Reverberations

First there is chaos. You can't tell where the explosion was, because the sound echoes off the mountains that surround the city and the buildings that crowd it. It's a strange ventriloquism that has everyone believing the bomb was a block away. But the better part of a mile from ground zero, my windows and walls shake with the concussion wave and the fading reverberations that provide the only noise in the moments after the blast. Then come sirens and small-arms fire. There are plenty of people on the streets of Kabul with guns, and the roar of an early-morning car bomb riles even the most war-weathered security guards. Kalashnikovs begin spitting rounds at nothing in particular.

Today's bombing in Kabul is only the most recent in a string of attacks against the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police since the Taliban brought their quarrels with the government to the nation's capital. An attack on an army bus in June killed at least 35, another one in September at least 30, and there have been three suicide attacks here in the last week. The Taliban, always shrewd, maintain that collateral damage is the fault of NATO warplanes, and to back it up they take pains to avoid civilian targets. They believe it to be a matter of only semantic concern that not every passenger on a Ministry of Defense bus is a soldier, nor are those passersby unfortunate enough to be near the target at the moment of detonation.

In a sense they've got it right: the whispering that goes on among witnesses to the recent bombings condemn the Karzai administration for its failure to protect the people, rather than the Taliban for killing them.

Today's bombing was carried out by a VBIED, or Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device. A small car laden with explosives pulled up to an army bus and detonated with such force that it peeled off the roof of the bus and wrenched the front so forcefully that the engine assembly rotated back over the cab, so that the two front wheels came crashing down behind the driver. It killed 13 people and injured another seven—or 20, depending on whether you listen to witnesses, the defense ministry, or local journalists. Everyone here has an ulterior motive, a reason to over- or understate the number of dead and wounded. An Afghan friend once told me that Afghans are like chickens; you can kill hundreds of them and no one cares. Indeed, after every bombing the victims' lives quickly become less important than their deaths. If in no other way, this fact unites the country—the martyr who takes the lives as a political statement, and the member of parliament who exploits them for political currency.

Afghans hate their ministers for holding dual citizenship, believing it to be proof of compromised allegiances. But Afghanistan no longer needs outsiders to ignite ethnic tensions. Whether the Iranian government is really funding the huge Shiite seminary on Darulaman Road; whether or not Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency is really conducting political assassinations to further a policy of Pashtun domination—none of it really matters. Because Afghans tend to think according to their ethnic predispositions, and they will speak accordingly; no information from any source is without likely bias. Westerners have a hard time seeing the influence of ethnic allegiance, because Afghans pride themselves on hospitality, a central component of which is identifying what your guests want to see and then showing it to them. Racism is unappealing to Americans, who have little license for pride in their own history; to Germans, who generations later still harbor a collective, residual guilt; and to people from any of the other countries with a significant presence in Afghanistan.

In the streets near the site of the bombing, in the Chihulsutoon area of southwest Kabul, cars drive off the pavement to avoid the potholes carved out by artillery shells that fell during the civil war. The predominant sound of life and commerce in this economically depressed neighborhood is the scraping of undercarriages on the pavement and the careful shifting of cars between neutral and first gear. Now the road bears another scar of war: a crater several feet deep and roughly the diameter of a man.