Suicide Attack Bid On US Defence Secretary

The short version: On March 14, 2012, as U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's plane touched down at Camp Bastion in Helmand province, an Afghan contract worker drove a stolen pickup truck at high speed onto the airfield — crashing into a ditch, emerging in flames, and claiming to be wearing a suicide vest. Panetta was never in danger. The audacity of the attempt was the story.

What happened

The attacker, an Afghan employed as an interpreter on the base, sped across the runway just as Panetta's C-17 was landing. He crashed the truck into a ditch, jumped out engulfed in flames, and told the soldiers who subdued him that he had explosives strapped to his body. No bomb went off; he was detained. Panetta was still aboard the aircraft, well away from the scene.

The Taliban later claimed responsibility, framing it as an assassination attempt on the visiting American defense chief.

Why it mattered

The incident came at one of the lowest points of the Afghan war's insider-threat crisis. Just weeks earlier, the burning of Qurans at Bagram had triggered riots across the country, and "green-on-blue" attacks — Afghan soldiers and police turning their weapons on coalition troops — were climbing. The Camp Bastion attempt was not quite that: the attacker was a contractor, not a soldier. But it proved the same point — that the perimeter meant less than it was supposed to.

Panetta carried on with the visit, met Afghan leadership, and departed on schedule. The Pentagon publicly downplayed the danger to him personally. But the image of a flaming man on a runway as the defense secretary's plane landed said more about the state of the war than any briefing that day.

From the archive: this piece was originally published March 14, 2012, and has been rewritten for accuracy.