• Former president and peace envoy killed in bomb blast
• Hopes of settlement in tatters after assassination
• Hamid Karzai to fly home from UN summit
The Guardian's Jon Boone in Kabul has passed on some reaction to Rabbani killings from Ahmed Wali Massoud, the bother of a legendary anti-Taliban guerrilla leader who was himself killed by suicide bombers days before the terrorist attacks of September 11.
"This absolutely shows that peace with the Taliban is dead," said Massoud.
"It doesn't work, it won't work," he added.
From an aide to Rabbani, Jon has also got some more on the circumstances of today's assassination, which took place after Rabbani agreed to meet two men who said they represented Quetta Shura, the Taliban's governing body, and had an important message to
deliver.
Jon writes:
Not only were the visitors deemed too important to search thoroughly, inspecting a turban is still generally seen as disrespectful, even though there have been three other cases this year of the head gear used to conceal bombs.
The aide said that when Rabbani entered the room one of them approached him, hugging him tight and placing his head on his victim's chest.
Shopkeepers nearby heard a muffled bang from inside the building, which was still loud enough to set off the "duck and cover" alarms at the US Embassy just a short distance away.
The former president was killed instantly while four others in the room were injured, including Masoom Stanekzai, a highly regarded technocrat who runs the day to day operations of the HPC and had brought the men to Rabbani's house.
The second man was also seriously injured. His turban was burning when he was found, according to an official from the country's Interior Ministry.
He was rushed to hospital were strenuous efforts were made to keep him alive in the hope he would help investigators with their enquiries.
An interesting piece by Anand Gopal for Foreign Policy suggests that the killing of Rabbani and the spate of assassinations in northern Afghanistan in recent months could be seen as the steady elimination of elements standing in the way of a deal favourable to the Taliban.
Gopal writes that Rabbani initially approached his role with alacrity but it was unclear whether he was pursuing a sort of managed surrender (reintegration) or genuine negotiations. He adds:
From the Taliban and Pakistani side, Rabbani and other Northern Alliance figures appear to be seen as impediments to a deal. "These people don't represent Afghanistan," a Taliban official in Quetta told me earlier this summer. "We can't ever have peace with them around."
NATO has been responding to the Rabbani killing, saying that it will not stop reconciliation efforts in Afghanistan
"This assassination is only another cowardly act of violence, but it will not deter the important work of reconciliation," NATO's top operations officer, Admiral James Stavridis, said in a statement, according to Reuters.
NATO's Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the killing "will not shake the resolve of the international and Afghan partnership".
"We will continue to work shoulder to shoulder to provide a better and safer future for the Afghan people," he said in a statement.
Ten years from now, Rabbani's assassination may well be seen as a decisive step towards a renewed civil war, according Matthieu Aikins, a journalist who has reported extensively from Afghanistan.
In a profile that he has filed for the Guardian, he adds:
Rabbani was a pragmatist who saw engagement in the reconciliation process as a way of securing his position in a post-US Afghanistan. His killing will harden attitudes against peace.
It is a worrying sign that Afghanistan, with fewer figures able to rein in its centrifugal forces, is careening towards disintegration.
This is Ben Quinn taking over the live blog for the evening. You can also follow me on twitter at BenQuinn75
Here's an evening summary:
• Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan President appointed by Hamid Karzai to start peace talks with the Taliban, has been assassinated at his home in Kabul. Though the circumstances surrounding the killing are unclear, initial reports suggest that a man who visited Rabbani's home was hiding explosives in his turban. (See 4.15pm.) Masoom Stanekzai, a key advisor to Karzai was also injured in the attack, and four bodyguards were reported dead.
• The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the bomb. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters: "Yes, we carried out the attack on Rabbani but will provide you other details shortly." But speculation about the identity of the assassins nonetheless remains rife. Focus is likely to linger on the feared Haqqani insurgent network. (See 5.12pm.) Once the killers' identity is confirmed, writes the Guardian's Declan Walsh, it is likely to have grave implications for Afghanistan and the region. (See 6.31pm.)
