KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – It’s hard to either feel safe or scared most of the time in Kabul.
Part of the city wants to be like Baghdad; security companies whisk people back and forth from the airport, HESCO barriers line some roads, and large chunks of the government and Nato apparatus are concealed behind barbed wire and barricades in ways that would have appeared excessive 18 months ago.
US troops – and we’ll be seeing a lot more of them here in the coming months – clear the main thoroughfares before racing through them in their Humvees, young American heads stuck out of gun turrets, seemingly unsure if they’re in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But much of the city – its long-term expat residents, for example – seem to be getting on with life as before. One long-term correspondent here joked at his home that he hoped I had noticed the extra strip of barbed wire he had put up on his garden wall.
For them, keeping away from the new influx of armour, the mobile targets wrapped in Kevlar that roam the streets, is the best form of safety.
And then something like today’s attacks happens, and everyone is unsure what’s best again.
At the time of writing, the most we know is that there have been about five separate attacks across the city. The justice ministry got hit the worst: gunmen getting inside, taking hostages reportedly, even coming close to the building’s internal kindergarten.
A suicide bomber blew himself up inside the building. Gunmen were shot down by police outside in the streets outside.
Talk of 16 gunmen loose across the city at one point. A local, unshakeable producer we know sounded tense – something that I’ve never heard before. It’s four hours later now and we’re not sure if it’s over yet.
The Taliban say they did this to protest the treatment of their fellow militants in Afghan prisons. But its main point is clear. Later this week, the new US presidental envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, is due to arrive. Known as the Bulldozer, he’s meant to shake up an already heavily shaken President Karzai – to tell the Afghan head of state that his government is not pulling its weight.
Nato seems to feel that it can blame the Afghan government for security failings across this country – to say that President Karzai, not their 72,000 troops, should be turning this mess around. The Taliban have given Nato and the Obama administration today ample proof that their writ can now extend to the heart of the capital and its most secure ministries.
They don’t run the city, or surround it, but Holbrooke will see how they can so easily generate fear in the hearts of its residents.
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