Real, Actual People That I Have Met Being Killed By Terrorism

The Taliban launched an attack at the Serena hotel in Kabul a few hours ago. The Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre was staying at the hotel and attending a meeting at the time. He was one floor below the suicide bomber, but was not injured. A Norwegian reporter from the Dagbladet newspaper was killed by gunfire. I've seen both of these men in real life. Støre just two months ago.

Foreign policy as we experience it is mostly just ink on a page or pixels on a screen, but suddenly it zooms up very very close. The accelerating speed at which the world can go from being very far away to killing someone standing next to you seems to be rapidly becoming how we think, hohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifw we have to think, of globalisation. Even in this, the most shielded and padded corner of the world. But there is something hypocritical about this, isn't there? About how important it suddenly gets when it's people we've vaguely seen in the middle distance sometime?

The UN Secretary General is saying Støre was the target, and this shows that we must strengthen security. The Taliban are saying they didn't even know Støre was in the building, they were just gunning for NATO personell in general, but oh by the way would we mind terribly pulling our troops out of Afghanistan?

Update: Daily Kos has a post, too with more info in English on Norwegian Afghanistan policy and some background on the hotel.

Yup. That's us.

Well, well, well. This morning Norway is about to be criticised by the UN Commision on Torture for handing over prisoners to the Afghan government. In Afghan prisons, there are numerous reports of prisoners being beaten with cables or bricks and having their nails pulled out, among other things. A week or two ago, a Foreign Affairs Dept. memo leaked in which a recent Amnesty International report on torture in Afghanistan was criticised as being "too political" and not balanced. Of course, this also happened back during the "Boomerang cases", where police officers in Bergen had been systematically abusing prisoners for years and years. Amnesty International really and truly got the shaft from the Norwegian media and police.

Jonas Gahr Støre, the Norwegian foreign minister, despite being an intelligent man, went on NRK this morning saying that basically "well, I mean, the Afghans tell us that everything is allright, so we trust them. We are, after all, there for their sake." On the one hand, he is saying that the Afghans are in control of their prisons and institutions so torture obviously isn't happening. On the other hand he is saying that we just got a deal in place so that we can check on them. Sigh.

We've known this was coming for a while. I'm ashamed.