• The assassination has cast a shadow over the UN General Assembly in New York, where Hamid Karzai and other world leaders are meeting. Karzai, who is heading back to Afghanistan after meeting privately with Barack Obama on the sidelines of the summit, paid tribute to Rabbani, hailing him as "an Afghan patriot who as we see has sacrificed his life for the sake of Afghanistan and for the people of our country. The mission that he had undertaken was vital to the Afghan people and for the security of our country and the peace of our country. We will miss him very, very much." Obama added that the killing, though a "tragic loss", would not deter the US and Kabul from pursuing a peace efforts. (See 5.39pm.)
• Rabbani's killing is a huge blow to efforts to bring Afghanistan's long-standing turmoil to a peaceful resolution. The Guardian's Jon Boone warns that it "potentially or almost certainly blows Hamid Karzai's entire peace agenda out of the water", while Julian Borger, the Guardian's diplomatic editor, argues the assassination is most harmful because of what Rabbani represented.
Declan Walsh gives us his take on those responsible for the assassination. In the wake of Rabbani's assassination, speculation about the identity of his assassins is rife among Kabul and Afghanistan experts, he writes.
As yet, it remains a mystery, although one western official told the Guardian that reports of the bomb being hidden in a turban appeared to be true. But once the killers' identity is confirmed, it is likely to have grave implications for Afghanistan and the region.If they were sent by the Taliban, it would likely scupper hopes for an early negotiated settlement to the conflict. If, on the other hand, it was an ethnic or political faction, it portends a fragile political fabric and the worrisome whiff of civil war. And should they have been sent by the Haqqani network –– the notorious Taliban-affiliated militant network that operates along the Pakistani border –– the ripples would reverberate violently across the region.
The US is already fixated on the Haqqani network, which it blames for last week's brazen assault on the US embassy in Kabul and an earlier giant truck bomb that wounded 77 soldiers. Washington is applying pressure on Pakistan, which it says is supporting the Haqqani network as its proxy in the Afghan war. Pakistan, the accusations go, wants to influence the outcome of the conflict in order to minimise Indian influence, and sees the Haqqanis as a powerful covert tool.
Islamabad denies the accusations. Neverthless recent days have seen a flurry of unusually hard-hitting American statements on the matter. The military chief, Admiral Mike Mullen, defence secretary Leon Panetta, secretary of state Hillary Clinton and, unusually, the US ambassador to Islamabad, Cameron Munter, have all called on Islamabad to cut all ties with the Haqqanis. It remains to be seen if the Rabbani hit-job will now be added to the mix of accusations.
A senior western official told the Guardian that it was too early to say if the Haqqanis were involved. But if turns out to be true, he added, "then the world just shifted".
My colleague Julian Borger has posted his analysis of the Rabbani assassination on the Guardian's Global Security blog. The killing, he writes, is a blow to the peace process, not because of what Rabbani did, but because of what he stood for:
The HPC always seemed an unlikely vehicle for pursuing peace, not least in the choice of its chairman. Rabbani, a veteran Tajik warlord who was president before the Taliban, appeared to have been particularly hated by the insurgent leadership. The HPC had not played a role in the most important breakthrough so far, the direct contacts between American negotiators and a Mullah Omar confidante, Tayyab Agha.
But Rabbani represented a very significant constituency who were already nervous about the contacts, and wary of being sold out in any future peace talks. The old Northern Alliance will now have to be brought back on board, and everyone else involved in the peace process in the run up to the Afghan conference in Bonn in December, will have to work out a strategy for dealing with the many more spoiler attacks that are sure to follow.
Here's a very concise obituary of Rabbani courtesy of the BBC. He was, it notes, a key player during some of the most turbulent years in Afghanistan's history. It quotes Kabul correspondent David Loyn as describing Rabbani as a contentious figure "who was blamed for much of the death and destruction that followed the Soviet withdrawal".
He says the Taliban have wanted to see him dead for a long time.
