“There is grim news from Baghdad: A twin suicide truck bombing of two Iraqi ministries has left over 130 dead and wounded more than 500. It is the largest such attack in all of 2009 and a reminder, unfortunately, that the oft-heralded “surge” was not the success that its architects and advocates like to claim.”

Stephen Walt, a member of the Belfer Center’s board of directors and faculty chair of the Center’s International Security Program, wrote “Grim News From Baghdad,” which he published on his Foreign Policy blog on October 26, 2009.

For the full opinion article, go to: http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/10/26/grim_news_from_baghdad

Deciphering the attack on Pakistan’s Army headquarters
ForeignPolicy.com
October 11
Commentary by: Hassan Abbas, Belfer Center
Topic: Recent terrorist attack in Pakistan

Before Pakistan could start recovering from a suicide bombing at a U.N. office in Islamabad and a massive bomb blast in a Peshawar market last week, the brazen October 10 attack targeting Pakistan’s most secure military complex — Army Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi, just a few miles from the capital of Islamabad — jolted it further. This latest attack dragged on for 18 hours as around 40 officials were held hostage by terrorists in a building that belongs to a very important military department. During initial gun battle, the Army lost a brigadier and a lieutenant colonel. This episode concluded with the arrest of the commander of the operation Aqeel, alias Dr. Usman, and the killing of his some seven associates who wore army fatigues and had coordinated their attack on GHQ from at least two directions.

This was neither the first attack on an army structure in the country nor the most deadly — but it is unprecedented given the extent of the breach of the GHQ security, the confusion that it created in its initial stage (raising concerns about the safety of army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani), and its timing vis-à-vis the planned launch of a ground military operation in South Waziristan.

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