Dawn is breaking the news that some of the attackers behind the massive explosion on Thursday night at a Sindh Crime Investigation Department building in Karachi, which killed 18 and wounded 100, may have been able to escape.
The southern Pakistani port city of Karachi (pop. 14 million) is a cauldron of ethnic and religious conflict, and has allegedly been targeted by the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (Movement of Pakistani Taliban) on several occasions recently. The TTP has asserted that it was behind the attack.
It is thought that perhaps the targets of the attack were security officials responsible for tracking and foiling terrorist plots by the TTP and the anti-Shiite Lashkar-i Jhangvi, a Punjabi group that has increasingly merged with the Pashtun Pakistani Taliban.
The boldness and ability of the TTP to blow up the HQ of the effort to track their movements is breathtaking, and shows the reach of the militants, since they struck far from their home base in Pakistan’s northwest.
Aljazeera English has video:
link to nytimes.com
November 12, 2010
Pakistan Slow to Rebuild Swat Valley a Year After Offensive
By ADAM B. ELLICK
The lack of progress on schools and running water after the military’s campaign against the Taliban has fed frustration at the government, raising fears of renewed militancy.
We have to get out of Afghanistan and stop warring in and urging war on Pakistan. We are destroying lives in some of the poorest regions on earth for no possible moral reason.
Humans are smart enough to do all kinds of good and bad things when they set their minds to them. I would not be awed by the audacity and success of the attack reported on here.
When the bonds of common humanity are dissolved by the acid of tribalism and the ascent of anomie, hey, anything goes. After all, look at how the Shah got installed in Iran, and read CIA guy Gary Schroen’s “First In: How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror (sic, sic, really sic) in Afghanistan” on how the Game is really played, and recall what happened to Salvador Allende and Ngo Dinh Diem (though he deserved it, in humanist terms.) link to en.wikipedia.org. And gee, how tough was it for a bunch of gentlemen from the Mideast to learn to fly well enough to ram two commercial jets into the biggest corporate phalluses in New Yawk?
This is just about a bit of training and some easily available weapons and what happens to any military/police HQ — “leaks in the secured perimeter.” Remember Mumbai?
There is always a segment of the population that needs only the waving of the tiniest, most diaphanous bit of “patriotic” bunting to turn them altogether loose. They are everywhere, and treating them as representatives of one “side” or the other completely ignores the fundamental(ist) fact that they are all from the same subset of humanity and have much more in common with each other (and tend to gather and train together even across otherwise violent partisan divides) than with the tribal set in which they grew up.
But again, does anybody care? Nope, trillions supposedly for a “War on Terror” that is really served most effectively by local and national police, plain old investigatory shoe leather cops and agents ane what, alert baggage handlers? And the few keep getting richer and richer, spinning their webs right across and in complete disregard of those Game of RISK! notions that people in all those nations cling to.
We are one freakin’ stupid purblind species.