The dust settles

So a day after the attacks ends this is what’s come out so far:

11 civilians dead, at least 3 of which were children. General John Allen, Commander of ISAF forces said in a press conference that over half of the civilians were children, but that still seems sketchy.

19 civilians were wounded. This seems to be from rockets landing over or short of the US Embassy. As I saw, rockets fell very close to ISAF’s perimeter. I don’t know how close they got to the US embassy.

6 ISAF soldiers were wounded outside ISAF bases somewhere in the city. That’s pretty much what I got verbatim from the ISAF spokesperson. That means, they’re probably special forces (I heard British special forces), who were involved helping Afghan SF clear the building.

5 Afghan National Police were killed trying to take the building.

There’s no more word on the other explosions around the city as yet.

I edited our footage all of Tuesday night. We weren’t allowed to leave our building, so I slept an hour on my desk before waking up after a dream about renewed fighting. It wasn’t a dream. At 5am, I grabbed a camera and went back on the roof. Jeff and I had morning tea and filmed black hawks helicopters hovering by the building as their gunners engaged the two remaining fighters inside, now occupying the 9th or 10th floor.

The fight went on until 10am, when they finally killed the last fighter. There were officially 7 fighters, 4 of them suicide bombers, who had come over from Pakistan. They’d brought nuts and energy drinks over from Pakistan. The journalists who visited the site, said the police took great pains to emphasise the providence of these snacks, although the attackers seem to be originally from provinces around Afghanistan.

At a press conference, there seemed to be an impasse of understanding between ISAF and journalists. NATO and ISAF look at the big picture: the attacks the Afghan forces have stopped recently (but we haven’t heard about) and the capability of the forces they see as a positive.

The journalists countered with individual stories of frightened Afghans in their homes cradling crying children as bombs shook their windows.

How can Afghans have any faith in a secure country when attackers can close down their city for 20 hours?

NATO, ISAF and now US Ambassador Ryan Crocker countered with viewpoints that said, basically, if that’s the best they could do, then, militarily speaking, it was a failure.

But the emotional and the military reaction are having trouble seeing eye to eye.

The streets are back to normal, having been eerily empty when I finally went home yesterday.