News of the killing has made it to world leaders gathered in New York, where Hamid Karzai and Barack Obama are beginning talks on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Karzai, who is to fly home after the meeting with the US president, described the killing of Rabbani as a "martyrdom" and said he sacrificed his life for peace. Obama said the assassination, though tragic, would not deter the US or Afghanistan from working towards peace.
Meanwhile, the European Union's Special Representative and head of mission in Afghanistan, Vygaudas Ušackas has condemned the assassination. He said:
This is a tragic day for all of us. The Afghan people had fought hard to choose a just leader for the High Council of Peace, which he truly was. He was a fearless individual and representative of a majority of the Afghan people. This attack represents the intention of a handful of people that wish to undermine democracy and threaten the stability of the country. I call upon the perpetrators of this attack to express their opinions through peaceful means and renounce violence for the sake of the future of Afghanistan.
Declan Walsh, the Guardian's man in Islamabad, has been leafing through a profile of Hamid Karzai written by the New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson in June 2005 for insights into the long and difficult relationship between the current President and Rabbani. The piece recounts how Karzai briefly served as deputy foreign minister in Rabbani's transitional government in 1992. He didn't last long – once the country's civil war flared again, Karzai fled, and over the years there have been persistent rumours that he had been imprisoned or even tortured under Rabbani. Anderson asked the president to clarify what happened:
One day, when he [Karzai] was at the Foreign Ministry, one of Rabbani's men came and told him that the President wanted to see him. Karzai was suspicious, but he went along. The man drove Karzai to the office of the intelligence services and led him into a small, dirty room with a bare radiator. Muhammad Aref, who later served as the head of Karzai's own intelligence services, came in. ("I have never mentioned it to him," Karzai said.) Aref and the other man began to interrogate Karzai, asking about alliances against Rabbani. "I said, 'I know nothing of this.' They were very, very nervous, almost pale with nervousness! Just as they asked me the second question, a big bang was heard, and the room filled with smoke and debris from glass and all that, and everybody ran out, and I also ran out. I saw that the roof was not there. I saw that sunshine was coming in."
A rocket had hit the building. In the confusion that followed, Karzai made his way outside, and back to his office. "That's it. I came to the Foreign Ministry, and the people there were shocked—I was bleeding, I had some shrapnel."
Karzai hired a taxi and began a circuitous trip, by car and on foot, until he was safely in Pakistan. He said that Rabbani later telephoned him and his father to apologize, saying that he hadn't known about the interrogation beforehand. But Karzai did not go back. The people around the President, he realized, had succumbed to paranoia. The next time Karzai returned to Kabul, it was as Afghanistan's President.
Reaction to the hammer-blow of Rabbani's death is now starting to come in from all over the world. Unsurprisingly, the leadership of Pakistan has been among the first to pay tribute to the peace envoy who had been working closely with Islamabad. In a joint statement, Prime Minister Yusuf Reza Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari conveyed their "extreme anger and shock" at the killing:
The people of Pakistan stand by their Afghan brothers and sisters in this moment of grief...Rabbani was a friend of Pakistan with whom we were working closely within the Afghanistan-Pakistan Joint Commission for Reconciliation and Peace on a vision for peace and prosperity in Afghanistan.
On Sunday, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar for three-and-a-half hours of talks during which she pressed Islamabad to take action against Haqqani militants, whose leadership is based in Pakistan's tribal belt. After the meeting, a senior State Department official was quoted as saying the talks were focused on US suspicions that the network receives support from the Pakistani government.
Rabbani occupied a prominent position on the world stage for decades. These photographs- from 1980, 1988 and 2001- trace his career.
Jon Boone, in Kabul, said Rabbani was meeting two insurgents, in his role as head of the high peace council, when he was killed by a suicide bomb:
In a phone call from Kabul, Boone said:
There were two insurgents in there and it hasn't been confirmed whether one or both of those insurgents were responsible for the blast but from the witnesses, or bystanders, who were not too far from the building it's most likely that the blast came from within rather than outside the building.
He said suspicion is likely to fall on the Haqqani network, which is based in Pakistan.
They have been fingered for most of the recent serious attacks in Kabul. They are the ones the US government have consistently said are the closest to the Pakistani military. It is thought by most analysts that the Pakistanis want to have a high degree of control and influence over peace talks.
