Almost 2 years after the U.S. troops rolled in, security is a dream in Afghanistan

KABUL, August 20 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – After one of the bloodiest weeks in Afghanistan sine the U.S.-led campaign against the former Taliban regime, UN operations in the troubled country, where humanitarian workers are under attack from anti-government forces, were likely to see security bolstered after the bombing of the UN's Baghdad headquarters, according to a UN official Wednesday, August 20.

Security is already stringent for everyone party in Afghanistan, especially the UN staff, where an intensified guerrilla campaign by suspected Taliban fighters and factional fighting have claimed around 100 lives in the past week.

"I doubt (the Baghdad attack) will have an impact operationally but it will on security," Shinohara of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

She described UN missions in Afghanistan as a "soft target" for what she termed as “terror attacks”.

"It could happen anywhere, although our missions are very different between here and Iraq. We have a much more solid base and are more established. But we're still a very soft target here."

A recent surge in violence in Afghanistan against local and Western aid workers, government and military targets has forced aid organizations to reduce road missions and even suspend work in several areas.

The UN has suspended road missions across much of southern Afghanistan because of attacks in which aid workers were beaten up and an Afghan working for the U.S. aid agency Mercy Corps was killed.

The UNHCR earlier this month suspended work in northeastern Kunar province after a rocket landed near its office, without injuring anyone.

Violence Unabated

The site of last week’s bus bomb blast

However, Kabul University political analyst Nasrullah Stanikzai was quoted by AFP as saying, the increased violence did not pose a threat to President Hamid Karzai's government.

"Recent attacks...are not part of an organized war but they are like a guerrilla war by smaller groups of fundamentalists and some specific groups who were in power in the past," he said.

"It is not a great worry but it proves that there are still groups who can create problems and the attacks happen in places or from places where they had started their movements," he said in reference to attacks in the Taliban's former southern Afghan stronghold.

A rocket attack on the home of a soldier Sunday blamed on Taliban militants killed two people. An investigation Monday ended in an ambush that left nine Afghan police dead as they probed the cause of the attack in Logar province, 100 kilometers (62 miles) southwest of Kabul.

Provincial military commander Fazlullah Mujadadi blamed both attacks on guerrillas of the ousted regime that was forced - late 2001 by a U.S.-led campaign- to quit.

"Their car was ambushed by Taliban ... the security commander and his eight other police officers were killed," he said.

The soldier was also targeted by the Taliban, Mujadadi said, because he worked for the government.

The latest upsurge in violence has claimed the lives of rebels, police, soldiers and aid workers.

The worst day of bloodshed in months came Wednesday last week, when some 60 people were reported killed in a bus bombing, military clashes with militants and between rival militias in southern and southeastern Afghanistan.

Pitched battles at the weekend between Afghan forces and allegedly hundreds of heavily armed militants in the southeastern border province of Paktika left dead 15 suspected Taliban and 10 Afghan soldiers.

Paktika governor Mohammad Ali Jalali Tuesday criticized the central government for not sending additional military support.

Jalali said in an interview with Kabul TV that he did not have enough police and soldiers to ensure security in his province.

Afghan officials claimed the fighters had crossed the border from Pakistan.

The intensified violence comes on the heels of NATO's takeover of a 5,300-strong international peacekeeping force in the war-ravaged country. The alliance, on its first mission outside Europe in its 54-year history, has so far resisted calls to deploy beyond the UN-mandated force's confines of Kabul.

Another 12,500 U.S.-led foreign troops are hunting al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants mainly in the south and southeast.