Unto this world to be greeted by the militant. This succinctly sums up the latest tragedy of Afghanistan. What will they know of the extremist upsurge who only the love of the mother know? Tuesday’s outrage in a maternity clinic in Kabul was almost incredibly hideous in its perpetration.

Among the 16 killed were newborns; the parallel outrage in which a suicide bomber killed 24 people at a funeral can be considered to be part of the furniture in Afghanistan, and incidentally on a morning of double tragedy. Both the newborns in one part of Kabul and those who had turned up to say the final goodbye at another were targets of mindless militant fury.

As the attackers rampaged their way through the wards, the chilling visuals panned on soldiers racing out of the hospital carrying infants wrapped in bloodstained blankets to waiting ambulances. The incident has underlined yet again the atrophy of successive political dispensations, this time after an infructuous deal between the United States and the Taliban in Doha.

President Ashraf Ghani, whose government was excluded from the talks, is reported to have ordered a resumption of a full offensive against the Taliban and other militant groups, ending a period of reduced military activity ahead of US-brokered peace talks that had been expected to start this year.

Neither the Taliban nor the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have claimed responsibility for the calculated malevolence that has targeted newborns and their mothers in the holy month of Ramzan. The tragedy has few parallels, if at all, in the history of conflicts.

On the very first day of their lives, the very first sound the infants heard was that of gunfire. The infants and their mothers have been targeted in a war in which they had no part. The query of Shaharzad Akbar, the chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, was as sharp as it was pertinent ~ “Will their lives, like ours, continue to be shaped by war?”

The time to probe the pregnant symbolism is not quite yet. The attack targeting the most vulnerable of civilians, including children just hours old and exhausted new mothers, caused a wave of horror and revulsion in a tormented land. More accurately perhaps, horror and revulsion have been integral to Afghanistan’s narrative.

Yet the latest variant has been cruelly extraordinary. The raison d’etre ~ specifically to end this senseless violence ~ has been defeated yet again. “This is not peace, nor its beginnings,” was the immediate response of Hamdullah Mobib, President Ghani’s national security adviser. We do not know if this marks the retreat of authority. But the ruling class would appear to have played on the backfoot. Peace has eluded the country as the plot thickens.