Informed Speculation

Thank God he’s okay, but tragically, 23 are dead:

A suicide bomber attacked the entrance to the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, killing up to 23 people and wounding 20. Cheney was unhurt in the attack, which was claimed by the Taliban and was the closest that militants have come to a top U.S. official visiting Afghanistan. At least one U.S. soldier, an American contractor and a South Korean solder were among the dead, NATO said.

Cheney, who visited with President Hamid Karzai and then left the country two hours after the blast, said the attackers were trying “to find ways to question the authority of the central government.”

The vice president had spent the night at the sprawling Bagram Air Base, and it was about 10 a.m. when the explosion sent up a plume of smoke visible by reporters accompanying. U.S. military officials declared a “red alert.”

“I heard a loud boom,” Cheney told reporters. “The Secret Service came in and told me there had been an attack on the main gate.”

He said he was moved “for a brief period of time” to one of the base bomb shelters near his quarters. “As the situation settled down and they had a better sense of what was going on, I went back to my room,” Cheney added.

Asked if the Taliban were trying to send a message with the attack, Cheney said that fighters “clearly try to find ways to question the authority of the central government.”

“Striking at the Bagram (base) with a suicide bomber, I suppose, is one way to do that,” he said. “It shouldn’t affect our behavior.”

Maj. William Mitchell said it did not appear the explosion was intended as a threat to Cheney. “He wasn’t near the site of the explosion,” Mitchell said. “He was safely within the base at the time of the explosion.”

Hmm…not intended as a threat to Cheney? That’s not what this Reuters report suggests:

“We wanted to target … Cheney,” Taliban spokesman Mullah Hayat Khan told Reuters by phone from an undisclosed location.

Hmmm again…what was left out between ‘target’ and ‘Cheney’? An interest omission…

UPDATE 8:42 a.m.: More here. It appears that there’s a good chance the Taliban is making an opportunistic allegation, since the fact that the Vice President was staying over an extra night was not widely known:

Maj. William Mitchell said it did not appear the explosion was intended as a threat to the vice president.

“He wasn’t near the site of the explosion,” Mitchell said. “He was safely within the base at the time of the explosion.”

However, a purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said Cheney was the target of the attack.

“We knew that Dick Cheney would be staying inside the base,” Ahmadi told The Associated Press by telephone. “The attacker was trying to reach Cheney.”

Mitchell noted that Cheney’s overnight stay occurred only after a meeting with Karzai on Monday was canceled because of bad weather.

“I think it’s a far-fetched allegation,” he said, referring to the Taliban claim. “The vice president wasn’t even supposed to be here overnight, so this would have been a surprise to everybody.”