Afghan strikes kill 8 U.S. troops

KABUL, Afghanistan — American forces suffered a deadly 24 hours in Afghanistan, with eight servicemen killed in attacks including a Taliban raid on a police compound in the key southern city of Kandahar, officials said Wednesday.

The U.S. and its coalition allies have warned that violence and troop casualties are likely to mount this summer as thousands of new forces fan out across southern insurgent strongholds in a bid to turn around the nearly 9-year-old war.

However, a top U.S. commander in the south said Wednesday that the new operation should start reducing violence in coming months.

So far in July, 45 coalition servicemen, 33 of them Americans, have died in Afghanistan, continuing the upward trend of the previous month, which was the war’s deadliest for the NATO-led force, with 103international troops killed.

A suicide attacker slammed a car bomb into the gate of the headquarters of the elite Afghan National Civil Order Police late Tuesday night in Kandahar, the international force said. Minutes later, insurgents opened fire with machine guns and rocket propelled grenades.

Three U.S. servicemen, an Afghan policeman and five civilians - three interpreters and two security guards - died in the attack, but NATO said the insurgents failed to enter the compound.

The Kandahar provincial police chief, Mohammad Zazai, gave a slightly different account. He said two suicide bombers attacked on foot - the first blasting a wall and the second detonating his explosives inside, causing the casualties.

“The Taliban’s aim is just destruction and to cause casualties,” he said.

Four more American servicemen were killed elsewhere in the south Wednesday by a roadside bomb, while one more U.S. serviceman died the same day of wounds from a gunbattle, also in the south. NATO gave no further details of those attacks.

The special Civil Order Police had only recently sent 600 more officers to Kandahar to set up checkpoints along with international forces to try to secure the south’s largest city, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi telephoned reporters Wednesday to claim responsibility for the Kandahar attack.

The insurgents, who are prone to exaggerate death tolls of their enemies, claimed 13 international servicemen died in the raid.

Also in Kandahar, a progovernment cleric and member of a local people’s council was gunned down in a mosque Wednesday. Haji Khalifa, a member of the Pajawai district shura, or council, was shot dead as he prayed, said provincial shura member Agha Haji Lalai.

He said assassinations have increased in Kandahar as insurgents make the point that they can still operate despite the extra security.

NATO and Afghan troops are stepping up patrols around Kandahar province to pressure insurgents in rural areas. The strategy is to improve security with more and better-trained police and troops so that effective government control can be established and development projects can move forward and win the loyalty of ordinary Afghans.

The Taliban have responded by ratcheting up suicide attacks and bombings.

Army Brig. Gen. Ben Hodges, a top U.S. commander in southern Afghanistan, said Wednesday that the new Kandahar operation is still in its early stages and security will begin to improve in coming months as additional American and Afghan forces move into violent areas.

“It’s a rising tide,” he said. “And that tide is starting to come in now. We’re going to start feeling those positive effects here as July turns into August.”

In the contested district of Zhari, where the government has far less control than in Kandahar city, Hodges said the timing of the beginning of combat operations will depend on when the Afghans are ready to take the lead in governing. American military forces could clear these areas quickly and decisively, he said, but doing so without establishing local governance and permanent security forces would have negative consequences.

“All that would accomplish is a lot of casualties, ours as well as Afghans,” he said, “and we would create even more insurgents because we’d be leaving.”

Experience in neighboring Helmand province has proved how difficult it can be to establish an effective government presence after clearing a militant stronghold.

Officials on Wednesday confirmed that the government representative in the troubled southern district of Marjah had been replaced, barely six months after a major NATO military offensive to retake the area from the Taliban.

Provincial spokesman Daoud Ahmadi said Abdul Zahir has been replaced as district chief as part of a “reform procedure.” He would not say whether Zahir was removed because of continued instability in Marjah. The southern farming town - much like the current Kandahar push - was intended to be a showcase of good Afghan governance after combined Afghan and international forces expelled the Taliban, but authorities have struggled to consolidate their control.

Hodges, the American commander, said Zahir was ousted for refusing to take a qualification test required under Afghan law. He said he did not have details but suspected the test requirement was waived when Zahir was first recruited as district chief.

Meanwhile, the Afghan government Wednesday approved a program to establish local defense forces that U.S. military officials hope will help remote areas of the country thwart attacks by Taliban insurgents.

Few details are known of the plan, but Americans had been promoting the force as a crucial stopgap to combat rising violence and frustration with the slow pace of training permanent professional security forces.

Many parts of Afghanistan have no soldiers or police officers.

Over 12 days of talks, Gen.

David Petraeus, the new NATO commander, overcame the objections of President Hamid Karzai, who had worried that the forces could harden into militias that his weak government could not control. In the end, the two sides agreed that the forces would be under the supervision of the Afghan Interior Ministry, which will also be their paymaster.

“They would not be militias,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, at a briefing in Washington on Wednesday. “These would be government-formed, government-paid, government-uniformed local police units who would keep any eye out for bad guys - in their neighborhoods, in their communities - and who would, in turn, work with the Afghan police forces and the Afghan army, to keep them out of their towns.”

DEFINING AFGHAN SUCCESS

President Barack Obama and his officials need to define U.S. objectives in Afghanistan before a planned 2011 draw down of troops, said U.S. senators who expressed concern about the direction of American efforts.

Republican and Democratic senators told Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, at a hearing Wednesday that they don’t understand how progress on civilian projects is being measured or would back military aims.

“We need a better definition of exactly what success is in Afghanistan,” said the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s chairman, John Kerry, D-Mass.

“We absolutely need to understand what the political situation is and how we get there.”

The committee’s hearing, which focused on the civilian development plan in Afghanistan, comes before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton travels to next week’s Kabul Conference. At that gathering, Karzai is expected to present plans for strengthening governance and accountability, the rule of law, and social and economic development.

Holbrooke cautioned against a rush for the exits. “There’s a direct correlation between Afghanistan, Pakistan and our homeland security,” Holbrooke said. “I’m very leery of setting an endpoint.”

The envoy pointed to projects on agricultural production and the reduction of opium poppy production. He also noted an effort to wire areas such as Kandahar for electricity.

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said he had little confidence about progress before July 2011. “Absent a major realignment on the ground, it’s unrealistic to expect that a significant downsizing of U.S. forces could occur at that time without security consequences,” he said.

Holbrooke told senators that the July 2011 date wasn’t a deadline for troop withdrawals and instead marked the beginning of departures.

Information for this article was contributed by Kay Johnson, Mirwais Khan, Richard Lardner, Amir Shah and Deb Riechmann of The Associated Press; by Joshua Partlow and Javed Hamdard of The Washington Post; by Nicole Gaouette of Bloomberg News; and by Alissa J. Rubin, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Thom Shanker of The New York Times.