[An Nahar] A roadside kaboom killed eight civilians in Helmand...an Afghan province populated mostly by Pashtuns, adjacent to Injun country in Pak Balochistan...
on Wednesday as U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
...current SecDef, previously Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Panetta served as President Bill Clinton's White House Chief of Staff from 1994 to 1997 and was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1993....
was visiting troops in a military camp in the southern Afghan province.
"A roadside mine planted by the Taliban blasted in Marja district when a minivan touched it, triggering a big kaboom. As a result eight non-combatants were killed," provincial front man Daud Ahmedi told Agence La Belle France Presse.
The blast happened about a 15-minute helicopter flight from Camp Bastion, where Panetta landed Wednesday for talks with local government officials before a planned meeting with President Hamid
Maybe I'll join the TalibanKarzai
... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a
Pashtunface on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use...
His trip comes at a fraught moment in the Afghan war after a shooting rampage by a US soldier killed 16 villagers in neighboring Kandahar province, raising fears of an anti-American backlash.
A cycle of violence kaboom in Kandahar city shortly before the Helmand attack killed at least one Afghan security officer and maimed two others.
On Tuesday, suspected Taliban snuffies opened fire on an Afghan government delegation attending a memorial service for the murdered civilians in Panjwai district in Kandahar province, where the shooting took place.
The hail of gunfire left one member of the Afghan cops dead and one policeman maimed.