MAHMUD RAQI, Afghanistan -- Taliban fighters are scoring early gains in several strategic areas near the capital this summer, inflicting heavy casualties and casting new doubt on the ability of Afghan forces to contain the insurgency as the United States moves to complete its withdrawal of combat troops, according to Afghan officials and local elders.
On Saturday, attacks across Afghanistan, including where hundreds of Taliban fighters swarmed police checkpoints across the south, killed at least 13 people, officials said.
But the Taliban have found success beyond their traditional strongholds in the rural south and are now dominating territory near crucial highways and cities that surround Kabul, the capital, in strategic provinces like Kapisa and Nangarhar.
Their advance has gone unreported because most U.S. forces have left the field and officials in Kabul have largely refused to talk about it. The Afghan ministries have not released casualty statistics since an alarming rise in army and police deaths last year.
In Saturday's attacks, which focused on Kandahar province, Taliban fighters killed six police officers -- including a district police chief -- in assaults on about 15 checkpoints, said Dawa Khan Menapal, a spokesman for the provincial governor. Menapal said reinforcements later arrived to combat the Taliban fighters and the combat continued into Saturday night.
In Helmand province, a bomb hidden inside a motorcycle killed four civilians and wounded four others in Marjah district, said Omer Zwak, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand province. In Kabul, a bomb blast killed an army officer and wounded his driver, police spokesman Hashmat Stanikzai said.
In Herat province, gunmen on motorcycles shot and killed two army officers in the city of Herat, said a provincial security official who spoke on condition of anonymity as he wasn't authorized to brief journalists.
At a time when an election crisis is threatening the stability of the government, the Taliban's increasingly aggressive campaign is threatening another crucial facet of the U.S. withdrawal plan -- full security by Afghan forces this year.
"They are running a series of tests right now at the military level, seeing how people respond," one Western official said, describing a Taliban effort to gauge how quickly they could advance. "They are trying to figure out: Can they do it now, or will it have to wait" until after the U.S. withdrawal, the official added, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the coalition has officially ceded security control.
Interviews with local officials and residents in several strategic areas across the country suggest that, given the success of their attacks, the Taliban are growing bolder just two months into the fighting season, at great cost to Afghan military and police forces.
In Kapisa, a verdant province just north of Kabul that includes a vital highway to northern Afghanistan, insurgents are openly challenging and even driving away the security forces in several districts.
Insurgents in Alasay district, northeast of Kabul, recently laid siege to an entire valley for more than a week, forcing hundreds of residents and 45 police officers to flee. At least some of the local police in a neighboring district have cut deals with the Taliban to save themselves.
In the past month, a once-safe district beside the major city of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, has fallen under Taliban control, and a district along a crucial highway nearby is under constant threat from the Taliban. South of Kabul, police forces in significant parts of Logar and Wardak provinces have been under frequent attack.
But there are only anecdotal reports to help gauge just how deadly the offensive has been. The Afghan defense and interior ministries stopped releasing casualty data after a shocking surge of military and police deaths in 2013 began raising questions about the country's ability to sustain the losses. By September, with more than 100 soldiers and police officers dying every week, even the commander of the International Security Assistance Force suggested the losses could not be sustained.
Asked for figures on the latest security force casualties this year, both ministries refused to provide data or confirm accounts from local officials.
Information for this article was contributed by Azam Ahmed, Haris Kakar, Jawad Sukhanyar and Khalid Alokozay of The New York Times and by Rahim Faiez of The Associated Press.
A Section on 07/27/2014