Dispatches from FOBistan: Let’s Think About Kabul

BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN — The events in Kabul yesterday were indeed horrific. I had heard some scattered reports about what was going on but didn’t think much of it until I tried to meet a friend down at ECP1, or Entry Control Point One (a fancy and unnecessary name for “gate”). While I was on my way there in a rumbling Chevy Trail Blazer, he called my Roshan.

“Hey, this is XXXX.”

“Oh hey, XXXX! We’re on our way to come get you.”

“Well, maybe you can get us through, ’cause they’re saying the gate’s locked down.”

“What do you mean?” As I said that, we came along a humvee parked diagonally across Disney Road, with a few soldiers and a few ANP providing slung machine guns. “Let me see what’s going on, I’ll call you back.” We pulled around to a side lot, and my colleague and I walked up to the U.S. soldier standing watch. As we got close, he waved to us.

“Sirs, you’ll have to step back. The base is on lockdown and no one is getting on or off today.” We tried to see if we could walk past into the badging office to wave my friend on (he’s a U.S. citizen, but non-military). We couldn’t. As I called XXXX to tell him that we couldn’t get him, the soldier yelled at the Afghan men standing near the empty bazaar not to gather in groups. I made my apologies, and my colleague and I returned the car we had borrowed from the Brigade we support. Then I got on the Internets.

While Noah posted a most excellent roundup of the day’s events there, this is most certainly not a “Mumbai-Style Attack,” unless all coordinated attacks are now to be called “Mumbai-Style.” He isn’t the only one drawing the comparison (this was planned way before Mumbai), but it doesn’t make any sense, either: the Mumbai attack did not involve suicide bombers, it did not involve attacking government ministries, and it was not stopped dead in its tracks within hours. The attack in Kabul was bad, yes, but from the reports I’ve read there were many suicide bombs, most of which got stopped. Yes, 19 people died (about one tenth the number killed in Mumbai), but this attack was actually halted very quickly by the Afghan and Coalition security forces.

What else baffles me is the surprise. Jari saw this coming months ago. Spencer saw this coming even before that. Hell, the Taliban has been threatening to “cut off Kabul” or some nonsense since December of 2007, and they’ve been launching surprise attacks on the city at least since the attack on the Serena Hotel in January of last year. They have largely failed in that, just as they failed to induce major casualties in yesterday’s attack (seriously, 19 dead for at least eight IEDs is a really low number… single suicide bombers in Iraq kill more than that, as did the single car bomb at the Indian Embassy this past July). People still come and go from Kabul, and just as it is impossible to seal off the insurgents from the city, so is it impossible for them to seal it off from us and normal people. I know what matters is the psychological impact, but think about the planning and coordination needed to line up bombers this way: big events like this matter, but they are also comparatively rare… especially when compared with the frequency of high-casualty bombing events in Baghdad during the height of the insurgency.

But what gets under my skin even more about this whole thing—aside from the fact that, while this represented more simultaneous attempts at suicide bombs than we’ve seen in Afghanistan, and probably in most places, it was overall a fairly small physical event—is the amount of hype being lavished upon it by people who should know better. It makes to discuss what this might mean for the prospects of the government (why only focus on the Justice and Education Ministries?), or if it is an indication of Hamid Karzai’s deep unpopularity, and so on. But there are two analysis I want to draw particular attention to—coming from opposite political persuasion, to show that this is not a partisan issue—if only because they are so over-hyped.

The first is Anand Gopal, who writes for the Christian Science Monitor, and occasionally for Tom Dispatch and The Nation (the partisan American rag, not the Pakistani daily). He begins by calling the part of town that was attacked—which includes Camp Eggers, ISAF Headquarters, and the U.S. Embassy—a “fortified section of Kabul.” There is nothing fortified about it. It is a neighborhood in a city much like any other, with streets and cars and people and dust and walled compounds. The compounds are fortified (reports indicate the militants only got inside the Justice ministry by detonating a suicide bomb at the gate), but the entire neighborhood? Poppycock. He is hyping the section of town as something it is not. He then proceeds to imply that the attack was actually Afghanistan’s fault because of prison conditions… an argument disappointingly close to Robert Kaplan’s blaming of the Indian Embassy bombing on Afghanistan itself.

The other is Bill Roggio (I really don’t mean to pick on him, but this is important). He notes something very important: The National Directorate of Security (basically, the secret police, like a Secret Service, FBI, ATF, and DEA all rolled into one) broke up a Haqqani Network cell last week. All well and good. But he then goes on to imply that the ISI is responsible for these attacks by noting their support or direct sponsorship of other attacks in the past.

Both are examples of irresponsible rumor-mongering at this point. Just as the wild speculation after the Mumbai Attack didn’t serve anyone’s interest save the pundits building their own visibility, so here are we not well served by people leaping to conclusions about this one feature or the other. No one from the Haqqani Network has claimed responsibility for the attack, while a Taliban spokesman has. Despite some’s efforts to roll them all into one mega-group and consider them as interchangeable entities, the reality is more complex, and actually more difficult. There are not super-rich super-geniuses in Pakistan pulling strings—the insurgency is far more granular than that.

Then there are other things to consider. As economies in the Middle East start to spiral in the face of the global financial crisis, Gulf-based donations to terror groups are drying up. It will be interesting to see if the crunch on terror donations has a measurable effect on the “Spring Offensive” no one really hypes anymore. This attack took several months to plan, from conception to funding to surveillance to planning to logistics to acquisition to execution. Unless the Taliban has the ability to “stack” multiple attacks right on top of each other—a capability it has not yet demonstrated—I think we can take a bit of a breath here to gather our bearings and see how to prevent the next one.

And in the meantime, pundits, STOP THE LAZY ANALOGIES. They get old.

Update: Kip at Abu Muqawama offers thoughts pretty similar to mine.

Tagged as: Afghanistan

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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