Vice President Cheney is okay after a terrorist bomb exploded at the entrance to Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan on Tuesday, during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney.
The Taliban claimed responsibility and said Cheney was the target of the blast which killed 14 people and wounded about a dozen more outside the base.
A purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said Cheney was the target of the attack, which Ahmadi said was carried out by an Afghan called Mullah Abdul Rahim from Logar province.
"We knew that Dick Cheney would be staying inside the base," Ahmadi told AP telephone from an undisclosed location. "The attacker was trying to reach Cheney."
Fortunately, we can write this off as another failed Taliban attack. The attacker didn't make it past the first of three gated checkpoints vehicles must pass through before gaining access to the sprawling airbase. Cheney "was safely within the base at the time of the explosion," not near the site of the explosion.
The Taliban's targeting of the Vice President is more evidence that Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf should heed the warning Cheney delivered to Pakistan to act against al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists. According to the New York Times, the Pakistani government responded to the warning in a series of statements insisting that “Pakistan does not accept dictation from any side or any source.”
Apparently, President Musharraf has forgotten what he said in his "60 Minutes" interview last September. How does he think the United States would react to having its vice president killed in a terrorist attack?
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