A deadly Taliban suicide attack on a restaurant frequented by foreigners in central Kabul has shown that even major cities controlled by the Afghan government are not immune to the spreading violence of the civil war as Nato prepares to withdraw.
Taliban gunmen and a suicide bomber attacked the Taverna du Liban, a Lebanese restaurant, on Friday night, killing 21 people including 13 foreigners. Among them were UN staff and K Wabel Abdallah, a Lebanese who was representative of the International Monetary Fund and one of the best informed analysts of the economy.
Two Britons were among the dead, including Del Singh, Labour party candidate for the European Parliament elections, and Simon Chase, who was reportedly serving with Eupol, the EU police mission.
“We at the Fund are all devastated,” said Christine Lagarde, IMF managing director, echoing the sentiments of Kabul’s expatriate community at the loss of colleagues and friends.
The Taliban – Sunni Muslim extremists ousted from power in Kabul in 2001 with the help of a US bombing campaign from the air – claimed responsibility, saying the restaurant was patronised by “high-ranking foreigners” who drank alcohol with their meals.
Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who heads the Centre on International Cooperation of New York University, described the event as “a very serious terrorist attack”.
Mr Rubin, who was until recently an adviser to the US State Deptartment, was addressing a session on Afghanistan’s future at the Jaipur Literary Festival in India.
He said: “The [Taliban] message of this attack was ‘There’s not going to be a long-term international presence because we won’t allow it and it’s going to destabilise rather than stabilise Afghanistan’.”
The US-led Nato war in Afghanistan was triggered by the September 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington by Al-Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden was then based in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime.
But the US – after initial successes in routing the Taliban with the help of its Afghan allies from the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, and in installing an elected government under President Hamid Karzai – has now grown weary of the longest war in its history.
Nato forces have begun to withdraw – although the US is trying to finalise a security agreement with the Karzai government to keep a few thousand soldiers in the country – and Taliban militants have overrun much of the countryside in the Pashtun heartlands of southern Afghanistan.
Attempts by the US and Afghan governments to arrange peace talks with Taliban leaders have stalled. “It’s not true that nobody wants peace,” said Mr Rubin sardonically. “Everybody wants peace – which they define as their enemy surrendering.”
Ben Anderson, a writer and documentary film-maker who has travelled frequently in Afghanistan, painted a gloomy picture of the war in the south.
Afghan security forces – partly trained by their western allies - were suffering heavy casualties and mass desertions, while policemen routinely kidnapped people for money, stole fuel and supplies, and abducted and raped young boys. “We’ve installed a force that makes the Taliban looks like the good guys again,” he said.
Big cities are safer for civilians, but by no means secure. The grim security situation today even in heavily defended Kabul, where most foreign diplomats and troops are not allowed to leave their compounds or bases for fear of attack, is in stark contrast to the euphoria and relaxed atmosphere after the Taliban fled and Northern Alliance troops took control in December 2001.
President Karzai is due to step down after an election in April, but it is unclear how credible the election will be in a country ravaged by a worsening civil war and whose economy is largely funded by opium trafficking.
The overthrow of the Taliban has boosted the economy and put millions of children – including girls – in school for the first time, but Afghans fear that these advances could be reversed if the war continues to spread. Many educated residents of Kabul are trying to secure visas for European countries or other means of escape.
Mr Rubin described the violent stalemate as a Afghan paradox. “The changes that have occurred in Afghanistan are irreversible,” he said. “And the changes that have occurred in Afghanistan are unsustainable.”
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