Diplomat Killed on Afghan Mission She Coveted

[rug]

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
Published: April 7, 2013

Family and friends said Anne Smedinghoff had chafed at the restrictions that American diplomats can face in Afghanistan, where the excitement and passion for foreign service are often dampened by lives circumscribed by blast walls and checkpoints and fortified compounds.

Ms. Smedinghoff joined the Foreign Service three years ago, straight out of Johns Hopkins University, and moved to Kabul in July. Being locked in the embassy compound, though it kept her largely safe from suicide bombers and rocket attacks, was not for her, her family and friends said. She longed to be out among Afghans, helping to ease the tumult of their lives.

On Saturday, Ms. Smedinghoff, 25, got her chance. She joined a delegation accompanying the governor of Zabul Province to inaugurate a new school in Qalat, the provincial capital. She was to help deliver donated books.

At 11 a.m., a suicide car bomber detonated explosives that ripped into the convoy, killing Ms. Smedinghoff and four other Americans — a civilian and three soldiers — in the deadliest day for Americans in Afghanistan this year. The names of the other four victims had not been released Sunday night.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/us/us-diplomat-killed-on-afghan-mission-she-coveted.html?_r=0

[no_hypocrisy]

1. To kill yourself and others as a perceived political act when in fact

you are nihilistic and destroying the hope of a better future for your country is sheer madness. What your goal is all people living in your society to be under the control of a religious minority at the expense of their lives, not yours.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

2. I am sorry

Anne paid the ultimate price. Is it not possible though, that she was a spy/intelligence agent and was found out? Somehow delivering books to a school in the same country where our drones operate seems incongruent...

[rug]

3. I suspect it will be a century before all the stories of this war are told.