THE US vowed to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with Pakistan after an explosion in a crowded Peshawar market yesterday killed at least 100 people, many of them women and children, in the country’s worst Taliban-engineered atrocity in two years.
The suspected car bomb in Peshawar’s old city flattened shops and a mosque, scattered body parts and filled the streets with blood and burning rubble in a grim scene that one resident likened to “doomsday”.
It came hours after US secretary of state Hillary Clinton started a three-day visit aimed at repairing battered relations between the two countries.
“We commit to standing shoulder to shoulder with the Pakistani people,” she said.
The blast ripped through the Meena bazaar, a warren of cosmetics stalls, jewellery stores and clothes traders frequented by women in a male-dominated city.
Dozens of people were trapped by collapsed buildings, some sitting dazed under twisted metal as rescuers scrambled to help.
Men in white prayer caps ferried the dead and injured away on makeshift stretchers. Women scrambled to safety through smoke-filled alleyways. Businesses across the city closed.
By evening, the provincial government said at least 100 people had been killed and 147 injured, making it the bloodiest attack since the October 2007 bombing of a rally held by Benazir Bhutto in Karachi that killed about 140.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, as is common when many civilians die, but most suspicions fell on the Taliban.
For more than three weeks, extremists have rocked Pakistan with an unrelenting wave of attacks on targets including the army headquarters, an Islamic university and an airforce base, killing about 300 people.
“The war is spreading fear across the country. There is a feeling of uncertainty and insecurity,” said Zaffar Abbas, the Islamabad editor of Dawn newspaper.
The violence is a reaction to a sweeping 11-day-old army assault on the Taliban’s mountain stronghold in South Waziristan, at the southern end of the tribal belt.
Military spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas said 35 militants were killed in heavy fighting over the previous 24 hours. He said troops captured ammunition, destroyed training camps and were progressing along three lines of attack into the heart of the militant fortress. The information could not be confirmed, as South Waziristan is effectively cut off from the outside world.
In Islamabad, Mrs Clinton met Pakistani officials amid tight security. “This fight is not Pakistan’s alone. This is our struggle as well,” she told a press conference.
Standing beside her, Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi sounded a defiant note as he addressed the militants directly. “We will not buckle. We will fight you,” he said. “We will fight you because we want stability and peace in Pakistan.”
Mrs Clinton is on a mission to defuse rampant anti-Americanism that has caused many Pakistanis to see Washington as part of the problem and not the solution.
She promised to turn a “new page” in the testy relationship by broadening its focus beyond security issues. For years, Washington has goaded Islamabad into taking stiffer measures against Taliban and al-Qaeda militants inside its borders.
Mrs Clinton pledged $125 million (€85 million) for a project to reduce Pakistan’s chronic energy shortage on top of a $7.5 billion US aid package that US president Barack Obama recently signed into law. The aid deal was criticised by the Pakistani military, which said it infringed national sovereignty.
Even though the Taliban pose the most serious threat to Pakistan’s stability, some pundits blamed the “foreign hand” – shorthand for arch-rival India – for yesterday’s attack. “This is a situation that the enemies of Pakistan would also like to exploit. You cannot exclude the foreign hand,” said Masood Sharif Khattak, a former head of the country’s Intelligence Bureau spy agency.
Others saw it differently. “This was clearly designed to let Clinton know that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not cowed and very much still in this war,” said Adnan Rehmat of Internews, a media development organisation.
The war on the Taliban is also hobbled by public disillusionment with Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, whose approval ratings have plunged to about 30 per cent.
Mr Zardari, who is often accused of being too pro-American, met Mrs Clinton yesterday, but did not appear with her in public.