KABUL, 19 January 2006 — An increase in suicide bombings in Afghanistan is likely an attempt to warn off NATO troops set for deployment in the south and rattle international donors meeting in London this month, analysts said.

At least 26 people were killed in two separate blasts on Monday in southern Kandahar province, where a Canadian diplomat and two Afghans died in another suicide bombing on Sunday.

Monday’s blasts, which follow around 20 other suicide attacks in the past four months, were the bloodiest since the toppling of the Taleban regime and its Al-Qaeda allies in a US-led invasion in late 2001. The spike in attacks comes as thousands of NATO troops will deploy to the volatile south within weeks, moving into an area where US-led forces have for four years been trying to root out Taleban and other insurgents.

“Terrorists — remnants of the Taleban backed by Al-Qaeda insurgents and foreign terrorist elements — are trying to show that the country is insecure and the NATO troops will be vulnerable once deployed,” political analyst Rangin Dadfar Spanta told AFP.

Fear of attacks in the south is fuelling opposition in the Netherlands to its planned deployment of some 1,100 Dutch troops to southern Uruzgan province, one of the most dangerous.

If the Dutch pull out, Britain said Tuesday, it would find it “difficult” to commit more than the 900 extra troops it will send to Afghanistan when it takes charge of NATO operations there in May.

The attacks have put the “forgotten war” back on the front pages and editorial columns of British and other newspapers for the first time in months.

Spanta, also an advisor to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said another likely motive of the attackers was to cast a shadow over the conference in London where international donors are expected to renew their commitment to secure and rebuild the country destroyed by decades of conflict. “The terrorists and elements outside Afghanistan’s borders don’t want the world’s long-term commitment to Afghanistan,” said Spanta.

The suicide bombings, including six this year, have fed fears that insurgents are copying terrorist tactics used in Iraq. Such attacks were previously rare in this Central Asian country even during the armed resistance to the Russian occupation in the 1980s.

“They (militants) have learned the suicide attacks from Iraq but I doubt if they’ve received the training from Iraqi insurgents,” Spanta said.

Former Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali, who resigned in September, also cast doubt on a direct link between Iraqi and Afghan militants.

“In essence it’s the same: They do it in Iraq and they do it in Afghanistan. But here it is different from Iraq,” he said.

The US military has said one difference was the equipment. The devices used were not as sophisticated in Afghanistan as in Iraq with many failing to detonate or detonating prematurely.

Adoption of suicide bombings in Afghanistan was a sign of desperation as militants were “no longer able to fight troops in the battlefields,” US-based Jalali said in an interview with an Afghan radio station aired Tuesday.

Taleban insurgents also wanted to show, ahead of the London conference, that the country they ruled between 1996 and 2001 was still unstable despite the presence of around 30,000 foreign troops.

“Their aim is to show that Afghanistan is insecure and there has not been progress,” said the professor of military strategy.

Despite a flood of billions of dollars in international aid since the Taleban fell, Afghanistan still struggles with crushing poverty, particularly in remote provinces along the border with Pakistan, home to most of the country’s militants.

Observers believe the poverty has helped the rebels gain support from locals, with some earning money for carrying out attacks.

“There are illegal militias paid to carry out attacks... it’s not political,” said Afghanistan NGO Security Office coordinator Christian Willach.

Instability caused by the attacks is undermining the new US-backed government, a Western military official warned.

“We’re now in a race between rebels and international community to gain people’s confidence,” he said on condition of anonymity.