The Taliban carried out a brazen attack today against a military base in Southern Afghanistan.Using a truck bomb, gunmen stormed the complex and killed an American soldier.That followed an assault Friday that targeted a restaurant frequented by Westerners in Kabul;21 civilians were killed, 13 of them non-Afghans, in the single deadliest attack against foreign citizens since the war started.Claiming responsibility, the Taliban said the attack was in retaliation for an airstrike last week against insurgents in the eastern Parwan province.There is little agreement on the genesis of that attack.There were a number of civilian causalities, but there are conflicting reports on how many were killed.For more on the instability in Afghanistan, we turn to Washington Post reporter Pamela Constable.She recently returned from the country. And Omar Samad, a former Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman who also served as the country's ambassador to France and to Canada.Welcome to you both.What does this latest attack, Pam, tell us about how unstable things are right now security-wise in Afghanistan?I think it tells us, number one, that the Taliban are very deliberate, very precise, very well-organized.They target places that they know will have high symbolic value, especially to the international community.At a time of great uncertainty about things like the security agreement, about future elections, everybody's very nervous already in the country, both foreigners and Afghans.And I think an attack like this really focuses that fear and those uncertainties and crystallizes a lot of the concerns and, of course, makes them much more personal and much more -- much more emotional.
