Taliban attack crushes Afghan hopes

Not for the first time, official optimism on the future of Afghanistan came face-to-face with the remorseless nihilism of the Taliban suicide bomber yesterday (Sunday).

Even as the attacks began, Afghan officials and their American allies were congratulating themselves on the progress made in establishing order in the country.

A statement issued by the interior ministry yesterday morning praised the outcome of a mission over the previous three days to deter the annual "spring offensive" it knew would come.

Nearly 100 opposition fighters had been "taken out" in operations across the country, it said - 47 killed, 31 wounded and 21 captured. Quantities of arms had been seized.

It took less than two hours from the release of that statement for the reality of the "spring offensive" to overtake expectations, optimistic or otherwise.

The first indication of what was to come was a roadside bomb in Mahmud-i-Raqi, capital of the eastern province of Kapisa. With telling accuracy, it hit the second car of a police convoy - that containing the city's police chief, named as Jan Agha Faizi, killing him and three others.

The full assault, a combined attack on Kabul and three other major cities without parallel in the 11 years since the Nato invasion, began at about 1.30pm local time, when the sound of automatic gunfire and explosions rang out across the capital.

The initial target came as no surprise: the central and diplomatic triangle district of Wazir Akbar Khan, home to major embassies, including those of Britain and the US, the local United Nations headquarters, and a Nato base.

Insurgents stormed a half-finished tower block and made it their base for an aggressive operation which used rocket-propelled grenades and bombs to attack the symbols of Afghanistan's backing in the West.

Within minutes, smoke was rising from the German embassy, while the streets were raked with gunfire, causing passers-by to dive for cover.

A house used as a residence for British embassy officials was the next target, hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, though the Foreign Office later said all British diplomats "had been accounted for". Then, the US embassy and the Japanese embassy compound, which was hit by three rockets, came under fire.

Smoke billowed from the windows of the nearby newly opened Kabul Star hotel as it came under fire.

Camp Eggers, headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the Nato-led coalition army backing the Afghan government, came under rocket bombardment.

As the terror unfolded in Kabul's most prestigious district, about a mile to the south west, Afghan President Hamid Karzai had been holding a routine meeting to discuss the government budget with a group of MPs inside his presidential palace. Upon hearing the gunfire, his bodyguards put the palace into lockdown, moving him into what was described as a "secure area".

Ironically, among the meetings he had to cancel was one with a delegation from the Hezb-i-Islami, the militant insurgents led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of Afghanistan's most feared warlords, which is discussing peace terms with the government.

Twenty years ago, in a previous round of Afghanistan's long civil war, Hekmatyar's artillery pounded Kabul.

Meanwhile, security forces near the home of one of Karzai's two deputies, Mohammad Karim Khalili, managed to stop three would-be attackers who were heading there armed with suicide vests, guns and other explosives, a spokesman for the main intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), said. On the western side of town, rockets were fired at the Russian embassy and the parliament, prior to a full-blown assault.

In a development that gave some comfort to Karzai's western allies, parliament's guards, helped by some MPs who took to the rooftops with their own weaponry, managed to beat the attackers off, forcing them to take refuge in a building, where they came under sustained assault. "I shot up to 400 or 500 bullets from my Kalashnikov at the attackers," Mohammad Nahim Lalai Hamidzai, an MP for Kandahar, told reporters. "They fired two rocket-propelled grenades at the parliament."

Then on the Jalalabad Road, to the south-east, another ISAF base, Camp Warehouse, came under mortar attack.

By this time, the Taliban was already crowing about its responsibility for the onslaught. Zabiullah Mujahid sent a text message to reporters saying "a lot of suicide bombers" were involved.

While Kabul has come under sustained and multi-pronged attack before, most recently last September, yesterday the Taliban were able to launch raids on major targets elsewhere in the country.

In Pul-e-Alam, in Logar province, south of Kabul, suicide attacks and gun battles hit the provincial governor's office, the police headquarters, and a US military base.

In Jalalabad, a major city in the east, three suicide bombers were shot dead at the gates of the military airport, and two more at the nearby Nato base. Others managed to cause an explosion inside the base. In Gardez, south of Kabul, bombers hit a police training facility, while last night a number of suspected suicide bombers were being surrounded in a building near the university.

In the northern city of Kundoz, 15 suspected militants were arrested over an alleged plot to launch attacks.

By last night, fighting was continuing in parts of Kabul, with militants still occupying the half-built tower block that had served as a base.

"They're still resisting in two areas, one near parliament and the other close to the Kabul Star hotel," Kabul police chief Gen Ayoub Salangi told Reuters.

The attacks come just a month before a Nato summit at which the US and its allies are supposed to put finishing touches on plans for transition to Afghan security control.

Western leaders will now have to consider whether the withdrawal of all international forces can realistically go ahead in 2014, as currently planned, without leaving the country at the mercy of yesterday's attackers.