There were hints of a terrorist car bomb attack sometime on 9-11.  Perhaps the world’s vigilance defeated the terrorists.  But in the one place where evil is still in control, in Afganistan, the Taliban marked the 9-11 tenth anniversary by detonating a powerful truck bomb which ripped

through an Eastern Afghanistan military base.  Five Afghans were killed, 77 American troops were injured.  This from the WSJ Online:

The blast was so mighty that it shattered windows two miles away and leveled buildings within 300 yards of the truck, pulling down an observation aerostat. Casualties included a woman killed by shrapnel that flew about half a mile from Combat Outpost Sayedabad, in Wardak province, local Afghans said.

Many of the injured U.S. service members were evacuated to hospitals. The military said the majority of those injured will return to duties shortly. The blast occurred at the outer checkpoint of the base, something that prevented potentially far more serious casualties.

“It was a very heavy explosion that ruined everything. The buildings inside the base are completely destroyed [including] our district building and police headquarters,” said Zmaray, the police chief of Sayedabad district, who like many Afghans goes by one name.

The attack took place in the same district of Wardak province as last month’s downing of a U.S. Chinook helicopter, in which 30 American service members—most of them members of the elite Navy SEALs—lost their lives. Wardak, on the southern approaches to Kabul, has increasingly become an insurgency hotspot. A coalition statement said the base remains operational.

The Taliban took responsibility for the blast. The insurgents’ ability to exact such devastation served as a grim reminder that despite 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan, with over 100,000 American troops currently spread throughout the country, the enemy remains far from defeated.

At least 429 coalition troops have died so far this year, 316 of them American, according to icasualties.org, an independent monitoring site.

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Filed under: Inside The KC, Politics, Sonja Eddings Brown by Sonja Eddings Brown, Sep 12, 2011