I was struck by the photo of the Peshawar five-star hotel bombing in the print edition of today's New York Times, it looked very similar to the results of Tim McVeigh's work in Oklahoma City. It appears there isn't the exact same photo available with the online version of the story--this one comes close, but is more cropped and fuzzy, doesn't give the same impact.
The accompanying report,
Militants Strike Five-Star Hotel in Pakistan, Killing 11, by Ismail Khan and Salman Masood from Peshawar,
pretty much makes it clear how huge the bomb was and that greater human damage was only avoided by the parking lot barriers:
The blast, powerful enough to leave a crater 6 feet deep and 15 feet wide, collapsed the western wing of the hotel...The bombing Tuesday was the seventh in Peshawar since the military operation began.
It was by far the largest -- using an estimated 1,000 pounds of explosives, the police said -- making it the most spectacular against a Western target in Pakistan since the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in the capital, Islamabad, last September, which left more than 50 dead.
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 gauntlet 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.
The last paragraph is quite striking:
"We are the front line," said Farahnaz Ispahani, the media advisor to President Asif Ali Zardari. "This is really a fight for our way of life. This is a fight for Pakistan."
The Times has summarized some very interesting updates to the story in its news blog this morning--
Report: U.S. Planned to Buy Bombed Peshawar Hotel, by Robert Mackey:
As a colleague here at The Times points out, the Pearl Continental hotel in Peshawar, Pakistan, which was partly destroyed on Tuesday by a massive car bomb, is well known locally as a meeting point for not just wealthy Pakistanis, foreign aid workers and journalists but also intelligence agents...
Given that reputation, the hotel was an obvious target for militants -- even before a report surfaced two weeks ago that the United States was planning to buy the hotel as part of a plan to greatly expand its diplomatic presence in the city. As the Press Trust of India reported on Tuesday, the Pearl Continental is currently owned by Sadruddin Hashwani, who also owns the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which was bombed last September, resulting in more than 50 deaths.
According to a report by Saeed Shah and Warren P. Strobel of McClatchy Newspapers, the hotel was apparently at the center of an American plan to establish a long-term presence in Peshawar...
Also of serious note is this second report in today's print version--
Villagers Take on Taliban After Bombing in Pakistan,
by Sabrina Tavernise and Irfan Ashraf in Peshawar:
....More than a thousand villagers from the district of Dir have been fighting Taliban militants since Friday, when a Taliban suicide bomber detonated his payload during prayer time at a mosque, killing at least 30 villagers....
The uprising is not the first time that Pakistanis have formed their own militias to stand up to the Taliban, and previous efforts have often collapsed largely because the government and military did not come to their aid.
But the latest attempt is significant, revealing the determination of the people of Dir to keep out both the Taliban and the military and to prevent their area from turning into another war zone, like the nearby Swat Valley, where millions have fled fighting.
The rebellion, locals said, gives the government a chance to demonstrate to the Pakistani people that it is serious in supporting them this time....
Fayaz Ahmad Khan Toru, an official with the government of North-West Frontier Province, said that officials knew that the government response was being closely watched, and that they were working with local people. "Failure is not an option," he said.
Syed Muhammad, 30, a civil servant from the village of Mian Dog in the valley, said that without the military's help, the uprising would fail. The militants were dug in too deep for the local militia to dislodge them on its own with just guns.
But he expressed cautious optimism that the local people would not be ignored, as they had been in most other operations, and that the military, now pressing ahead with its campaign against the Taliban, might be learning.
"I think that the military has now realized that the locals should be involved in these operations," he said. "Without the support of the local people they cannot wipe out the militants."
Meanwhile, Defense Sec. Gates was reporting to the U.S. Senate on Aghanistan "more hopeful than he had been in a long time," noting that the price for wheat there was almost the same as for opium, and Adm. Mike Mullen expressed a U.S. priority to reduce civilian casulaties.