At the Wall Street Journal, "A Taliban Massacre Jolts Heart of Kabul: Attack Fuels Fears of Widespread Bloodshed Ahead of Election":
KABUL—The four men sat down for dinner, ordered juice and then excused themselves to the bathroom. There, they extracted tiny pistols from the soles of their shoes, and, after returning to the restaurant of Kabul's most luxurious hotel, started shooting patrons point-blank.
The first target was the Afghan family of Sardar Ahmad, a 40-year-old Afghan journalist with Agence France-Presse, the government said. The gunmen shot dead Mr. Ahmad, his wife, his 5-year-old daughter Nilofar and 3-year-old son Omar. His youngest son Abuzar, not even two, is in coma with bullets in his head.
Then, the gunmen shot other prominent Afghans and foreign officials who had gathered on Thursday night for a festive dinner at the Serena Hotel here. Soon after, at least nine guests—including a U.S. citizen, two Canadians and a Paraguayan election observer—and the four attackers were dead and several injured. Even by the grim standards of the Afghan war, the Serena bloodbath was shocking.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the killings, saying that such attacks "are carried out for the purposes of the outsiders and unfortunately, the victims are innocent civilians, children and women."
The Taliban, which claimed responsibility for Thursday's attack, have carried out a series of assaults in recent days aimed at disrupting the presidential elections on April 5 to pick a successor to Mr. Karzai.
A successful election—combined with the planned departure of foreign forces—would mark the first democratic transfer of power in Afghanistan's history.
That would undercut the Taliban's appeal, rooted in resentment against foreign presence and the widespread corruption of Mr. Karzai's administration. This explains the Taliban's attempts to derail the vote and undermine its legitimacy.
The Taliban's tactic is certain to reduce the international role in vote monitoring. The National Democratic Institute, a Washington nonprofit that planned to observe the vote, ordered its personnel out of the country Friday after one of its members was killed in the Thursday attack.
As some of the leading candidates voice fears that Mr. Karzai's favorite will win the presidency by fraud, the presence of foreign election observers is needed to legitimize any result. In contrast, their departure as a result of the Serena attack would make any dispute over the outcome much more difficult to adjudicate. Such a dispute could fracture the country's political and military establishment to benefit of the Taliban, who hope to retake political power..
Mr. Karzai isn't allowed to run for president again under the Afghan constitution. The leading candidates in the race—former Foreign Ministers Abdullah Abdullah and Zalmai Rassoul, and former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani — have been crisscrossing the country this week, holding campaign rallies despite Taliban threats....
Posing as diners and hiding six tiny palm-sized pistols in the soles of their bulky shoes, the four gunmen managed to get past the metal detector at the entrance to the hotel, Afghan interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said.
Mr. Sediqqi said the government was investigating whether the attackers had some inside help at the hotel. Serena manages its own security force.
Waiters at the hotel said the men then took a table at the buffet-style restaurant, where guests had gathered to celebrate the Persian New Year, known as Nowruz.
With many other eateries in the city off-bounds to foreigners after the January attack that killed 21 at a Lebanese restaurant in Kabul, the supposedly safe Serena was one of the few locations where international diplomats, aid workers, United Nations officials and prominent Afghans still gathered regularly.
On Thursday night, four parliament members were dining there. As the gunmen shot and injured one of the lawmakers, the others tried to fight back by throwing glasses at the Taliban, Mr. Sediqqi said.
The wife of Mr. Ahmad, the slain journalist, yelled at the gunmen, telling them "Shoot me, not my children," said waiters at the hotel. Pictures of the attack's aftermath showed her lying on the ground, trying to protect the children with her hand...
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