Friday 13 May 2011 20.43 BST
- Article history
When Osama bin Laden's Pakistani supporters strike back, this is what it looks like: twisted metal, scattered suitcases and body parts; blood and savagery.
The Taliban said the vicious double suicide bombing in Shabqadar, a trading town on the edge of the tribal belt in Charsadda district in north-western Pakistan, claimed the first part of the blood price they had promised to extract for the American killing of Bin Laden on 2 May. It was conducted with ruthless efficiency.
Abid Khan, 24, cowered in his sweetshop when he heard the first blast and then, eight minutes later, a second. Rushing to the scene, he found some 200 trainee soldiers strewn on the road among mangled vans and a pile of bags.
"It was very bad," he said in slow, precise English. "Some people had no hand. Some people had no foot. Some heads were far away [from] the people." He repeated himself. "It was very bad."
The dead and injured had been among 800 trainee soldiers partying just hours earlier with songs and music, having graduated into the ranks of the Frontier Corps, a poorly equipped paramilitary force drawn from the tribes of north-western Pakistan.
They had just completed a six-month training course at the FC's main training academy in Shabqadar – a British-era base with sweeping lawns and tree-lined drives – and came from districts that read like a roll-call of Taliban battlegrounds: Waziristan, Swat, Kohat, Lakki Marwat.
But they barely made it out of the gate. As the young cadets left the base at 6am, clambering into buses and piling their luggage on top, a suicide bomber approached on foot then exploded his payload. More trainees rushed out to help the wounded. But eight minutes later a second bomber turned up, on a motorbike, exploding a vicious hail of ballbearings that sliced through shops, buses and flesh. By evening the death toll had reached 80, of whom 66 were FC recruits, with another 120 injured. The toll, as ever, was expected to rise.
US officials are hoping to leverage outrage over Bin Laden to gain concessions from the Pakistani army. They want the military to push into Waziristan, to sever relations with militant groups such as the Haqqani network, and to arrest high-level fugitives thought to be still inside Pakistan, mostly notably Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.
Perhaps underscoring the drive, a CIA drone fired a missile at a car in North Waziristan, killing three people in the third such attack since Bin Laden's death. The US embassy in Islamabad did not comment, but it did issue a statement condemning the Shabqadar attack as the work of the "true enemy of the people of Pakistan".
It's still unclear whether the army, a past master at managing the tricky US relationship, will accede to any or all of Washington's demands. But it is sensitive to an unprecedented wave of criticism in Islamabad, where the top brass made a rare address to parliament.
The army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, the chief of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, and at least three other top generals fielded questions from parliamentarians late into the evening in a session that was closed to the public.
But some details leaked out – most intriguingly a claim by the country's air chief that Shamsi airbase in Balochistan, used by the CIA to carry out drone attacks, is actually under the jurisdiction of the United Arab Emirates.
But in Shabqadar, just a two-hour drive away, the repercussions of Bin Laden's death — what one local termed the "Osama drama" – had a very real impact. The town centre was deserted, shuttered by police as the authorities cleaned up the blast site. A dozen Hiace mini-vans, crushed like tin cans, clustered outside the gates of the base. Blood-soaked rags littered the pavement. A policemen emerged from the wreckage with a fistful of ballbearings.
"We are not afraid of the situation," he said, a little unsteadily. "Everything is for Allah." Hundreds of tiny holes pitted the shopfront behind him.
A few provincial ministers came up from Peshawar, 30 miles to the south, offering soundbites for the cameras then departing in a whirl of flashing lights, horns and armoured cars.
The scene was a reminder that, behind the spy games and hushed diplomatic shuffle, it is ordinary Pakistanis who have paid the price for their country's part in the fight against militancy.
Some 30,000 Pakistanis have died violently in the past decade, including 9,000 from the armed forces, according to official figures – 10 times the death toll in the US on 9/11. Commando instructor Gul Zaman, a burly man with a stone face, stood outside the crumbled barriers of the FC base, mourning his students. "They were all just young boys," he said quietly. "Not one was over 25 years old."
A Taliban spokesman said the atrocity was the first revenge for the "martyrdom" of Bin Laden. "There will be more," Ehsanullah Ehsan told Reuters. But senior police officials believe the bombing was more connected to the war in nearby Mohmand tribal agency, which starts just three miles from Shabqadar. Pakistan's army has been fighting the Pakistani Taliban there for more than two years, as part of a series of rolling battles across the tribal belt. The fight is vicious.
In December a Taliban suicide bomber killed at least 50 people at a public meeting; this week they assassinated one pro-government militiaman and kidnapped another. On Thursday a stray shell landed on a house in Mohmand, killing one person and wounding a woman and two children. People in Shabqadar can hear the artillery.
But the suicide bombings were also a challenge to Pakistani politicians who want to spurn western assistance. A half-shredded poster at the blast site carried the image of Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician who once advocated talks with the Taliban. His supporters, including many women, protested outside parliament as the generals spoke, carrying posters that read "What are you hiding?"
The message echoed widespread scepticism among Pakistanis who, despite the blasts, continue to believe in astonishing numbers that the death of Bin Laden was concocted. "It was all just a drama. Osama wasn't really there," said taxi driver Hakimullah Jan in Shabqadar. "The Pakistani army and the Americans are just players in this Osama drama."
Caught between army hawks, a disbelieving public and an angry America, others simply feel beleaguered, as if their country has nowhere to turn. "So we are doomed if we side with militants and doomed if we don't," tweeted @ghamidiview, a follower of the moderate Islamic scholar Javed Ghamidi.
As evening fell in Shabqadar, a small group of staff emerged from the base, which was still shuttered, to gather up the luggage in the street.
One by one, they unrolled the dead soldiers' belongings – bundles of bedding wrapped round piles of neatly folded, military jumpers. Then they quietly rolled them up again, and carried them back into the base.
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