A NATO chopper hunts down militants attacking Tuesday / Photo by Shah Marai / AFP / Getty Images
A NATO helicopter flies over the building from where Taliban fighters attacked the most heavily protected part of Kabul on September 14, 2011. A coordinated Taliban assault on the Afghan capital was quelled on September 14 after raging for 19 hours in a hail of rockets, grenades and suicide blasts that left 14 dead and six foreign troops wounded. Afghan and foreign troops battled the insurgents who targeted the US embassy and NATO headquarters, sowing fear and confusion and raising fresh questions over the government's ability to secure the country even after a ten-year war. The standoff ended when troops finally killed the two last insurgents who had held out overnight in a high-rise building under construction just a few hundred metres from the heavily guarded US embassy.AFP PHOTO/SHAH Marai (Photo credit should read SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images)
Astute longtime DIA intelligence analyst John McCreary reviews what happened Tuesday in Kabul and doesn’t like what he sees:
Three major Taliban attacks have taken place in Kabul this summer…One such attack is a perhaps good fortune. A second might have been a coincidence, but three is a strategic trend. Violent instability is always centripetal – it seeks the center of power. The images of the Coalition and Afghan forces fighting to defend themselves in Kabul mean the insurgency has reached the center of power. The small casualty count only means that the Taliban cannot yet seize power in Kabul. But if the Coalition were winning, these attacks should never have taken place at all. Kabul of all places should be kept secure, if the lessons of Tet 1968 had been learned.
Read the full thing on his NightWatch blog.
