the entire South Asian Sub-continent is experiencing pockets of such bloody massacres with increasing frequency & more lethality – is very dsiturbing.
KXB: I should have clarified. My comment was in jest and in reference to Giuliani’s demagoguery against Congressman Paul in last night debate on Fox News.
he…he..funny.As the Onion said it best, Rudy should just run for President of 9/11
Is it just me, or have things in Kashmir quietened down quite a bit? If it has, is it a result of all the action going on in Afghanistan and NWFP? If there really is a large, loosely governed network of jihadis, its stands to reason that screws being tightened in these areas results in a drop in Kashmir. Speculating…
It’s only a matter of time before this infection really spreads to Pakistan in a major way. The power vacuum in civilian leadership caused by Musharraf is sucking in political Islam, and with twin threats from secular and religious dissidents the regime is becoming dangerously unstable.
WTF did Rudy do to deserve to be “hero” of 9/11??
The heros are the firefighters who went into a collapsing building and saved lives. How many lives did Rudy save?? But he is a media annointed 9/11 hero. I get so irritated by the media let him claim 9/11 as his whatever? WTF??
I think Rudy’s chances of running for office are very very slim. I read somewhere that he has a lot of “history” when it comes to expressing himself in public.
“Is it just me, or have things in Kashmir quietened down quite a bit”
SkepMod, things generally quite down in Kashmir during the winters because the mountain passes are snowed in. Once they melt, starting in APril or so is when the cross border infiltration picks up. At least that has been the case since the inception of the insurgency.
Afghans and their government always like to blame Pakistan for all of their political problems, as though the jihadi spell does not exist in a country that has been in the midst of 40 years of civil war. This is not to discount the major contributions of various Pakistani regimes to the instability of Afghanistan, with their support of the Taliban and other meddling. The position the Karzai government seems to be trying to sell is that Afghanistan would been a peaceful, stable country if not for the evil hand of Pakistan and the ISI interfering and supporting violent miscreants.
The porous Afghan/Pakistani border region has plenty of young men willing to fight jihad and commit evil in the name of religion, tribe, or whatever whether they spend most of their time on the Afghan side of the border or the Pakistani. To pretend such sentiments do not exist organically within the culture and instead blame outsiders is simply BS.
There is no dividing line politically or geographically between Pashtuns who support one cause or another, yet plenty would like to divert responsibility from themselves and pretend the source of evil has some foreign hand.
BTW, my parents are both from the region in question who are obsessed with drawing distinctions between themselves and non-Pashto speakers, whether Pakistani-native or from various Afghan ethnicities; and will never recognize the need for a rehabilitation within our own culture. Perhaps the region is doomed to fail because of its lack of resources and services, but there is a lot to be done on our part.