Cheney OK After Afghan Suicide Bombing

KABUL, Afghanistan _ After getting a taste of the terrorism that threatens the Afghan government, Vice President Dick Cheney, attempting to give assurances that the United States will stand by Afghanistan, insisted that political leaders in the United States calling for a withdrawal of military forces from Iraq will leave countries in this part of the world vulnerable to dangerous “consequences.”

The vice president _ who became the most senior member of the Bush administration to spend the night in a war zone after poor weather delayed his trip into Kabul _ also came up against some of the violence that threatens the young government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. At least 23 people died and many more were wounded when a suicide bomber attacked the main gate of Bagram Air Force Base on the morning that Cheney awoke at the vast air base nestled in the mountains.

At the time of the attack, for which the Taliban claimed credit, the vice president was secure and well inside the base, far from the bombing that sent a plume of smoke rising beyond the flight line where his military cargo jet was parked preparing for takeoff for Kabul. As the base called a Code Red, Cheney was moved “for a brief moment” from the room where he was staying, he said, but was returned to his room after the situation “settled down.”

The broader meaning of the attack, Cheney said hours later, is that insurgents are pressing for ways to challenge the authority of the Karzai government. Talk of withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq only emboldens terrorists operating here and in Pakistan, where he had traveled the day before, he continued.

“I think they clearly try to find ways to question the authority of the central government,” Cheney said during a brief interview in a luxury-cabin mounted inside the cargo bay of the C-17 military transport, dubbed “The Spirit of Strom Thurmond,” that had carried him in to Pakistan and Afghanistan and out again.

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

Cheney said he heard “a loud boom” sitting in his room deep inside the sprawling base. The Secret Service moved him to a nearby bomb shelter, he said, but returned him to his room when “the situation settled down.” He already had been preparing to leave Bagram for Kabul that morning, but the pace of agents moving people to the vice president’s military transport picked up after the attack. The plane took off at 12:01 p.m. local time, landing in Kabul 18 minutes later.

Terrorists in the region are intent on testing the resolve of the U.S. in Iraq, the Bush administration maintains. And “the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world” is part of the reason that President Bush dispatched the vice president to Pakistan on Monday and Afghanistan on Tuesday, according to a senior administration official interviewed near the end of a trip that was supposed to be completed in one day but turned into a two-day affair because of weather in Afghanistan.

This official also suggested that news reports indicating that Cheney had been dispatched to “beat up” on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for the persisting terrorism that is based and planned inside Pakistan is “not so.” The idea that Cheney would “go in and threaten someone is not valid.”

The Afghan president was reportedly “upbeat” in his hourlong meeting with Cheney at the fortified presidential palace in Kabul, which the vice president reached in an armored motorcade that weaved through the cement-and-sandbag barriers erected in slalom fashion leading toward the palace.

Karzai told Cheney of a meeting that he had held with tribal leaders in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan where terrorists seek haven, according to this official, who quoted Karzai as saying over lunch with Cheney: “The only question they wanted to ask me was, `Is the United States with you?”`

On a weeklong trip around the world, Cheney has insisted that political leaders in the U.S. calling for withdrawal of forces from Iraq are playing into al-Qaida’s strategy to weaken the U.S. will to fight. “That would have devastating consequences,” the administration official said at the close of the vice president’s trip.

“The al-Qaida strategy is based on the notion that they can break the will of the American people,” the official said. The Afghan government is encouraged by additional money and troops that the Bush administration is committing, he said. “If they see weakness on the part of the U.S.,” he said, “they worry about our commitment.”

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(Mark Silva is traveling with the vice president.)

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(c) 2007, Chicago Tribune.

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Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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