Insurgent Activity Spikes in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Insurgent activity in Afghanistan has risen fourfold this year, and militants now launch more than 600 attacks a month, a rising wave of violence that has resulted in 3,700 deaths in 2006, a bleak new report released Sunday found.

On Monday, a provincal police chief said U.S. and Afghan forces have arrested a senior al-Qaida member in southeastern Afghanistan, a provincial police chief.

The troops detained six people _ four Afghans, an Arab and a Pakistani _ on Thursday in the city of Khost, said Mohammad Ayub, the provincial police chief. He said the detainees are under the custody of U.S. forces.

Pakistan's The News daily reported on Monday that one of the detainees was Abu Nasir al-Qahtani, one of four Arab al-Qaida operatives who escaped from the U.S. prison in Bagram in July 2005.

Meanwhile, in the volatile border area near Pakistan, more than 20 Taliban militants _ and possibly as many as 60 _ were killed during several days of clashes, officials said Sunday.

The new report said insurgents were launching more than 600 attacks a month as of the end of September, up from 300 a month at the end of March this year. The violence has killed more than 3,700 people this year, it said.

Afghanistan saw about 130 insurgent attacks a month last year, said the report by the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, a body of Afghan and international officials charged with overseeing the implementation of the Afghanistan Compact, a five-year reconstruction and development blueprint signed in February.

The violence "threatens to reverse some of the gains made in the recent past, with development activities being especially hard hit in several areas, resulting in partial or total withdrawal of international agencies in a number of the worst-affected provinces."

The report said that the rising drug trade in Afghanistan is fueling the insurgency in four volatile southern provinces. The slow pace of development is contributing to popular disaffection and ineffective implementation of the drug fight, it said.

Afghanistan's poppy crop, which is used to make heroin, increased by 59 percent in Afghanistan this past year.

Insurgents have launched a record number of roadside bombs and suicide attacks this year, and there have been clashes all year between insurgents and Afghan and NATO security forces, particularly in the southern and eastern provinces near the border with Pakistan.

The 3,700 deaths the report attributes to insurgent-related violence is comparable to the number of deaths _ about 3,500 _ tallied by The Associated Press this year based on reports from the U.S. military, NATO and Afghan officials.