Deadly Bombing in Kabul Is One of the Afghan War’s Worst Strikes -
By MUJIB MASHAL, FAHIM ABED and JAWAD SUKHANYARMAY 31, 2017
KABUL, Afghanistan — In one of the deadliest single strikes of the long Afghan war, a truck bomb on Wednesday devastated a central area of Kabul near the presidential palace and foreign embassies, serving as a horrible reminder
that the capital city itself has become a hazardous battlefield.
In a statement, President Ghani called the attack “a crime against humanity.” Then, in a televised address as the city was preparing to go to sleep, he came out with a resolute message, calling for unity in the face of attackers
that he said were receiving help from outside intelligence forces — frequent shorthand here for Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, which has long maintained ties with the Haqqani network.
The year’s traumatic news began piling up even before the spring fighting season took off: massacres at a fortified army hospital
and then an even more fortified army base, another district fallen to the Taliban as stretched security forces collapsed, a city overrun two times on verge of falling again, more civilians killed.
Even as the United States is weighing sending more troops to try to slow or reverse government losses to the Taliban this year, the bombing showed, again,
that foreign troops and foreign aid have never been enough to truly secure even Kabul itself.
A statement by Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, applauded the Afghan security forces for preventing the truck full of explosives from entering the Green Zone, a reference to the area
that houses the headquarters of the coalition forces as well as several foreign embassies.