More on this story, and an update on Taliban encroachment in and around Peshawar: It looks like the latest truce between Pakistan and the Taliban, signed in July, is yielding familiar results. "U.S. Diplomat Attacked in Peshawar," by Jane Perlez for the New York Times:
[...] In the increasingly lawless northern city of Peshawar on Tuesday morning, three men with assault rifles and the long hair and beards of the Taliban attacked a vehicle carrying a top American diplomat, the provincial police chief said.
The bulletproof Land Cruiser carrying the diplomat, Lynne Tracy, the principal officer at the United States Consulate in Peshawar, was stopped by the three men who got out of a sport utility vehicle and fired, said the police official, Malik Naveed Khan, inspector general of the police in North-West Frontier Province.
Ms. Tracy, who was headed to work at the consulate from her home about a mile away, was unharmed, he said.
The men attacked as the Taliban, who virtually control the tribal areas adjacent to Peshawar, pressed in on the city, conducting suicide bomb attacks and kidnapping civilians.
The attack took place in a district known as University Town, considered one of the more secure areas with large houses protected by high walls and guards.
About 30 Americans work at the consulate, mostly managing economic development programs and as liaisons between the American military and the Pakistani Army. Since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, when Pakistan joined the Bush administration in the fight against terrorism, the movements of American diplomats in Pakistan have been restricted, and they have been advised not to travel outside major cities.
Lou Fintor, a spokesman for the American Embassy in Islamabad, said, “There was a security incident in Peshawar this morning involving a U.S. Consulate vehicle.” He said three employees were in the car.
A current focus of the consulate is a $750 million program to encourage economic development and to counter the influence of the Taliban in the nearby tribal areas. A number of Americans who work on that program but who are not officially employees of the consulate live in the city.
Two Americans were killed in 2002, when gunmen attacked a Protestant church in Islamabad. In 2006, a car bombing killed an American diplomat at the consulate in Karachi.
In the past year, suicide bombers have attacked Pakistani military targets in Peshawar. Last week, the Pakistani Taliban took responsibility for a suicide bomber who hit a bus carrying members of the Pakistani Air Force, killing 14.
Despite bullying by that presumptuous failure Condoleezza Rice, Foreign Service officers should simply refuse to work in Pakistan and other Muslim countries if they so wish. Joining the State Department is not the same thing as joining the military as a professional soldier. Why should any Americans be in Peshawar? Why should there be help extended to Pakistan? The governmet of Pakistan has received tens of billions of dollars in aid over the past fifty years from the United States. In return it helped create and then nurture the Taliban. Its military establishment paid for the thefts of Western nuclear secrets by A. Q. Khan, and for the development of nuclear weapons by his group, and then protected him as he proceeded to distribute, for money and in-kind information, to North Korea and to Iran and to Libya, and perhaps other places. For the past seven years Pakistan has received about thirty billion dollars, in military aid, economic aid, and debt forgiveness, from the American government alone. That is enough.
If all thirty of the American employees now wish to leave, they should do so, and any attempt by Condoleezza Rice to punish them result, instead, in her richly-deserved public humiliation by those in Congress who can tell her that she has overstepped, and besides, her complete failure in every area -- with her telling the Sunnis and the Shi'a that they "had better" get along, with her telling the Israelis that their "settlement building" in the "West Bank" --- which even the notoriously hostile James Baker admitted was completely witin Israel's legal right -- is "not helpful" by which she means "not helpful" to her, who does not understand and refuses to try to understand the larger picture, the meaning and menace of Islam, and wishes Israel to surrender its own claims because, she thinks, this will make her own job easier, and she certainly at this point has no idea how to deal with all the instruments or manifestations of the world-wide Jihad. A chicken with her head cut off, she lurches and ignores, and certainly an intelligent and aware Secretary of State would have taken note long ago of all the signs of Russian impatience and fury, shared by vast numbers of people and not merely by the ruthless regime of Povodyr' Putin, in the hero-worshipping or kult-lichnosti atmosphere of "takogo kak Putin," where the Ukraine, and Estonia (the statue to the Russian soldier moved from its place of honor in April 2007), and what seemed to be, even to ordinary not-completely-brainwashed Russians, as American "encirclement" because of the seemingly relentless expansion of NATO, the American agreements for bases in Bulgaria and in some of the Central Asian "stans," an "encirclement" that Rice, whose manner, and even the modulations of her too-high voice, make it difficult to take her seriously. Even her inability to understand the simplest Russian, that was exposed on Russian television during an interview, makes Russians wonder about this "Soviet specialist" who can't speak Russian.
Congress should step in, and tell Rice that her policy of forcing State Department personnel to remain -- if they volunteer it is another matter -- in obvious places of danger (see all of Pakistan), is not acceptable.
It's time for her to be retired, and given a post, if post she must be given, as Football Commissioner, or something else far from statecraft. And please, all you tycoons, don't put her on your boards. Don't "honor" her or swell her coffers further. She's had far too good a run, while running on empty.
Now that they know the car is bulletproof and can withstand an assault rifle, the remotely-detonated IED can't be far in the future. The munitions experts can't be far away. The roadside bombs will start going off very soon.
Where are the anti-Taliban squads? Can we expect them to come down hard on people who try to kill American consular officials?
Hah!
why in the hell do we nave a United States Consulate in Peshawar? give the taliban something to shoot at?
The first fruits of the degenerate Rice's "democracy for the Muslim people" drive. But the main harvest is still ahead. Now that democracy brought Musharraf down, Pakistan is drifting into total chaos, the jihadists are having the run of the country, and the ISI, all of whom are themselves jihadists, are openly aiding them. It is only the matter of time before the jihadists get their fingers on the nuclear buttons, if they haven't already. After the US State Dept. sociopaths betrayed and abandoned Musharraf the moment he had run into difficulty, who else in Pakistan will stick his neck out for the Americans? Suddenly, not one but two epicenters of Nuclear Jihad are now emerging: Iran and Pakistan. And Pakistan is now merging with Afghanistan into one huge jihad entity.
And what are the degenerate Rice and our idiot-boy Bush doing in this crucial time? Rattling Russia with their illegal, roguish recognition of the evil Albanian "Kosova" that replaced the crucified Christian Serb Kosovo, because a career State Dept. sociopath Nicholas Burns convinced them that it will be a "bipartisan foreign policy success". Not content with that, the imbecilic duo sought another "success" goading Georgia into a murderous attack on Ossetian civilians and Russian soldiers on peacekeeping duty. Russia finally had enough, switching from words into an action mode, wooping "our man Saakashvili in Georgia" and recognizing the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And the very Western sociopaths who crucified Serbia and illegally recognized "Kosova" now have the nerve to call Russia's recognition of the 2 breakaway countries "illegal". But they cannot do anything to Russia beyond trash talk, while Russia can do a lot to them. The very Robert Gates who dug the pit for Russia in Afghanistan, is now sitting in it. The moment Russia denies its land and airspace to NATO supply flights to Afghanistan, Gates will be buried in the pit of his own digging.
Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999.
Ansd US POUTUS, who, during elections, declard himself of "Christian faith", has this to parrot, thanks to his wahhabbi masters: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-11.html