A Couple Horrible South Asian Bombings You Should Know About

The looming Pakistani election (it'll start in a matter of hours) has provoked renewed violence, with 37 dead as a suicide bomber ran his car into a Pakistan People's Party (Bhutto's party) rally and blew himself up. This is part of the parallel conflicts in Pakistan; the Islamists hate the PPP, but the PPP's main rival is really Musharraf, who is desperate to hold on to power, even though we've deluded ourselves into thinking that Musharraf is going after the Islamists. It's extremely complicated.

Meanwhile, today saw the worst suicide bombing in Afghanistan since 2001:

A suicide bomber blew himself up in a large crowd gathered at a dogfighting festival just outside this city in southern Afghanistan, killing some 80 people and wounding nearly 100 more in the country’s worst single bombing since 2001.

According to witnesses and officials, the bomber killed a local police chief, Abdul Hakim Jan, a number of his guards and scores of villagers attending the event in the district of Argandab, just north of Kandahar city.

The governor of Kandahar, Asadullah Khaled, said the dead numbered 80 and the wounded over 90. A spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Kabul, Dr. Abdullah Fahim, said the Kandahar hospital had received 67 bodies. But some families had taken bodies straight home for burial from the scene of the blast, he said.

The Taliban is claiming that they didn't even do this, and the implications of that are staggering. Could there be other insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan with this kind of capacity.

Very sad.