Hydrablog

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/world/asia/11pstan.html
June 11, 2009
Death Toll in Pakistan Bomb Now 16
By SALMAN MASOOD AND ISMAIL KHAN [Pakistan] [hydra] [Pakistan became the clear staging area for operations into Afghanistan during 2007] [AfPak] [additional indications that “spring” offensive is on: Taliban getting bolder in their stronghold] [hard to know where the insurgency ends and common criminality begins] [Swat and other accommodations qua appeasements?] [followup] [use psci469b] [Taliban and jihadis move closer to Islamabad] [general populace has fled Talibanization] [use psci469b] [another blazen attack on Pakistan’s Western infrastructure: Western hotels with Marriott last fall and a 5-star hotel in Peshawar] [why does Pakistan need a 5-star in the single most important hub connecting Pakistan’s tribal frontiers with non-tribal Pakistan?] [how much buiness could it possibly do?] [***]
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A day after suicide bombers rushed a small truck packed with explosives through the gates of a five-star hotel in the northwestern city of Peshawar, the death toll was reported to have risen to 16 as more bodies were pulled from the wreckage, news reports and officials said on Wednesday.

As Pakistani authorities cleared away the debris and began investigating the attack, closed-circuit television images showed two vehicles — a car and a pickup truck — speeding through the security post at the Pearl Continental Hotel late Tuesday, taking security guards by surprise. [***]

One attacker sprayed bullets at the guards from the truck before it blew up, the images showed. It was not clear whether the bullets hit the guards. [I’m willing to bet the young men were between 16-25] [devout and pious] [and probably foreign fighters if only from a CAsia or SAsia state other than Pakistan] [the recruitment of them would be interesting to read and I suspect relatively predictable in nature] [***]

The blast, powerful enough to leave a crater 6 feet deep and 15 feet wide, collapsed the western wing of the hotel, one of the few in the city that cater to Western visitors. The hotel’s registry at the time of the attack, which occurred about 10 p.m. local time, included officials working for United Nations agencies and other aid groups tending to the large refugee population that has been displaced by the recent fighting between the Pakistani Army and Taliban insurgents.

Rescue workers said six more bodies were recovered on Wednesday.

Saddrudin Hashwani, the hotel’s owner, said the government should have provided better security, and he pledged to reopen the hotel in two months, local news reports said. Mr. Hashwani also owns the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad which was the target of a bombing last September that killed more than 50 people. The Marriot reopened recently. [interesting] [I don’t want to be the one to start ugly rumors but . . . ?] [does he have someone in his fairly immediate family with a past Islamist background?] [how does insurance work in Pakistan?] [probably coincidental] [but I’d not heard before that the same fellow owned the Marriott attacked last September (?) just before the World at Risk—i.e., the Talent-Allison, et al. panel—was due to stay there] [any old grudges between Hashwani and Pakistani Taliban?] [again, there really no basis for my rapacious speculation here but when one has a nation-state of 160 million and Mr. Hotelier has been hit twice in 9 months] [one must allow for possibility that there’s more there than initially meets the eye, n’est-ce pas?] [***]

Two foreign United Nations workers were among those killed in the Peshawar blast on Tuesday.

The United Nations children’s agency, known as Unicef, identified one of the officials as Perseveranda So from the Philippines. She had been working to help girls gain access to education.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in a statement from its Geneva headquarters on Wednesday, identified the second official as Aleksandar Vorkapic, a citizen of Serbia. “He was on his first emergency mission and he gave his life serving others,” the refugee agency said.

Two officials for the World Food Program were wounded, one, from Madagascar, critically, said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the aid agency.

The attack followed threats on May 27 by Taliban leaders, who warned Pakistanis that they were preparing “major attacks” in large cities in retaliation for the military’s campaign against the insurgents in parts of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. [indeed they did] [in fact, Baitallah Meshud whom I though might have been dead popped back up onto the gsave radar] [***]

Peshawar, the capital of the province and a gateway to the tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have set up a base, has been the scene of frequent attacks by the Taliban. [***] [tempting to think if connected the chronology would be reversed?] [months ago an attack in Peshawar] [followed upwards of a year later by a more spectacular attack in Islamabad]

On the day of the Taliban warning last week, three bombs detonated in and around Peshawar, including at an electronics market and a police checkpoint, as well as in Dera Ismail Khan, in the country’s western area. The bombing on Tuesday was the seventh in Peshawar since the military operation began. [***]

It was by far the largest bombing, with an estimated 1,000 pounds of explosives, the police said, and it was the most spectacular against a Western target in Pakistan since the bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad.

The Pearl Continental is set back from a main road that is also the location of the Provincial Assembly and the High Court, and its parking lot is a maze of zigzagging barriers to prevent just such an attack.

But the attackers employed tactics similar to those used in the assault on May 27 against the headquarters of the Pakistani intelligence service in Lahore, which fell short of its intended target but killed 26 [**] people at a nearby emergency-response unit.

“This attack has all the signatures of the Rescue 15 attack in Lahore,” said one Pakistani security official, referring to the emergency-response service that was hit. [***] [Pakistani military, ISI, and Rescue 15] [first two are self evident] [rescue 15 is an emergency-response organization who autonomy and chain of command are unclear, at least unclear to me] [***]

In both cases, militants shot guards in order to allow a suicide bomber into a secured area. On Tuesday, witnesses and officials said the attack started when three or four assailants on a pickup truck opened fire on a guard post at the gates of the hotel, where cars are routinely scanned for explosives.

“The assailants first killed the security guards on the main entrance to lower the electronic barrier and then went inside the main parking lot firing indiscriminately,” said a police official, Safwat Ghayyir. Once the barriers had been lowered, a suicide bomber drove a minivan packed with explosives toward the hotel. It exploded close enough to the building to reduce a large portion of it to rubble.

“We are the front line,” said Farahnaz Ispahani, the media adviser to President Asif Ali Zardari. “This is really a fight for our way of life. This is a fight for Pakistan.” [in Peshawar it’s not especially surprising that government authorities feel under siege] [my recollection is it’s a city of 1-million plus citizens on the border (unrecognizable though it may be to some) one of Pakistan’s major nation-state/quazi-nation-state lines of demarcation] [***]

Salman Masood reported from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar.Irfan Ashraf contributed reporting from Peshawar, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company