Kabul Riot Explained

1 June, 2006. 325 words.

Again I’m compelled to recommend the Counterterrorism Blog as an alternate view of sensationalized terrorism-related events in the news. They are surprisingly non-partisan and thoughtful in their reporting. They generally just stick to the facts and explain them thoroughly, which is incredibly refreshing in this day and age.

Anyway, today I read Two days after the Kabul riot, a report by Bill Roggio, who recently traveled to Afghanistan. I only caught a few stories about the riot on the cable “news” networks and NBC Nightly News From New Orleans, and they all not only completely failed to describe what actually happened, but they generally left the impression that the Afghani people would be much happier if the U.S. had never come to their country and that they wished they had the Taliban back.

Thanks to Bill Roggio, at least I now know what actually happened: Apparently a U.S. cargo truck’s brakes failed while going down a “steep” hill, and it crashed into some Afghani traffic. Roggio writes:

From one to six Afghanis were killed in the accident, and up to a dozen were killed and over a hundred wounded in the waves of demonstrations and riots that followed. … The violence was not Taliban-inspired, but composed mainly of Hazaris. The Haziris are an ethnic group … [that] have recently been marginalized by the Karzai administration after they lost their last cabinet post. The rioters were largely young, unemployed males, and there was a significant criminal element involved.

I recommend reading the rest of Roggio’s report; it’s very thorough. I call it a “report,” by the way, because it feels like the sort of thing that journalists should do, unlike what the vast majority of journalists actually turn in. (I call the latter “crap.”) Certainly it’s far superior to the posts of so-called “citizen journalists,” aka. bloggers. Also, IMO, Roggio’s report deserves to be read and called a “report” simply because he actually went to Afghanistan.

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