[ by Charles Cameron — two Taliban “peace” envoys who blow themselves up, and two bombs in two turbans ]
.

I didn’t catch this at the time, but there’s a curious echo of the most celebrated of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons…

in the killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the Afghan High Peace Council.

I picked up on this detail today because I was checking back on Rabbani’s killing in light of today’s assassination attempt on Asadullah Khalid, head of the Afghan National Directorate of Security by a “Taliban suicide bomber posing as a peace envoy” — the same MO used in the Rabbani assassination.

Taliban “peace envoys” intent on destroying their partners in negotiation — that’s one recurrent pattern here.

**

And the other…

Is it just that there are only so many pieces of clothing in which a bomb can be hidden, and a turban is one of them — or is there some deliberate irony at work here, taking the cartoon’s metaphorical bomb, making it real and pointing it back ?

Parallelisms are always worth a little extra consideration.