The New York Times’s Robert Mackey has footage of the attack aired by Pakistan’s Geo TV. You see a really big boom, right above a Pepsi billboard, and billowing mushroom clouds of smoke. It’s easy to believe that the Taliban penetrated the compound, which is surely why the video exists.

Contrast that with the December attack on a CIA headquarters in eastern Afghanistan that left at least seven CIA operatives and a Blackwater contractor dead, all at the hands of an al-Qaeda double agent. That was perhaps the single greatest loss of life in CIA history. (It also appears to have sparked a retaliatory up-tempo in drone strike operations.) But it wasn’t filmed, for the obvious reason that the attacker had no intention of making it out alive.

Khost was a big terrorist success. Peshawar was a negligible one, and perhaps now a wake-up call to the consulate and other diplomatic presences in Pakistan. But as a media event, all the Taliban may have been after is projecting strength, rather than demonstrating it.

Update, 11:03 a.m.: I should say that between this attack and another complex one elsewhere in Pakistan, the Taliban have killed at least 3 dozen Pakistani civilians and security forces today. I did not mean to imply that U.S. assets are the only “real” targets the Taliban seeks in Pakistan, only that as a U.S.-vs-extremists event, the attack on the consulate was in fact negligible.

[Northwest Frontier Province] Information Minister, Mian Iftikhar told DawnNews that the government ‘would continue to target militants,’ and that they would ‘win the war against the extremists.’ The Minister went on to say that the only way to win the war was to ‘target all terrorists… without which, no operation could be successful.’ Furthermore, to ‘take a backward step would be to empower the terrorists.’

Update: Patrick Barry insightfully notes that the State Department was planning on buying the Pearl and turning it into a “super-consulate” to gather intelligence and manage aid programs. That would likely explain the targeting decision, and contextualize it as “the most significant attempt by the insurgents in the post-Swat offensive period to drive a wedge between the Pakistani government and their U.S. backers,” Patrick writes.