By Eltaf Najafizada and James Rupert - Apr 16, 2012 5:45 AM GMT+0700
Afghan police and troops battled Taliban guerrillas who attacked simultaneously at least six government or foreign centers in Kabul and three other provinces yesterday in their highest-profile assault this year.
Guerrillas seized three construction sites of multi-story buildings in the capital, using them as high ground from which to fire down on police and threaten government offices, foreign embassies and military camps. Police surrounded the attackers, killing at least 19, while at least 14 officers and 9 civilians were wounded, Siddiq Siddiqui, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said by phone.
A Norwegian soldier, left, aims his rifle toward the scene of attacks in Kabul on April 15, 2012. Photographer: Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images
Afghan National Army soldiers hold rocket-propelled grenade launchers as they keep watch near the scene of an attack in Kabul on Sunday, April 15, 2012. More than 10 explosions in all rocked the capital, and heavy gunfire shook the city for more than an hour after the initial blast. Photographer: Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images
An Afghan security officer runs to a building being used as a shelter by insurgents at the scene of an attack in Kabul on April 15, 2012. Photographer: Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images
Some of the battles, including one about a kilometer (0.6 mile) from the palace of President Hamid Karzai and the U.S. Embassy, continued late into Kabul’s evening, nine hours after the attacks began, police said. Gunfire and at least two explosions jolted the neighborhood, and Agence France-Presse cited an aide to Karzai as saying he had been moved to a safe shelter. Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi, did not answer calls seeking confirmation.
Following last year’s offensives by U.S. forces and the annual winter lull in Afghanistan’s war, “the Taliban are sending a message to the U.S. and its allies that they are still powerful,” said Waheed Mujda, a political analyst at the independent Kabul Center for Strategic Studies and a former Foreign Ministry official during the Taliban regime in the 1990s.
Pakistan Attacks
Also yesterday, Pakistani Taliban guerrillas, which include factions allied to the Afghan movement, attacked a government prison in Bannu, Pakistan, with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades. The assault freed more than 300 Islamic militant prisoners, GEO television and other Pakistani news channels reported. The information minister and prisons director for Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, as well as local officials in Bannu, did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
The day’s complex assault in Afghanistan “has just been a high-profile showing by the Taliban,” said U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF. “The good news in all of this is how well the Afghan national security forces have responded,” he said by e-mail.
While U.S. officials say expanded military operations last year by the reinforced American combat force have undercut the Taliban’s strength, analysts said recent data on guerrilla attacks suggest that their spring offensive, following the annual winter lull in fighting, is undiminished this year.
‘Little Lasting Effect’
“The data show that the U.S. military surge in 2011 succeeded in reducing the number of security incidents per month, but had little lasting effect,” John McCreary, a retired U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, wrote in an April 11 newsletter for Washington-based Kforce Government Solutions. “The south and east remain the areas under greatest stress, with the Taliban instigating more than half of the combat actions.”
The top U.S. and ISAF commander in Afghanistan, Marine General John Allen, told the House Armed Service Committee March 20 that, “as a result of our recent winter operations, we have seriously degraded the Taliban’s ability to mount a major spring offensive.”
“We know that the Taliban remain a resilient and determined enemy and that many of them will try to regain their lost ground this spring through assassination, intimidation, high profile attacks and the emplacement of IEDs,” or bombs, Allen said.
Afghan Government Forces
“No one is underestimating the severity” of the attacks, Allen said in a statement yesterday. “But the very fact that they chose these types of targets speaks volumes about where we are in this campaign,” Allen said.
Afghan forces had led the response to the Taliban assault, he said.
Afghan forces “were on the scene immediately, well-led and well-coordinated,” Allen said. “They integrated their efforts, helped protect their fellow citizens and largely kept the insurgents contained. I consider it a testament to their skill and of far they’ve come, that they haven’t yet asked” for ISAF support, he said.
Allen’s spokesman Navy Captain John Kirby said ISAF believes more than 20 insurgents attacked Kabul and that the Afghan National Police have detained at least three suspects, including one planner.
Kirby said it was difficult at this time to estimate the number killed “‘but we know they did suffer casualties.’’
Haqqani Faction
Yesterday’s attacks took place in Kabul and the nearby provincial capitals of Jalalabad, to the east, and Pul-e-Alam and Gardez, to the southeast. Those are areas where the Taliban’s Haqqani faction, based partly in Pakistan, is the primary Taliban fighting force.
The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, said in an interview with CNN’s ‘‘State of the Union” program that he believed yesterday’s assaults were conducted by the group, led by the family of an aged Afghan militant, Jalaluddin Haqqani.
Afghan intelligence officers intercepted three Haqqani faction militants carrying guns and two suicide bombs as they entered Kabul to attack the home of one of Karzai’s two vice- presidents, Mohammad Karim Khalili, said Lutfullah Mashal, spokesman of the Afghanistan National Security Directorate.
In Pul-e-Alam, the center of Logar province, Taliban with heavy weapons targeted the governor’s office and the Afghan intelligence agency office, said Din Mohammad Darwish, the provincial government spokesman. “The governor and all the government workers are stuck inside” their offices, he said by phone.
U.S. Embassy Lockdown
In Jalalabad, “a suicide bomber blew himself up at the gate of the Americans’ PRT,” or Provincial Reconstruction Team base, said Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, the local government spokesman. “Other Taliban tried to enter but were shot dead by Afghan police and American forces,” he said by phone.
A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahed, said in an e- mailed statement that the attackers had targeted the nation’s parliament, police and other government agencies, the German and British embassies and ISAF.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul went into a “lockdown, following our standard operating procedures after hearing explosions and gunfire in the area,” Gavin Sundwall, an embassy spokesman, said in a statement in Kabul. All its personnel were safe, he said.
Afghan Security Forces have things “pretty much under control,” Crocker told CNN. “We are hearing from the Afghans they have been successful in killing and capturing the terrorists while taking relatively few casualties of their own.”
Crocker said the attacks don’t buttress an argument for the U.S. to accelerate the planned withdrawal of its main combat forces, now set for 2014. While the Afghan forces’ response yesterday was “a clear sign of progress,” the attacks also showed “a very dangerous enemy with capabilities,” Crocker said. An early withdrawal would “invite the Taliban and Haqqani” network “back in and set the stage for another 9-11,” he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Eltaf Najafizada in Kabul at enajafizada1@bloomberg.net; James Rupert in New Delhi at jrupert3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net
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