On the consequences for Afghan politics and the prospects of a peace deal, he says:
It potentially or almost certainly blows Hamid Karzai's entire peace agenda out of the water. Lots of analysts have argued that he [Karzai] isn't really sincere about peace, maybe by appointing Rabbani who actually is very controversial, not particularly liked by the insurgents [and] maybe wasn't particularly serious in the first place. Nonetheless this is what Karzai has invested in very heavily over the past 18 months.
[The] second issue is this man Rabbani was an extremely important figure amongst northern non-Pashtun, and in general, anti-Taliban Afghans. Now these people are crucial. Their buy-in is vital if there's ever going to be a successful peace deal. Now the insurgents, we don't know which particular group, have taken out one of their great leaders....so I think this is going to play havoc with Afghan politics.
The Guardian's Jon Boone has this latest update on this afternoon's dramatic events. The assassination of Rabbani has dealt a huge blow to hopes that the war in Afghanistan might end through a negotiated settlement, he writes:
Such an apparently deliberate attack on a still-embryonic peace process that has created tensions within Afghanistan and between its neighbours is likely to tip the country further into political crisis.
Hamid Karzai's office has said the President will fly back from the United Nationals General Assembly in New York soon.
A quick update from Jon Boone:
Outside the military hospital close to the scene of the attack,
Habibulllah, a distraught close friend of Rabbani, tells The Guardian that the former president was killed by a suicide bomber who concealed the explosives under his turban.
The Guardian's correspondent in Kabul, Jon Boone, has just called the phone of Masoom Stanekzai, the senior High Peace
Council official also wounded in today's attack. He writes:
The man who answered would not reveal his name, but said that although Stanekzai has a serious leg injury he was well enough to speak on the phone to Hamid Karzai, who is currently in New York. The man said he was certain that a suicide bomber was responsible, but it was not yet clear whether the culprit was one of the Taliban guests Rabbani had been holding talks with in his house.
The New York Times met and spoke with Rabbani in January 2002, shortly after Hamid Karzai became Afghanistan's interim president. Here's the result of the encounter, which gives an intriguing flavour of Rabbani's life as an elder statesman. In it, journalist Amy Waldman writes that the transfer of power to Karzai had been orderly, but awkward:
Mr. Rabbani had no formal post to retreat to and no portfolio to preside over. It seemed unclear exactly what he would do. All is now clear: he will continue to act much like Afghanistan's president.
He has a security entourage larger than former President Bill Clinton's. He lives in the presidential compound, in a large quasi-modernist house called Castle No. 1. His guards control the compound, and have sometimes seemed uninterested in ensuring that visitors also see Mr. Karzai.
And all day long, a stone's throw from the seat of the interim government, Mr. Rabbani receives visitors from all over the country coming to pay their respects, or seek advice or ask him to press their case with officials he appointed. With the transfer of power, Mr. Rabbani said in an interview at Castle No. 1 last night, he thought he would have fewer commitments than before. Instead he finds that he is busier than ever.
Reuters are reporting that a senior advisor to Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, was also caught up in the blast that killed Rabbani. A senior police source is quoted as saying:
Masoom Stanekzai is alive but badly wounded.
The head of Afghanistan's high peace council, former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, has been killed in Kabul, a senior police officer said.
His death is another blow to the security situation in Kabul, coming just a week after a 20-hour seige in Kabul's heavily diplomatic enclave. Rabbani lived in the so-called green zone.
It was Rabbani's task to try to to negotiate a political end to the war. However, the peace council had made little headway since it was formed a year ago.
He was president of the Afghan government that preceded the Taliban, having been leader of a powerful mujahideen party during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980. After he was driven from Kabul in 1996, he became the nominal head of the Northern Alliance, mostly minority Tajiks and Uzbeks, who swept to power in Kabul after the Taliban's fall. Rabbani is an ethnic Tajik.
"Rabbani has been martyred," Mohammed Zahir, head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Kabul Police, told Reuters. He had no further details.