On the recordMay 19, 2010
On Tuesday, a suicide bomber deliberately crashed his minivan on a street in Kabul during one of the busiest times of the day. According to The New York Times account, and I quote them, ``The blast blew bodies apart. Limbs and entrails flew hundreds of feet, littering yards and walls and streets. In a passenger bus, an Afghan woman lay dead in her seat, cut in half, with her baby still squirming in her arms. Fifty yards away, a man's head lay on the hood of a truck.'' It was the most devastating strike seen in the Afghan capital in some time, Madam Speaker. It served as a kind of ``welcome home'' from the insurgents to President Karzai, just returning home from his visit to the United States, who was getting ready to brief reporters at the Presidential palace, just a short distance away from the site of the explosion. Aside from the gruesome civilian casualties, this attack is also significant because it claimed the lives of five of our soldiers, which brings the total number of U.S. troop fatalities in the war in Afghanistan to over 1,000. This tragic milestone should fill us with horror, Madam Speaker. It should keep every one of us awake at night. For years, the failure to make progress in Afghanistan flew under the radar as the war in Iraq grabbed most of the attention and headlines. But more than 100 months into the Afghanistan conflict, the mission is clearly floundering. More than half of those 1,000 deaths have occurred just since September of 2008.
