KABUL, 20 October 2005 — Taleban gunmen assassinated an Afghan district chief and a school headmaster in southern Kandahar province, a government spokesman said yesterday, the latest victims of militant violence. Separately, two French soldiers of the NATO-led peacekeeping force were wounded in a roadside bomb blast during a patrol north of the capital, a statement from the force said.
It said the wounds were not life threatening. Taleban militants are not active in the area, but there have been several attacks in the past against foreign peacekeepers since they were stationed in Kabul after the Taleban were driven from power in 2001.
Kandahar’s Arghandab district chief was gunned down in a mosque late on Tuesday evening and Haji Abdul Lalai, a school headmaster of another district, was shot dead earlier in the day, Interior Ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanezai said. Taleban officials could not be reached for comment.
A roadside bombing on Tuesday also killed two Afghans and wounded three others who worked for a US security firm called USPI in Kandahar.
Taleban militants have increased their attacks this month, killing two dozen Afghan troops, several US soldiers, five local aid workers and three pro-government clerics.
The violence is focused mostly in the southern and eastern areas close to the border with Pakistan where militants are active. Nearly 1,100 people, most of them militants, but also more than 50 US soldiers, have been killed this year, the bloodiest period since US-led troops overthrew Taleban.
Meanwhile, NATO has yet to decide whether it will participate in Afghanistan’s war on drugs, the military alliance’s supreme allied commander in Europe said yesterday.
US Gen. James Jones, addressing journalists at NATO headquarters in the Belgian town of Mons, said NATO must decide on clearly defined goals before its troops start clamping down on Afghanistan’s flourishing drugs trade. “We have an enormous problem there and we must be clear which ambitions we have to resolve it,” he said.
Tackling Afghanistan’s illicit opium industry does not fall under the current mandate of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force currently in the country.
“It is only logical, if NATO is to pursue increasingly ambitious goals in Afghanistan, that it has a clear strategy on this question,” Jones said. “We must understand that the money that is earned through drug cultivation largely serves to finance terrorists,” he added.
Many NATO states, however, are reluctant to involve their soldiers in such a clampdown, citing the considerable risk to international troops from powerful drug syndicates.
In another development, the commerce minister said large sections of Afghanistan are safe for desperately needed foreign investment as they are mostly free of the Taleban-led insurgency that keeps the country in the headlines.
These included most of the north and west, which had largely escaped the violence, Commerce Minister Hedayat Amin Arsala told reporters.
“Insecurity is mostly regional,” Arsala said, referring to the southern and eastern provinces battling almost daily attacks as part of the insurgency launched after the Taleban were removed from power in late 2001. “It should be clarified that there are other parts which are pretty safe and secure,” he said.
Arsala visited the United States last month with the head of the government’s Investment Support Agency, Omer Zahid-Khil, to try to attract foreign capital.
Their message was that the country, turning its back on decades of war, “is a great opportunity,” Zahid-Khil said, adding investors had shown some interest.
“We’ve security in Herat, good in Mazar-e-Sharif, it’s good in Kunduz and there is good security in Badakhshan,” he said, referring to cities in the north and west.
