Kabul attack a predictable atrocity
This weekend’s terrorist attack in Kabul, in which 21 people, including two Canadians, were gunned down, was a long time in coming. But such an assault was inevitable. Given how little success the Taliban has had in striking heavily fortified embassies and NATO bases, it was always astonishing that the insurgents had not aimed their hatred of the West at one of the six or seven popular, comparatively lightly guarded restaurants where the usual Third World crowd of aid workers, journalists, UN officials, spooks and retired soldiers working as security advisers congregate to pretend for a few hours that they are anywhere but Afghanistan.
I had been to La Taverna du Liban a few times.
One of Taverna’s attractions was, that booze was available in what is supposed to be a dry country.
The abundance of alcohol and the fact that western men and women sat together in such restaurants outraged many Afghans, who are among the most puritanical Muslims anywhere. But other Afghans regarded such gatherings as an economic opportunity.
The European owner of a nearby pub/restaurant that is crammed most nights with moist and garrulous westerners lamented to me a couple of months back that he not only had to pay off various levels of the local government to illegally serve alcohol to his guests, the Taliban demanded and got a cut, too.
The Taverna’s genial Lebanese owner, Kamal Hamade, often entertained guests with tales of a lifetime spent toughing it out in some of the most dangerous corners of the world.
It was not surprising to read reports that Hamade died with a gun in his hand defending his property. The double outer steel doors and the armed Afghan guards that Hamade had posted there among the sandbags made the Taverna seem far safer than it turned out to be. So did the restaurant’s location within an inner circle of checkpoints in Wazir Akbar Khan, where many embassies are cheek by jowl with equally protected, overthe-top-palaces inhabited by many of Afghanistan’s outrageously rich drug lords. Canada’s legation is only about 400 metres away from the Taverna. Its emissaries work and live there behind a jumble of barbed wire and amid a maze of checkpoints and anti-blast walls.
Their relative oasis of calm would have been seriously shaken by the explosion triggered by the suicide bomber who opened the way for gunmen armed with AK47 assault rifles to enter the premises and wreck havoc. Martin Glazer and Peter Mc- Sheffrey, the two Canadians who died in the restaurant, were contract auditors sent to examine the books of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which has had a big operation in Afghanistan since Ottawa opened an embassy there in 2003.
It would have been unlikely, but not impossible, that a Canadian diplomat would have been at the Taverna. Operating under rules that have become stricter every year, they seldom venture out anymore for a night on the town, unless it is to attend gatherings at other embassies. The last couple of hundred Canadian military trainers still in Kabul follow an even more stringent code. Mentoring Afghan security forces inside a couple of bases that they seldom leave, the Canadians won’t have any chance to sample the capital’s nightlife before the last of them grab their duffel bags and head for home in mid-March. Inevitably, given the small size of Kabul’s foreign community, I had crossed paths with a few of the victims.
One was the UN’s Vadim Nazarov. Ironically, he was one of the UN’s main peace brokers between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
Canada’s first ambassador to Afghanistan, Chris Alexander, worked with Nazarov between 2005 and 2009 when Alexander was the UN’s special representative to the international organization’s mission there. Currently Canada’s minister for immigration and citizenship, Alexander remembered Nazarov this weekend as a “good friend” and “a star.”
“But we cannot be cowed by such things,” he said.
That’s the hope. But this attack will cause some panicked foreigners in Kabul to join an exodus that has been approximately tracing the accelerating drawdown of NATO forces from Afghanistan.
Sadly, this strike will be a victory for the Taliban — who are widely hated in Kabul — as it will move terrified foreigner enablers even further from the Afghans whom they have come to work with.