Deadly Attack by Taliban in Kabul Sought to Kill Head of Blackwater

Mujebullah, who like many Afghans goes by one name, said he had been inside the store when the bomb exploded. His sister was there to buy a pacifier for her infant son, whom she had left with relatives at home.
Suddenly there was a huge explosion, shelves fell forward, the lights flickered and went dark. As foreign shoppers started to push their way out of the chaos, Mujebullah realized that his sister and cousin were missing.
As one women’s mangled body was pulled out, a police offer asked him, “Is this your sister?”
The tearful boy looked on, confused. “I can’t tell,” he said.
Sometime later, as another woman’s body was pulled out, the boy’s father said, “This is her,” not indicating if it was his daughter or niece, one of whom was still missing.
“This is your security!” the man wailed to the crowd as rescue workers and the police looked on. “You can’t even provide security in Kabul; how can you secure the whole country?”
Attacks in the capital were frequent occurrences in 2008 and 2009, but they declined sharply last year. Coalition forces have cautiously credited the decline to their increased operations and surveillance across the eastern border with Pakistan, putting pressure on insurgent groups, including the Haqqani Network.
The group is believed to have been responsible for some of the biggest attacks in Kabul, including bombings of the Indian Embassy, which killed more than 70 people in separate attacks in 2008 and 2009.
But insurgent inroads into this city appear to have picked up in the past several weeks.
On Jan. 12, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle blew himself up alongside a bus carrying Afghan intelligence officers, killing 2 people and wounding 36. A week earlier, a bomb hidden in a rice sack downtown killed a policeman and wounded two civilians.
And on Dec. 19, two militants wearing suicide vests and armed with machine guns and grenades attacked a bus carrying Afghan National Army officers, killing five and wounding nine.