KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — President Hamid Karzai and hundreds of his guests scrambled to get away from gunfire and explosions during a deadly Taliban attack on a celebration in the heart of the capital city yesterday, as a parade showcasing Afghanistan's military strength turned into the latest display of the country's fragility.
Canadian Ambassador Arif Lalani was in the front row of foreign dignitaries standing to Mr. Karzai's left when the crack of gunshots interrupted a live band playing the national anthem. Three people were killed in the chaos: a parliamentarian, a 10-year-old boy and a local Shia leader.
They had gathered to mark the 16th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet-backed regime, and watch ranks of Afghan soldiers marching past three canopied platforms containing many of the most prominent figures in the country.
“It was meant to be a normal march past,” Mr. Lalani said afterward. “It was disrupted by gunfire.” The Canadian ambassador refused to say how close the bullets came to his own position, but Afghan officials say he was likely less than 100 metres from the platform where gunfire hit two parliamentarians and others threw themselves to the ground.
An Afghan military member in ceremonial uniform runs from an attack on President Hamid Karzai near the presidential palace in Kabul April 27, 2008. Afghan President Hamid Karzai escaped unhurt after an assassination attempt by Taliban fighters with guns and rockets during an official celebration in the capital, Kabul, on Sunday. (REUTERS/Omar Sobhani)
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Bodyguards pulled the Canadian diplomat and other dignitaries into sport-utility vehicles and sped away.
It remains unclear what weapons were used in the attack, and how the Taliban got past the heightened security during one of the country's biggest annual holidays. A spokesman for the insurgents said the assassination team consisted of six men armed with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests. No suicide bombing was reported, but witnesses said they saw mortars strike nearby. Some officials also expressed doubt about whether the attack was a serious assassination attempt, saying the shooters were too far away to aim at Mr. Karzai with any accuracy.
Several accounts described shots coming from a three-storey building near the parade grounds, while others said the assailants had disguised themselves with military uniforms in the assembled ranks of the Afghan army.
Mr. Karzai later appeared on state television, telling viewers that “everything is okay,” and the Canadian ambassador emphasized the same assurances.
“Frankly, I don't want to sensationalize it,” Mr. Lalani said. “I just wanted to make sure that everybody understood they shouldn't get alarmed by it.”
Others reacted differently. Television footage showed Afghan soldiers fleeing in a panic, and a British diplomat said the scene felt like a battlefield. “It was pretty chaotic,” the diplomat said.
Still, some observers say a greater disaster was likely avoided because the Afghan security forces did not react by shooting into the crowd, as happened in previous attacks. A suicide bombing that killed six parliamentarians in November at Baghlan, in northern Afghanistan, started a spate of panicked shooting by Afghan bodyguards, and the gunfire was later blamed for the majority of the 70 deaths in that incident.
Mr. Karzai has survived at least three other attempts on his life, but none of them happened in the capital. The latest attack was widely viewed as a symbol of the country's deteriorating security.
“It's a very bad experience for us, even by the standards of the last 30 years of war,” said Safia Siddiqi, a member of parliament. The annual victory celebrations had never been halted by violence, she said, despite the intense civil war that followed the expulsion of Soviet forces.
“Security in Afghanistan is, of course, getting worse,” she said.
Prakhar Sharma, head of research at the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies in Kabul, said the Taliban are showing a worrying new sophistication in their high-profile attacks.
Once ridiculed as the least-effective suicide bombers in the world, and regularly mocked by their NATO opponents for their poor marksmanship, certain Taliban groups have demonstrated newfound proficiency with attacks that defeated some of the toughest security precautions in the country – most spectacularly, by invading the well-guarded Serena Hotel in Kabul earlier this year.
“They are better trained and co-ordinated,” Mr. Sharma said. “It's a completely different story now, in terms of lethality.”
Recent studies have disagreed about whether the Afghan conflict is spreading beyond the Pashtun tribal lands in the south and east of the country. The United Nations' latest security assessment, in December, showed deepening insecurity in the Pashtun areas but little spread into other provinces; the Red Cross has disagreed, saying its network is reporting a rise of violence in new parts of the country.
Mr. Sharma's group has studied vulnerable provinces in the north, and concluded that the insurgency has made some limited geographic gains.
“They are getting more effective at targeting areas beyond the southern and eastern belt,” he said. “They have more capability to strike in the north, especially in the capital.”
Afghan police have reportedly detained dozens of people for questioning over the incident. An Afghan official in the capital said suspicion will likely fall on Mr. Karzai's own security forces, as investigators try to learn how the Taliban planned their attack on an event whose details were secret.
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