Clinton Arrival in Pakistan Met by Fatal Attacks
A man carried a boy who was wounded in a car-bomb explosion in a market district of Peshawar, Pakistan, on Wednesday. More Photos >
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan punctuated Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s arrival here with deadly attacks on Wednesday, underscoring their ability to cause chaos even in the face of offensives on both sides of the border.
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Flames raged and shops crumbled in a market in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Wednesday after a car-bomb attack, in which as many as 101 people were killed. More Photos »
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton with Anne W. Patterson, the American ambassador, Wednesday in Islamabad. More Photos >
In Pakistan, a devastating car bomb tore through a congested market in the northwest city of Peshawar, killing as many as 101 people, many of them women and children. Pakistani authorities said the attack was the country’s most serious in two years, and the deadliest ever in Peshawar, which has become a front line for Taliban efforts to destabilize the government through violence.
In the Afghan capital, Kabul, Taliban militants stormed a guesthouse, killing five United Nations employees and three other people in a furious two-hour siege. The attack was meant to scare Afghans away from voting in a runoff election on Nov. 7 between President Hamid Karzai and his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a Taliban spokesman said.
The violence cast a shadow over the visit of Mrs. Clinton, who was meeting with government ministers in Islamabad, 90 miles southwest of Peshawar, when news of the Peshawar explosion came over television screens. Mrs. Clinton immediately condemned the bombing, which in killing women and children in Peshawar seemed aimed at the very constituencies she has championed in her travels to other developing countries.
“These attacks on innocent people are cowardly; they are not courageous, they are cowardly,” Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference with the Pakistani foreign minister, her voice raw with anger.
“They know they are on the losing side of history,” she said of the militants. “But they are determined to take as many lives with them as their movement is finally exposed for the nihilistic, empty effort it is.”
In a vivid tableau, some television stations broadcast Mrs. Clinton’s remarks on a split screen — one half showing her speaking, the other half dominated by plumes of gray smoke and flames from the blast.
While there was no evidence that the attacks were coordinated, they may be traced to Taliban factions based in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Pakistani Army forces have taken on a widening campaign against the militants.
Responsibility for the Kabul attacks, which included rockets fired at the five-star Serena Hotel, was claimed by an Afghan Taliban faction led by Siraj Haqqani, who uses his base in North Waziristan, along the Afghan border, to organize an insurgency against American and NATO forces.
“This is a very dark day for the U.N. in Afghanistan,” said Kai Eide, the United Nations special representative to Afghanistan. He said officials of the organization would review “whether other appropriate measures need to be taken to protect all our staff.”
No one claimed responsibility for the Peshawar bombing, but the authorities said it appeared to be another in a series of attacks by Pakistani Taliban militants to answer the military’s offensive against their stronghold in South Waziristan.
Since the military moved into the region this month, the Pakistani Taliban have shifted their attacks from suicide bombings aimed at security installations and Western targets to more powerful and more indiscriminate bombings in urban centers intended to kill large numbers of Pakistani civilians.
“The militants want to destabilize the government and intimidate the public,” Mehmood Shah, a retired brigadier and defense analyst based in Peshawar, told the Geo news network. As long as the military operation continues, he added, “We can expect such attacks to carry on.”
A senior intelligence official blamed Taliban militants based in Darra Adamkhel for the attack. “We had an intercept last week that spoke of a ‘heart-rending’ attack in Peshawar,” the official said, requesting he not be identified. The militants, he said, spoke of carrying out the attack to “unnerve” the government. “This explains why they are now targeting civilians,” he said.
At a dinner for Mrs. Clinton, President Asif Ali Zardari characterized the violence as an attack on Pakistan’s way of life and said there was no choice but to strike back.
Mrs. Clinton praised the Pakistani military for its campaign against insurgents in South Waziristan, saying: “I want you to know that this fight is not Pakistan’s alone. This is our struggle as well.”
She responded to criticism here that the United States had drawn down its forces in the Afghan border region, allowing more extremists to flow into Pakistan. The complaint reversed familiar American demands that Pakistan do more to stem the flow of insurgents into Afghanistan. The Pentagon, she insisted, has put more forces in that region, but has consolidated its border outposts into fewer, larger posts.
For all the talk of security, Mrs. Clinton stuck to her goal of trying to broaden the relationship between Pakistan and the United States. She announced a new American-financed energy program that would help Pakistan repair and upgrade its aging power plants to cut down on power failures. The United States will contribute $125 million to the first phase of the program.
Mrs. Clinton tied the program to a broader American effort to improve the lives of Pakistanis.
“For months, families have endured sweltering heat and evenings spent in the dark, without appliances or televisions or computers,” she said, adding that “blackouts prompt an increase in crime.”
That observation seemed almost quaint on a day when Pakistan was convulsed in a crime wave of a different magnitude.
The attack in Peshawar was not a total surprise, according to Pakistani and American officials. A representative of a shopkeepers association in Peshawar said that he and others had received demands from militants in recent days to ban women from shopping in the market.
The car bomb exploded between two narrow lanes of Meena Bazaar and Kochi Bazaar, an area frequented by female shoppers. Most of the bodies were charred and mutilated beyond recognition.
