KABUL, Afghanistan — NATO and Afghan forces captured leaders of an insurgent group in eastern Afghanistan, including one believed to be linked to last month’s suicide attack on a Kabul supermarket, the coalition said Thursday. Insurgent attacks elsewhere killed three people, including a NATO serviceman.
The detainees were identified as members of Hizb-i-Islami, a militant group made up of loyalists of regional warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Among those captured was the group’s Kabul-based “media emir,” typically a senior official responsible for disseminating propaganda.He was arrested Wednesday in Parwan province.
NATO said the media emir, who was not identified, has ties to multiple militant groups, including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Taliban, and was involved in suicide bombings in November and January. The most recent blast killed eight people in the Western-style Finest supermarket near embassies in the Afghan capital.
The coalition said another leader of Hizb-i-Islami was captured nearby. A third top official in the group, responsible for commanding about 50 fighters, was captured in a separate raid in Khost province, NATO said.
Also in Khost, the multinational force said it killed a member of the Haqqani network, a group with ties to the Taliban and al-Qaida, in an airstrike. NATO identified the insurgent as Salem and said he was the leader of a bomb-making cell.
Insurgents killed a member of the U.S.-led multinational force in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday. NATO didn’t specify where the serviceman was killed. No nationality was provided.
A total of 17 international servicemen have been killed so far this month. Last year was the deadliest of the nearly decade-long war for international troops, with more than 700 killed, compared with just more than 500 in 2009.
The U.S. plans to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July. NATO troops are scheduled to pull out of the country by 2014, handing over responsibility for the country’s security to Afghan forces.
A roadside bomb targeting an Afghan police patrol killed one policeman and a farmer in the Chahar Dara district in the country’s northern Kunduz province, said district police chief Gulam Mohyuddin.
Meanwhile, Afghan officials said Thursday that an “erroneous” audit and inadequate help from international banking advisers compounded long-running financial problems at the embattled Kabul Bank.
The comments came after a top U.S. Treasury Department official visited Kabul to discuss ways to improve oversight of the nation’s budding private banking sector.
Kabul Bank, the nation’s largest lender, nearly collapsed last year after allegations of mismanagement, cronyism and questionable lending.
“Afghan and U.S. officials agreed that while at the heart of the crisis lay the unethical and fraudulent behavior of the bank’s executives and the inadequacies of the supervision department of the central bank, this was compounded by the erroneous audit by Pricewaterhouse Coopers and inadequate international technical assistance and supervision,” the Afghan Finance Ministry said in a statement issued late Thursday.
The U.S. government took issue with the Finance Ministry’s statement.
The responsibility of supervising Afghan banks rests with the Afghan government, not with outside auditors or international banking advisers, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate issue.
In other developments, the Obama administration is debating proposals that would increase Afghan security forces by up to 73,000.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that the U.S. will spend $12.8 billion in 2012 to train and equip the Afghan forces.
“So the question is, how long can we afford to do that? And you cannot do that indefinitely,” Gates said.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the exact range under consideration is between 352,000 and 378,000, disclosing for the first time the figures under discussion.
U.S. commanders have said it is critical to increase the size of the Afghan forces beyond the goal of 305,000 by the end of this year.
Meanwhile, the senior U.S. Marine general in Afghanistan said Thursday that an agreement with the leaders of the largest tribe in a Taliban stronghold to halt insurgent attacks and expel foreign fighters is working.
Maj. Gen. Richard Mills told reporters in a conference call from Helmand province that Marines have come under almost no gunfire in the center of Sangin in the past month.
Information for this article was contributed by Amir Shah, Deb Riechmann, Donna Cassata, Lolita C. Baldor and Julie Watson of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 02/18/2011