By Robert Mackey

As a colleague here at The Times points out, the Pearl Continental hotel in Peshawar, Pakistan, which was partly destroyed on Tuesday by a massive car bomb, is well known locally as a meeting point for not just wealthy Pakistanis, foreign aid workers and journalists but also intelligence agents. In other words, it is the sort of place a modern-day Graham Greene novel might be set, with security so tight that even the lifeguards at the hotel pool are armed with AK-47s.
Given that reputation, the hotel was an obvious target for militants — even before a report surfaced two weeks ago that the United States was planning to buy the hotel as part of a plan to greatly expand its diplomatic presence in the city. As the Press Trust of India reported on Tuesday, the Pearl Continental is currently owned by Sadruddin Hashwani, who also owns the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which was bombed last September, resulting in more than 50 deaths.
According to a report by Saeed Shah and Warren P. Strobel of McClatchy Newspapers, the hotel was apparently at the center of an American plan to establish a long-term presence in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province:
A senior State Department official confirmed that the U.S. plan for the consulate in Peshawar involves the purchase of the luxury Pearl Continental hotel. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. [...]
Peshawar is an important station for gathering intelligence on the tribal area that surrounds the city on three sides and is a base for al Qaida and the Taliban. The area also will be a focus for expanded U.S. aid programs, and the American mission in Peshawar has already expanded from three U.S. diplomats to several dozen.
In October 2001, a report in Time magazine described how the Pearl Continental fit into the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere of Peshawar, the city “where the terrorists meet, form cells and deploy — and where access to the closed world of the Taliban begins. Bin Laden’s foot soldiers regularly slip through the walled enclaves and jostling bazaars to recruit jihadis or send out instructions. Taliban fighters float through to spy and resupply. Every Afghan faction has its representative in some dim house. Intelligence agents linger in the lobby of the Pearl Continental Hotel, where the phones are tapped and drivers let fall scraps of information.”
As with the attack on the headquarters of the Pakistani intelligence service in Lahore on May 27, the bombing on Tuesday seems to have taken place at a site that militants knew to be central to the operations of the intelligence agencies fighting to defeat them.