Hospital officials said 87 bodies had been brought from the scene, where as many as three clusters of shops on narrow lanes and passageways collapsed, and fires raged out of control. Three hours after the explosion, people were still trying to dig bodies and survivors out, witnesses said.
Sahibzada Anees, the deputy coordination officer in Peshawar, said the city was poorly equipped to cope with such a large-scale attack. It does not have enough trained firefighters and could not move excavators into the narrow streets to rescue those buried in the rubble, she said.
At the colonial-era Lady Reading Hospital, medics were overwhelmed by the casualties.
“We don’t even have time to count the bodies,” said an official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of government rules.
Mark Landler reported from Islamabad, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan. Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Islamabad.Strong messages in Pakistan
By Andrew F Tully
WASHINGTON - United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Pakistan to meet with government officials, civic leaders, businesspeople, and even leaders of the political opposition.
For security reasons, the State Department isn't giving details of Clinton's visit - not even a timetable, let alone the topics she's expected to discuss with Pakistan's civilian and military leaders.
The security concerns proved correct, as Clinton's arrival in the country coincided with a car bomb that tore through a market in the northwest Pakistani city of Peshawar early on October 28. At least 105 people were killed and more than 200 wounded.
Clinton was three hours' drive away in the capital, Islamabad, when the blast took place. In remarks carried live on Pakistani news channels, she said, "I want you to know that this fight is not Pakistan's alone. This is our struggle as well."
Clinton's first trip to the country as secretary of state comes as the Pakistan army is mounting a major offensive against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants from the mountainous northwestern region - a move that has been welcomed in Washington.
At the same time, however, anti-American sentiment is running high in Pakistan, and has been worsened by a new US$7.5 billion aid package, the Kerry-Lugar bill, that includes conditions that many Pakistanis believe intrude on their nation's sovereignty.
The country is torn between a dislike of the United States and a need for US assistance, according to Stephen Cohen, who studies South Asia at the Brookings Institution, a private policy research center in Washington.
"A lot of [Pakistanis] deeply resent the relationship with the United States, and resent what they regard as undue conditionality of the Kerry-Lugar [US aid bill]," Cohen said. "But many of the same people understand that Pakistan is in a desperate position and absolutely needs that Kerry-Lugar and military support we're providing."
He continued, "Nobody likes to be the recipient of aid from somebody else, but they don't have much of a choice. So I think that we may be making some dent in the pervasive anti-Americanism in Pakistan, but it's still going to take a long time before that begins to dissipate."
Uncoordinated policy?
Cohen says the problems Clinton will face are complicated by the fact that the special US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, has yet to make significant progress on the ground in either country.
Some blame Holbrooke's strong personality, Cohen says, but he dismisses that conclusion because Holbrooke is merely trying to put forward a policy made by others. He says the real question is whether the US has too many centers of policy involved with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Those include "Holbrooke himself. The secretary of state and the Department of State - I don't think they're the same thing. National Security Council staff, whatever it's doing," Cohen said. "The senate and the house have different views. The Department of Defense. You have many clusters of policy-making, [but] I'm not sure if there's much policy coordination in the system. And I don't know, actually, who performs that function on behalf of the president."
But Cohen stresses that it's still early in US President Barack Obama's administration, and he still has time to learn how to become what Cohen calls a "foreign policy president" who will make his own decisions, rather than hire intelligent people to make the decisions on his behalf.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has been doing better than anyone expected, according to Simon Serfaty, who studies global security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, another Washington think-tank.
Serfaty acknowledges that Zardari is, in his words, "president by accident". He ran for the presidency only after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, who twice served as prime minister, was assassinated in December 2007. He also concedes that Zardari is greatly dependent on US support. But Zardari also has taken action to drive Muslim militants from the country's tribal regions.
"The Pakistani president, in my view, is doing better than had been anticipated," Serfaty said. "He's still in control, he has succeeded in launching his army on a path of regaining the real estate that had been lost to the Taliban, which [former president Pervez] Musharraf, his predecessor, did not seem to be able to keep going."
Tall order for Clinton
So can Clinton work with Zardari to win the hearts and minds of the Pakistani people? Serfaty says no. He concedes she is much admired around the world, and can capitalize on this to a great extent. But he insists that hearts and minds cannot be won during this brief visit.
Instead, Clinton's primary job during her visit to Pakistan seems to be to reassure both its civilian and military leadership of the wisdom of joining the United States in fighting the extremists as part of the war in Afghanistan.
To Serfaty, that could be a very difficult job.
"The people we are asking to fight with us in Afghanistan, to fight with the US, to assume a bit of the burden of the war, are people who are also watching a major debate unfolding here in Washington as to whether this war is winnable," he said. General Stanley McChrystal, the general appointed to run the Afghan war, "just said that if we do not do more than we're doing now, we'll lose the war, and if we're doing more than we're doing now, maybe we will not lose it. Maybe," he added.
If Clinton succeeds in reassuring Pakistan's leaders, Serfaty says, they may in turn be able to win the support of their people for a strong fight against the militants.
Copyright (c) 2009, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
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