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Afghans Confront Surge in Violence
Afghan police officer Ghulam Raza, 26, frisks guests before they are allowed to enter a wedding at the Sham-e-Paris restaurant in Kabul, the capital. Such security practices were unknown in Afghanistan until recent months.
(By Griff Witte -- The Washington Post)
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Eight civilians and a German soldier were killed when two cars -- one coming minutes after the other -- plowed into crowds in Kabul. Soldiers thwarted a suspected third attack when they shot and killed the driver of a car speeding toward the scene.
An Indian truck driver was taken hostage while working on a road reconstruction project in Nimruz province in southern Afghanistan. The Taliban later asserted it had killed him when a deadline passed for the worker's company to agree to abandon its operations in Afghanistan. Villagers found his nearly decapitated body the following day.
Two U.S. soldiers were killed by separate roadside bombs, bringing the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan this year close to 90 -- double the total in 2004. A Portuguese soldier and a Swedish soldier were also killed in bombings.
Insurgents burned down a police headquarters in eastern Afghanistan and took five Afghan officers hostage. Dozens more Afghans across the country were killed by bombs planted in homes, or in suicide attacks and ambushes.
The level of violence in Afghanistan is still nowhere near that in Iraq. The insurgency here is generally considered to have far less public support and to be less capable of pulling off attacks that cause mass casualties. Reconstruction projects are ongoing in most parts of the country, and Westerners can move freely in many areas with little fear of violence.
"Compared to Iraq, where the suicide bomber is such a cheap commodity they could throw them at almost any target, that's not where we are here," said U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann, noting that the bombers have been a mix of Afghans and foreigners.
Neumann said he did not believe the stepped-up attacks were a sign of widening Taliban support, but rather represented "a change in tactics and in targets, which makes the violence more evident."
But the increased violence has added another obstacle to the country's reconstruction effort, still struggling nearly four years after the overthrow of Taliban rule and the conference of international officials and Afghan leaders in Bonn that charted Afghanistan's democratization process.
"We've seen a deterioration in the security situation. And that's something that all of us who work here are worried about," said Adrian Edwards, the Kabul-based U.N. spokesman. "I don't think any of us [at Bonn] would have expected that this kind of security environment is something we would be faced with four years down the road," he said.
