Bombs kill four Afghan intelligence staff

The Taliban took aim at Afghanistan’s intelligence services today, killing four people and injuring more than 30 in two separate attacks, including a suicide bombing on a bus in the capital, officials said.

The attacks follow a surprise visit to the capital, Kabul, yesterday by US Vice President Joe Biden, who praised advances made against the insurgency while noting that gains made were “fragile and reversible”.

Mr Biden left Afghanistan for neighbouring Pakistan this morning.

In Kabul, a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up next to a minibus carrying intelligence service employees to work early this morning, killing two and wounding 29, police and health authorities said.

About an hour later in the troubled eastern province of Kunar, a remote-controlled roadside bomb killed an intelligence service colonel and his driver, and wounded two bodyguards, said Abdul Saboor Allahyar, deputy chief of Kunar’s provincial police.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for both attacks.

Insurgents often target Afghan security officials, although over the past few months the capital has been largely spared the worst of the major attacks.

The powerful blast in Kabul struck on a busy road during the morning rush-hour, shattering the windows of dozens of houses. The suicide bomber’s body lay in the street near the wreckage of his motorbike as police and intelligence officials cordoned off the area.

Mohammad Zahir, the capital’s chief of criminal investigation, initially said both of the dead and six of the wounded were intelligence service employees who had been on the minibus. Later, he said only one of those killed worked for the intelligence service and that the other was a civilian.

Public Health Ministry spokesman Gulam Sakhi Kargar said a total of 29 people were injured.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the bombing, calling it “an act against humanity and against Islam”.

Nato also condemned the attack, saying it had killed two Afghans and wounded at least 32.

The Taliban has proven resilient in the face of the US-led military coalition’s nearly decade-long war. Although Nato poured more than 30,000 extra troops into the country last year to pressure the insurgents’ traditional strongholds in the south, the Taliban has boosted its operations elsewhere, launching attacks across the north and east.

An extra contingent of 1,400 US Marines are to be deployed in the coming months in the southern province of Helmand, which, along with neighbouring Kandahar, have seen some of the fiercest fighting.

Nato says its campaign so far has had a significant impact. Spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said “thousands of insurgent leaders have been killed or captured and several thousand fighters have been taken off the battlefield” in 2010.

She described the guerrilla war as an “industrial strength” insurgency, but disputed recent estimates from military and diplomatic officials at Nato headquarters which placed Taliban forces at up to 25,000 fighters.

She called such estimates “highly unreliable”, and said focusing on the numerical strength of the Taliban misrepresents gains made by alliance forces in the past year.

“There has never been a single reliable source for the size of the insurgency. Numbers referred to a year ago were certainly based on best guess estimates at that time,” she said, adding that estimates at the end of 2009 “were anywhere from 25,000 to 35,000”.

Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi said today that no official Afghan government figures were available, but he estimated the size of the Taliban was between 25,000 and 35,000 people.