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Taliban gunmen kill Christian aid worker in Kabul

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-10-21 10:26

Kidnappings targeting wealthy Afghans have long been a problem in Kabul, but attacks against Westerners have grown recently. In mid-August, Taliban militants killed three women working for the US aid group International Rescue Committee while they were driving in Logar, a province south of Kabul.

An Afghan helicopter takes off from compound of the Britain's Provincial Reconstruction Team in Lashkar Gah the provincial capital of Helmand province south of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sunday, Oct. 19, 2008. [Agencies]

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber killed two German soldiers and five children in Kunduz province to the north, said Mohammad Omar, the provincial governor.

West of Kabul, meanwhile, assault helicopters dropped NATO troops into Jalrez district in Wardak province on Thursday, sparking a two-day battle involving airstrikes, the military alliance said in a statement Monday.

Wardak province, just 40 miles west of Kabul, has become an insurgent stronghold. Militants have expanded their traditional bases in the country's south and east, along the border with Pakistan, and have gained territory in the provinces surrounding Kabul, a worrying development for Afghan and NATO troops.

Those advances are part of the reason that top US military officials have warned the international mission to defeat the Taliban is in peril, and why NATO generals have called for a sharp increase in the number of troops.

Some 65,000 international troops now operate in Afghanistan, including about 32,000 Americans.

Speaking in London on Monday, Gen. John Craddock, the head of US European Command and NATO's supreme allied commander for Europe, called into question the political will among alliance members for the mission in Afghanistan.

Commanders have called for more NATO troops to be deployed in the violent south, but some NATO members have refused to move their troops from more peaceful parts of the country and have imposed restrictions on the duties their forces can carry out.

"It is this wavering political will that impedes operational progress and brings into question the relevance of the alliance here in the 21st century," Craddock told the Royal United Services Institute, a military think tank.

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