Afghan President Hamid Karzai, as you know, recently came close to being wiped out in Kabul. As Fred Burton and Scott Stewart pointed out in an excellent Strategic Forecasting, Inc. report (“Stratfor”) the fact that the assault happened during a live TV broadcast of the event, and the crowd included the US ambassador William Wood, the UK envoy and the NATO commander, heightened the coverage.
It turns out that Afghanistan Intelligence had some advance warning about the plot to assassinate the president and successfully thwarted two groups of al-Qaeda connected murderers that day, car bombers and a squad of men with a mortar. Later, the Taliban claimed credit for the attack efforts.
One group was able to evade the net. They were the ones who did all the shooting.
Three Islamic extremists successfully hid in a 3rd floor in a dilapidated building overlooking the parade ground a couple of hundred yards away.
They had rented it almost two months in advance. They were able to bring in grenade-firing assault rifles and a heavy machine gun, apparently by hauling them up it up at night by ropes. Police had searched the building two days before the attack. The men locked themselves in the room sometime after that and were not noticed.
President Karzai had been warned of a planned attack to take place during Sunday military parade by his intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh. A security perimeter of armed troops was tight and thick but the three men had already gotten through earlier.
The trio, who knew there would be no escape for them, began firing wildly as Karzai drove slowly by in an open-topped vehicle. Their opening volley coincided with a planned 21-gun salute, for a moment effectively disguising the fact of the attack. (Later, intelligence chief Saleh said that text messages found on the men’s mobile phones clearly spelled out their suicidal intent. It is possible that only one was killed by security police. The other two appeared to have shot themselves.)
The heavy and inaccurate arms used by the men seemed like a pretty stupid choice, particularly since they roughly knew the distance to where the president would be. Sniper rifles with scopes would have been more likely effective.
A Taliban spokesman later offered the moronic statement that the three assailants weren’t trying to kill the president –although they did kill three other people in the crowd and wounded eleven –they were just trying to show the world they could do it.
The Taliban point was totally phony.
There was considerable breast-beating within the Afghan government, particularly in the Ministry of the Interior, about the security failures that allowed the three men to evade detection.
One official told the Washington Post, in a story reported by Carlotta Gall, that “What happened was really shameful. Clearly it was a blow to our national and international prestige.” Well, maybe. But they are being awfully tough on themselves. Consider that this poor country has had over 4,000 separate terrorist attacks in just the last 12 months.
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