IT has been a bad two days on the terrorist front. Yesterday, in the Afghan capital a suicide attack on the Indian Embassy killed at least 41 people. Hours earlier in the Pakistani capital, a suicide bomb killed more than 10 Pakistani policemen while in the Somali capital gunmen murdered a top UN aid official.
The only civilized response to all three attacks is horror and revulsion - horror that once again innocent people have been murdered by evil-minded fanatics and revulsion at the warped thinking which drives them to such wickedness.
There is no factual link between these three killing sprees. Yet there is a broad political link, at least between the Kabul and Islamabad attacks. They were the work of so-called Islamic militants - a resurgent Taleban in Afghanistan and a similar movement in Pakistan. (Responsibility for the Somali attack is more difficult to pin down. It could be the work of a disgruntled war lord; on the other hand, attacks on aid agencies have noticeably increased in recent months and have been largely blamed on the local Al-Qaeda.)
The link between these militants is their twisted version of Islam that they use to justify their evil acts, as well as a sense of common cause and a hatred of everyone else who is not part of their movement.
It is a macabre irony that Indians and Pakistanis should be the joint targets of these fanatics. In the case of the Kabul attack, the Taleban were clearly out to make common cause with Kashmiri militants. That is a new development, but hardly surprising. Not that they will have any effect on that or on Indian relations with Afghanistan. They may have imagined that they could force a change of heart by Delhi - that it would end its program of aid and reconstruction - but they are as ignorant and foolish in that as they are cruel and evil. India, with its long experience of terrorists and its policy not to make concessions to them, will continue to maintain close ties with the Afghan government and provide it with aid.
The same with Pakistan. Sunday's killings will not deter the Pakistani police from doing their job any more than terrorist bombs deter the police in Spain or elsewhere. That is the one constant about terrorism. It never wins against a well-organized army or state. It is a thorn in the side of the state, painful and bloody, but not terminal. The only time terrorists can succeed is in a power vacuum. For all the problems, no one can say that about Afghanistan today. The Taleban may be resurgent but the country is not in chaos or on the point of collapse. Nor should anyone repeat the easy lie that it is forever a graveyard for foreigners. That is the very antithesis of what Afghanistan is. It is not the clash point of civilizations; it is, and has been for three thousand years, the crossroads of civilizations. It certainly was never the graveyard for the Arabs and Persians who introduced Islam to the country.
The embassy attack does not mean that Afghanistan is an impossible mess or that the international forces there are losing the battle. But it is a warning to President Karzai and Afghanistan's friends to redouble efforts to pacify the country. Ultimately that is not a military issue, it is a financial one. More roads, more schools, more infrastructure will mean more jobs, more trade, more business and more reason for ordinary Afghans to appreciate and support their government. That is President Karzai's urgent task.
