“…and Americans wonder why some people still love the Taliban. You are in America. Can’t you tell Americans that if they kill Rabbani’s other [expletive] friends, people will love them more?”
The US ambassador Ryan Crocker said the attack needed to be put into perspective. "These were five guys that rumbled into town with RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) under their car seats," he said.
"They got into a building and did some harassment fire on us and Isaf. This really is not a very big deal, a hard day for the embassy and my staff, who behaved with enormous courage and dedication, but half a dozen RPG rounds from 800 metres away – that isn't Tet, that's harassment," he said in reference to the Tet offensive in Vietnam.
"If that's the best they can do, I think it's actually a statement of their weakness and more importantly since Kabul is in the hands of Afghan security it's a real credit to the Afghan national security forces."
Video of the building from where the Taliban launched rocket attacks
Later Report: The Latest on the Taliban Attacks in Kabul
Taliban gunmen armed with suicide vests and heavy weaponry have launched co-ordinated attacks in Kabul, targeting NATO's headquarters, the US embassy, and the Afghan intelligence agency.
Heavy gunfire continued to be heard on Tuesday as Afghan forces battled to clear a building in the city's diplomatic quarter which had been taken over by heavily armed fighters. Rockets have reportedly been fired at the US and other embassies in the area.
At least four policemen and two civilians have been killed and 22 others injured, according to AFP.
Police have surrounded the occupied building, calling in air support to end a siege carried out by gunmen resisting inside the building.
Sediq Seddiqi, spokesman to the Afghan Ministry of Interior, said three of the Taliban fighters in the building had been killed and two were continuing to resist.
NATO has confirmed that they are providing Afghan forces ground and air support in the operation.
Casualty in Kabul Attack, 19 August>While the current situation in Afghanistan is not good, there is much that can be done to correct it. However, if Washington and the regime in Kabul do not address the serious problems built up rather than resolved over the last decade, President Obama’s “light in the distance” may fade into night forever.
Gareth Porter writes for InterPress Service:
Pakistani civilian and military leaders are insisting on an effective veto over which targets U.S. drone strikes hit, according to well-informed Pakistani military sources here.
The sources, who met with IPS on condition that they not be identified, said that such veto power over the conduct of the drone war is a central element in a new Pakistani demand for a formal government-to-government agreement on the terms under which the United States and Pakistan will cooperate against insurgents in Pakistan.
The basic government-to-government agreement now being demanded would be followed, the sources said, by more detailed agreements between U.S. and Pakistani military leaders and intelligence agencies.
The new Pakistani demand for equal say over drone strikes marks the culmination of a long evolution in the Pakistani military's attitude toward the drone war. Initially supportive of strikes that were targeting Al-Qaeda leaders, senior Pakistani military leaders soon came to realise that the drone war carried serious risks for Pakistan's war against the Pakistani Taliban.
In the deadliest day for American forces in the nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan, insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter on Saturday, killing 30 Americans, including some Navy Seal commandos from the unit that killed Osama bin Laden, as well as 8 Afghans, American and Afghan officials said.
The helicopter, on a night-raid mission in the Tangi Valley of Wardak Province, to the west of Kabul, was most likely brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade, one coalition official said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, and they could hardly have found a more valuable target: American officials said that 22 of the dead were Navy Seal commandos, including members of Seal Team 6. Other commandos from that team conducted the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Bin Laden in May. The officials said that those who were killed Saturday were not involved in the Pakistan mission.
I was sad when I heard Waheed Omer was appointed as President Hamid Karzai’s spokesperson. But I was also sad when he quit yesterday.
I met Waheed almost a decade ago in Peshawar in Pakistan at a modest function that the Sanayee Development Foundation was holding for its employees. Waheed worked for SDF; I was a new teacher for their affiliate English institute, Kabul English Language Center.
Back then, we --- young, partially-educated Afghans --- were a much different group. Our country had been given a second chance months earlier with the fall of the Taliban. So we were all looking very much forward to going back home and contributing not just to rebuilding our country, but rebuilding our lives.
UPDATE 1000 GMT: The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the killing of the Mayor of Kandahar by a suicide bomber.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said Mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi had ordered the destruction of homes that city officials claimed had been illegally constructed. He added that the mayor was killed to avenge the deaths of two children who allegedly were killed during the demolition.
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The French agency AFP reports:
The mayor of Kandahar, the biggest city in southern Afghanistan and the birthplace of the Taliban movement, was killed in a suicide attack on Wednesday, police said.
Ahmad Wali KarzaiThe man who finally killed Karzai was someone he trusted with his life. Not only was Sardar Mohammed a close confidant, but he also worked as an informant for the CIA, according to relatives, Karzai’s friends and the Afghan intelligence agency.
Photo: Associated PressYou are not supposed to be happy over a person’s death. But the business I am in does not allow for such conventional decencies, nor does the fact that I’m an Afghan.
I am not sure --- at least until the Arab revolutions of the last six months opened our eyes --- how many people knew of the monsters among us. One of these was Ahmad Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, shot to death this morning in Kandahar.
Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 13:54