Taliban Resurgent
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – Intelligence reports indicated that the Taliban had the ability to carry out suicide attacks near the main American base in Afghanistan even before a bloody bombing during a visit by Vice President Cheney, NATO said Wednesday.
Colonel Tom Collins, the top spokesman for NATO’s force in Afghanistan, said suicide bomb cells were present in the capital, Kabul, just 30 miles south of Bagram Air Base. Tuesday’s bombing killed 23 people, including two Americans, outside Bagram while Mr. Cheney was meeting with officials inside. The Taliban claimed the attack was aimed at Mr. Cheney, but officials said it posed no real threat to the vice president.
The attacker never tried to penetrate even the first of several U.S.-manned security checkpoints at Bagram, instead detonating his explosives among a group of Afghan workers outside the base.
“The Taliban’s claims that they were going after the vice president were absurd,” Colonel Collins said.
Colonel Collins said it was unclear whether the Taliban had really known of Mr. Cheney’s visit, or if the timing of the attack was a coincidence. The last suicide bombing at Bagram was in June 2006, when an attack aimed at an American convoy wounded two Afghans near a market area outside the base.
American Ambassador Ronald Neumann said he did not believe the Taliban had responded to Mr. Cheney’s presence, given that he arrived on Monday and only stayed the night because bad weather forced him to postpone a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“I just have not seen the ability to react that quickly, to grab your handy-dandy latest suicide candidate, who is usually not your brightest fellow around, and get him mobilized and get him up to the gate,” Mr. Neumann said. “It strains credulity for me.”
He said Mr. Cheney “could have been in New York for all the threat” the bomb posed.
Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry said a preliminary investigation suggested the bomber was a foreigner. But Lieutenant David Accetta, an American military spokesman, said the best that investigators could determine was that the bomber was of “Middle Eastern descent,” meaning he could have been from Afghanistan, Pakistan or other neighboring countries.
___
Associated Press reporter Fisnik Abrashi contributed to this report.
